The Copenhagen School (theology)

Biblical minimalism, also known as the Copenhagen School because two of its most prominent figures taught at Copenhagen University, was a movement or trend in biblical scholarship that began in the 1990s with two main claims:

Minimalism was not a unified movement, but rather a label that came to be applied to several scholars at different universities who held similar views, chiefly Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson at the University of Copenhagen, Philip R. Davies, and Keith Whitelam. Minimalism gave rise to intense debate during the 1990s—the term "minimalists" was in fact a derogatory one given by its opponents, who were consequently dubbed "maximalists", but in fact neither side accepted either label. The so-called Maximalists, or neo-Albrightians, were composed of two quite distinct groups, the first represented by the archaeologist William Dever and the influential publication Biblical Archaeology Review, the second by biblical scholar Iain Provan and Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. Although these debates were in some cases heated, most scholars occupied the middle ground between minimalists and maximalists evaluating the arguments of both schools critically, and since the 1990s, while some of the minimalist arguments have been challenged or rejected, others have been refined and adopted into the mainstream of biblical scholarship.

By the opening of the 20th century the stories of the Creation, Noah's ark, and the Tower of Babel—in short, chapters 1 to 11 of the Book of Genesis—had become subject to greater scrutiny by scholars, and the starting point for biblical history was regarded as the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and the other Hebrew patriarchs. Then in the 1970s, largely through the publication of two books, Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition it became widely accepted that the remaining chapters of Genesis were equally non-historical. At the same time, archaeology and comparative sociology convinced most scholars in the field that there was equally little historical basis to the biblical stories of the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.

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