Thomas L. Thompson

Thomas L. Thompson (born January 7, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan) is a biblical scholar and theologian. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993 to 2009, lives in Denmark and is now a Danish citizen.

Thompson is closely associated with the minimalist movement known as The Copenhagen School (other major figures include Niels Peter Lemche, Keith Whitelam, and Philip R. Davies), a loosely knit group of scholars who hold that the Bible cannot be used as a source to determine the history of ancient Israel, and that "Israel" itself is a problematic concept.

Thompson was raised as a Catholic and obtained a B.A. from Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, in 1962. After a year in Oxford, he moved to Tübingen, where he studied for 12 years with Kurt Galling and Herbert Haag. In the meantime he was instructor in theology at Dayton University (1964–65) and Assistant Professor in Old Testament studies at the University of Detroit (1967–69). He then studied Catholic Theology under the Catholic faculty at the University of Tübingen, completing his Ph.D. dissertation, "The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham", in 1971. He also worked as a research fellow on the Tübingen Atlas of the Near East. According to Thompson, the dissertation was rejected because his examiner (Joseph Ratzinger, then Tübingen's Professor of Systematic Theology and later Pope Benedict XVI) did not find it fitting for a Catholic theologian. Thompson then considered submitting his dissertation to the Protestant faculty at Tübingen, but left Tübingen in 1975 without a degree. His dissertation study was rejected by Catholic university presses, but was published in 1974 by De Gruyter Press as The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. It provoked controversy, and Thompson states that this was what prevented him from obtaining a position in any North American university. The work, together with John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition, is said to have buried the historicity of the patriarchal narratives.

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