Thomas L. Thompson
1) Υοu spent a big part of your life in Tübingen, Germany. Would you agree that you were touched by Bruno Bauer‘s aura?
Bauer was much more influential in Berlin and Bonn than Tübingen, where in New Testament studies, Ernst Käsemann drew far more in the direction of establishing and defending an historical Jesus, much in the spirit of the “Jesus Seminar” in the States. In Old Testament studies and Palestinian archaeology, which were my primary interests, the tradition rather lay in comparative literature and comparative religions. Kurt Galling, editor of the great 5 volume, German encyclopedia of religion (Religion in History and the Present 1935) was my professor. He was a student of Hugo Gressmann and Hermann Gunkel and held history and archaeology separate from literature and theology and the study of the Bible was, first of all, a literary work rather than history!
2) In Greece, it is rather impossible to see an academic theologian holding a critical stance towards the Bible. Are things different in the rest of the world?
Greek orthodoxy sees the role of theology as explanatory and Greek theology—much like Roman Catholicism is often very defensive of traditional teaching, except that Greek theology tries to idealize the theology of the early church fathers, while Catholicism looks to the theology of Aquinas and the European Middle Ages as the ideal. But they are both rapidly changing today and one finds a few sound, critical scholars in Greece today and an even greater number of them among Roman Catholic scholars. I think the most influential of conservative scholars are the fundamentalists in the US, where the Bible seems to be read as a description of actual events in which God was the primary active figure. Critical scholarship, which starts from the observation that biblical narrative is first of all literature and needs to be treated as such. It is strongest in Europe, where a strong commitment to critical humanism is the norm for most universities: especially in Germany and Denmark. Perhaps it is best to think of individual scholars and universities rather than countries. The university of Rome, Göttingen, Tübingen, Sheffield and Copenhagen insist that biblical studies be critical rather than traditional.
3) Explain to us in a few words what biblical minimalism is, who the scholars that comprised the core of its existence were and what was your part in this.
Biblical minimalism grows out of the failure of biblical archaeology’s efforts to provide a critical history of Israel. It is important to point out that “minimalism” is a term which was used by opponents of critical biblical scholarship. It was not a self-description. The development in critical biblical studies, which came to reject the use of the Biblical narrative as a historical description of past events was called “minimalism” because these scholars did not share the assumption of, for example, biblical archaeologists, that history could be written by bringing together evidence from biblical narrative and our knowledge of ancient history. Minimalists saw the Bible as allegorical literature and consequently separated their use of archaeology from the Bible to write their history of Palestine. Indeed, understanding history of the South Levant as a regional history of Palestine, rather than as an ethnocentric history of the people of Israel allowed us to understand the Bible’s literary narrative of Israel as a fictional and theological product: what I came to refer to as a “mythic past.” In contrast, our history (of Palestine) is evidence-based in archaeology and contemporary inscriptions rather than biblical narrative, as in biblical archaeology.
Among the earliest scholars committed to a “minimalist” approach to historical questions included such as
I was not aware of all of these names cited. But you can find posts referencing the names
- Van Seters,
- Niels Peter Lemche,
- William Dever, (I thought Dever opposed “minimalists”, certainly he opposed Thompson)
- Israel Finkelstein,
- Keith Whitelam,
- Philip Davies,
- Ingrid Hjelm,
- Emanuel Phoh,
- Lukasz Niesolowski,
- Lester Grabbe
in Vridar.
Bernd Diebner, Giovanni Garbini and John Van Seters, in the 1960s,
followed by Niels Peter Lemche, William Dever and myself in the 1970s
and Israel Finkelstein, Robert Coote, Keith Whitelam, Philip Davies, Gösta Ahlström and Axel Knauf in the 1980s
and 1990s and Ingrid Hjelm, Emanuel Pfoh, Lukasz Niesiolowski, Lester Grabbe, Issa Sarie, Joshua Sabih, Hamdan Taha and many others in the new millennium.
There are many others I could mention. I believe that, today, a considerable majority of critical scholars employ minimalist principles in regard to writing a regional history of Palestine. There are many facets to this thorough-going change in biblical scholarship and minimalism cannot be adequately understood if one only refers to the three or four scholars who were most self-consciously engaged in such changes. Although no shortlist of works can hardly adequately reflect the many changes, which have been most commonly cited does, illustrate minimalism’s complexity. Among some the most influential book-length monographs and collections of essays in minimalism have been my own 1974 Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives works, Van Seters’ 1975 work, Abraham in History and Tradition, John Hayes and J. Maxwell Miller’s Israelite and Judean History of 1977, Lemche’s Early Israel of 1985; R. Coote and Keith Whitelam’s The Emergence of Early Israel of 1987, Finkelstein’s The Archaeology of Israelite Settlement and Garbini’s History and Ideology in Ancient Israel from 1988, Lemche’s The Canaanites and Their Land of 1991, Davies In Search of ancient Israel and my Early History of the Israelite People of 1992, Keith Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel of 1996 and Ingrid Hjelm’s Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty from 2004.
4) Could you describe to us the consensus about the biblical reliability when you began promoting the theory of biblical minimalism? What were the reactions you faced from your colleagues and how did your arguments finally manage to gain ground?
Minimalism began as a reaction to the historicism of biblical archaeology, which understood the biblical narrative as a history of Israel and the establishment of such a history through a historicizing of biblical narrative. Indeed some biblical archaeologists, such as George Ernest Wright, understood the “acts of God” as biblical archaeology’s essential data and evidenced-based foundation for this historiography! For Wright and many of his students, theology was rooted in the events of the past and, by and large, biblical narratives were understood as historical. In particular, the stories of the patriarchs were presented by the vast majority of scholars, as a narrative, which had been clearly proven to be historical, established already in the early transition period of EB IV-MB I (ca. 2000 BCE). The entire history of Israel was accepted as historical from the patriarchs through the Books of the Maccabees.
In reaction to this, minimalism separated the biblical perspective of the past from an archaeological-based history, in which archaeology was interpreted independently of the perspectives of biblical literature. The immediate reaction to the first minimalist works of the 1960s and 1970s, which, for the most part, concentrated on the stories from Genesis to Judges, was uncompromisingly harsh. The two major minimalist works involved, my 1974 Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives and John Van Seters 1975 book: Abraham in History and Tradition, though understood generally as convincing and thorough in their argument and presentation, resulted in a bitter debate which lasted nearly ten years, a period in which I was not only academically unemployed but also unemployable in the United States from 1976 to 1984. I could not find a publisher for my dissertation in the United States and both Van Seters and I were repeatedly attacked by leading scholars at meetings of the American Society or Oriental Research, the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature.
However, in 1985, I was appointed as annual guest professor for a semester at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. By this time Van Seters and my understanding of the patriarchal narratives was fully accepted. In the aftermath of the early minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s, a consensus was reached in the early 1980s about the essentially folkloric and fictional character of biblical narrative from the beginning of Genesis to the closure of the book of Judges. History, one could say, began with the United Monarchy.
In 1991 and 1992, however, the publication of new works by Lemche, Davies and me, concluding in a rejection of the historicity of the biblical narratives about the United Monarchy and the Book of Kings. A new wave of protests from American and Israeli scholars began, even more virulent than that of the 1970s. Charges of incompetence, anti-Semitism, lack of scholarly integrity and willful distortion became the norm for this criticism. These reached their most extreme perhaps with the publication of a book in 2001 by William Dever, What Did Biblical Writers Know?, which made such personal attacks on me more than 200 times! From the Catholic side, having taught for 3 years at Marquette University in Wisconsin, I was just coming up for tenure when my Early History of 1992 was first published. This resulted in a denial of tenure at the university. In a more positive response to its publication, however, I was invited to take Edward Nielsen’s chair in Old Testament studies at the University of Copenhagen and I was able to return to friendly Europe.
The growing split in Old Testament scholarship continued to spread through the 1990s and the early 2000s, though a return to civility in Europe and elsewhere, apart from in Israeli and American scholarship since then has reflected a marked acceptance of the scholarship and principles fostered by minimalism’s separation between an expansive understanding of the Bible as primarily a literary work and the understanding of Palestine’s history as evidence and rooted in paleography and archaeology.
5) Should we consider biblical figures like Moses and Abraham as historical persons? What is the reliability of various incidents, battles and miraculous events that are being described in the Bible?
Narrative expansions of genealogies and other folkloric origin stories in the Bible from the genealogy Shem (= Asia), Ham (= Africa) and Japheth (= Europe) in Genesis 10 to the story of Solomon in 1 Kings are not historiographical narratives. They form rather folkloric chain narratives. The structure of the ethnographic story of Abraham creates the patriarch of Syria, Palestine and the southern steppe and desert regions. He is their common ancestor, fictively uniting Arabs, Sabeans and Midianites, Arameans and Phoenicians (including Israelites and Judeans). The themes of this chain narrative build their narrative as illustrative of a return from exile under the protection of the just god Yahweh.
The “events” of the stories of Genesis through Judges are all fictive, imitative and comparable to the stories of Homer in both the Iliad and Odysseus. The central plot of the biblical narrative, beginning in Genesis, is probably inspired by Plato’s understanding of an ideal and just society. The stories of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings, however, use regnal lists, with the names and chronologies for the reigns of kings in the otherwise unrelated patronage kingdoms of Judah and Israel to sketch a narrative of Yahweh’s coming to understand his role of patron God, who must learn to become a god of mercy and compassion. It is primarily a philosophical story, very similar to the story of Job, which uses the figure of Job to illustrate Israel’s gradual enlightenment. However, in Samuel-Kings it is Yahweh who is the subject of enlightenment, learning how to become merciful and compassionate.
6) In your book The Messiah Myth, 2005, you claimed that the basis for the David and Jesus traditions comes from earlier Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman texts. Could you tell us a few words about that?
My interests in history writing were not limited to my expanding archaeological interests, which followed the seven years I worked on Bronze Age settlement patterns for the Tübingen Atlas of the Near East (1969-1976). I also had interests in intellectual history, which engaged me especially with Old Testament narrative literature and the manner in which such an intellectual perspective was engaged. When I start out to write my Messiah Myth of 2005, I was involved in two fascinating tropes, which were frequently reiterated in both Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern narratives. The first of these was engaged by royal inscriptions with a short first-person narrative of how the king as a young man began his career in hardship and was sent into exile in a drought-plagued region (usually in Palestine) by his patron. In his wilderness, the future king was treated with favor and rose to prominence. He fought a duel against a great warrior and at times a giant or dragon, whom he killed with a single and usually unexpectedly successful shot! He became rich with a band of soldiers at his command, was reconciled with his patron and finally invited to return and take up his throne. There are more than twenty such stories found on inscriptions from the ancient Near East. The story is also used in the story of David’s rise to power and the Old Testament’s mythic concepts of the Messiah of apocalyptic literature and is, for example, used metaphorically in the book of Job.
The second trope I was interested in were the hundreds of examples of what I came to refer to as The Poor Song which praised the care of the widow and the orphan, one who had no home, the poor and the needy and a myriad of variations. This trope is most notable in the Book of Isaiah in biblical literature but is also found on inscriptions, in Qumran’s literature, Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts. In the story of the king’s rise to power, it is often used to mark his goodness as a just king and in Messianic literature it is endemic. When I wrote The Messiah Myth, I set out particularly to show that biblical narratives, especially on the one hand the narratives of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings used both the Poor Man’s Song and the story of the king’s rise to power to construct their narrative, which, through allegory, was one of the primary, theologically motivated goals of some of the pivotal roles of the narrative. These tropes are found most emphatically in the long story of the miracle workers and prophets, Elijah and Elisha, which dominates the supposedly historical 1-2 Kings, a story in which iron floats on water! The question of this book was not about the historicity of Jesus so much as about how the stories worked as literature and were not historiographic. The Jesus of the gospel is not historical, because it is not about Jesus. It is about suffering and the poor and it is about Yahweh’s need of compassion for his widowed people! For myself, this was fulfilling what had been a long-standing interest since 1968. It is an argument for the use of comparative literature as one of the essential methods for defining the literary character of the folkloric and mythical biblical narratives.
7) For that book you received criticism from Prof. Bart Ehrman, who often attacks those who doubt Jesus’s historicity. What were his arguments and what was your rebuttal? You also participated in the “Is this not the carpenter’s son” for that reason… What is your opinion on Jesus’s historicity?
Bart Ehrman has a very poor understanding of my book. What he criticized most emphatically was not in my book. He took the book as being a study or review of whether Jesus was historical, even though I explicitly argued that I was talking about the lack of historicity and rather literary character of the gospels and their dependence on Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern tropes. These tropes are not historical and one cannot find an historical Jesus there. To argue for an historical Jesus you need something more than these stories. I do not deny that Jesus existed. I wouldn’t know! That is what I wrote.
Most irritating of his criticism is his claim that I was not qualified for writing such a book. Who is more qualified than an Old Testament scholar interested in comparative literature. I was writing about Old Testament tropes in the gospels and am perfectly qualified to do that. Can he read the gospels as anything other than a commentary on the Jewish Bible? My 1974 Historicity and my 1992 Early History are about the question of historicity and my 1987 Origin Tradition is about the structure of Old Testament narratives, which are frequently reiterated in the gospels. The tropes that I had long since identified as The Poor Man’s Song and that of the Testimony of the Just King are specifically related to my earlier studies of these tropes. Who would be a better fit to discuss them?
I don’t think it is possible without considerably different evidence than we have to judge whether Jesus was historical. However, if the gospels were judged to be unhistorical and unable to support historicity one has problems. Who is this Jesus (Joshua/ the savior) if not the Jesus of the gospels and if Jesus in not historical, where would we go for evidence. In the Book Is this Not the Carpenter’s Son? the essays collected largely judge the issue unresolved.
8) What is the future of mythicism views inside the academic community, considering the publication of many related books and papers in previous times? Would you agree that mythicists could follow the steps of biblical minimalists?
Minimalism is a movement in biblical studies which brings the study of biblical narrative closer to what is normal for historians. As far as I am aware, most mythicists also understand this, though I think they may be too quick to judge the single issue of whether he existed. The proper question is rather a largely literary question than an historical one. Until we have texts, which bear evidence of his historicity, we can not do much more with that issue. We can and must, however, ask what the texts mean—as well as ask what they mean if they are not historical (a minimalist question). My professor Kurt Galling from Tübingen was once asked how one could tell whether an Old Testament text was historical or literary. He answered: If Iron floats on water it isn’t! The reference is found in the Elijah Elisha stories, whose reiteration has dominated the gospels. One might also use the story of the bear who kills the 42 children and certainly Elijah’s flight out into outer space.
Thompson, Thomas L. 1987. The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel: I. The Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1-23. Sheffield: Sheffield.
———. 1994. Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written & Archaeological Sources. Brill.
———. 1995. “‘House of David’: An Eponymic Referent to Yahweh as Godfather.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 9 (1): 59–74.
———. 1999a. The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel. New York: Basic Books.
———. 1999b. “Historiography in the Pentateuch: Twenty‐five Years after Historicity.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13 (2): 258–83.———. 2002. Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International.
———. 2000. “Lester Grabbe and Historiography: An <i>Apologia</I>.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 14 (1): 140–61.
———. 2001a. “On Reading the Bible for History: A Response to William G Dever.” Journal of Biblical Studies
———. 2001b. “The Messiah Epithet in the Hebrew Bible.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 15 (1): 57–82.
———. 2004. Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition. London ; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
———. 2005a. “The Role of Faith in Historical Research.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 19 (1): 111–34.
———. 2005b. The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. New York: Basic Books.
———. 2007. “Mesha and Questions of Historicity.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 21 (2): 241–60.Thompson, Thomas L., and Philippe
Wajdenbaum, eds. 2014. The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature. Routledge.
Thompson, Thomas L., and Tom Verenna, eds. 2011. “Is This Not the Carpenter?”: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. London ; Oakville, CT: Equinox.
தாமஸ் எல். தாம்சன், அமெரிக்காவில் பிறந்த ஒரு டேனிஷ் விவிலிய அறிஞரும் இறையியலாளரும் ஆவார். அவர் 1993 முதல் 2009 வரை கோபன்ஹேகன் பல்கலைக்கழகத்தில் இறையியல் பேராசிரியராகப் பணியாற்றினார். தற்போது அவர் டென்மார்க்கில் வசித்து வருகிறார். தாம்சன், கோபன்ஹேகன் பள்ளி என அறியப்படும் எளிமைவாத இயக்கத்தின் ஒரு பகுதியாக உள்ளார். விக்கிப்பீடியா
https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/opeds/critscho358014
On the Problem of Critical Scholarship: A Memoire
The exchange between Niels Peter Lemche and Hector Avalos underlines the concern which many of us have biblical studies has had with critical studies. The self-censorship which governs the individual imagination of the believer also plays an at times prevailing role in the systematic mobbing with which so many professional scholars and university institutions influence our field by defining the limits of acceptability for the public expression of our critical thought. While this censorship is most apparently and egregiously related to perceived threats which such thought might pose for “faith,” such mobbing is also encouraged by political goals which are directly supported or threatened by religious traditions. The following account is motivated by hopes of greater openness and honesty in our scholarship. It was written in the course of responding to a request from the editor, Mark Elliott, that I expand on and clarify the conflicts and debates, which had surrounded the acceptance and publication of my dissertation. The account is personal and deeply rooted in memory. Its objectivity is limited by that perspective and, of course, the feelings associated with it. It is offered as but a single example of a still chronic problem faced by many critical scholars, a problem which, over the past 50 years has hardly ever been addressed by the universities, let alone such societies as the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature or the American Schools of Oriental Research, which, nevertheless, have occasionally claimed dedication to critical research.
See Also:
Creating Biblical Figures
A View from Copenhagen: Israel and the History of Palestine
By Thomas L. Thompson
Professor Emeritus
University of Copenhagen
April 2011
My dissertation, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, was completed in June of 1971. At the beginning of the winter semester, it was submitted to the Catholic Theological faculty in Tübingen in fulfillment of the dissertation requirement for the PhD. Herbert Haag of the Catholic faculty (first reader) and Kurt Galling of the protestant faculty (second reader) were appointed to judge the dissertation. Following their written judgment, the dissertation was accepted by the Catholic faculty during the spring semester in 1972, with the etiquette summa cum laude. PhD examinations for the theological degree (the “Rigorosum”), involving ½ hour oral examinations in the 8 fields of Catholic Theology were, as I remember, set for February, 1973. I sent copies of the dissertation to the Society of Biblical Literature’s monograph series and to the Catholic Biblical Association’s monograph series, seeking publication.
As I was then employed as a research fellow on the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’s project Der Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients and was responsible for developing maps on Bronze Age settlements for both Palestine and the Sinai and Negev, I travelled to Jerusalem to carry out some 5-6 months archaeological research through the Autumn and winter of 1971/ 1972. During this period that I was in Jerusalem, I was invited to give a series of 4 two-hour seminars on the results of my dissertation at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. These seminars were attended, by, among others Profs. Abraham Malamat and Shalom Paul of the Hebrew University, both of whom responded very positively to my seminar and became life-long friends. I also was invited to give individual lectures on the same topic at the British School of Archaeology and the Hebrew University. Copies of my as yet unpublished dissertation were given at this time to Abraham Malamat, to the library of the École Biblique and to William Dever, the director of the American Schools.
After returning to Tübingen in the early summer of 1972, I received a response from the editor of the Catholic Biblical Monograph Series, Joseph Fitzmeyer, to the effect that, as I had submitted the work to them unsolicited, it was being returned unread. I also received an answer from the SBL monograph series that they had sent the manuscript to their reader (James Ross), and that they must reject it on the basis of its inadequate academic standards and “irresponsible” historical reconstructions. When I showed these letters to Kurt Galling, he spoke with Georg Fohrer, who was at that time editor of the BZAW series, and he, in due course, arranged the publication of my dissertation in this series with de Gruyter in Berlin. In spite of considerable, further delays in preparing the manuscript for the press, the dissertation was published in the BZAW series very early in 1974.
Already in the Fall of 1972, as I began preparation for my PhD examinations in Catholic theology, the first personal confrontation, based in a principled objection to my dissertation occurred. As Hans Küng, with whom I had studied Systematic theology, was on leave for a research semester, I was assigned to take my examinations in dogmatic theology from the professor of systematic theology, Joseph Ratzinger. When I spoke with him concerning bibliography for the upcoming examination, he explained to me that a Catholic could not write such a dissertation as I had and that I would not be receiving my PhD from their faculty in Tübingen. I must point out that the shock with which I met this statement, at the time, caused me to fixate my thoughts on the first phrase: that a Catholic could not write it ... but I had! ... and what then was I, if not a Catholic? ... and then: why couldn’t a Catholic write it? In that short time, I sensed the coming alienation from friends and colleagues in the Catholic faculty with whom I had worked and shared my life with for nearly ten years. I was closed out of Narnia as I moved into what was to be a long period of conflict and disagreement, culminating in the rejection of my PhD candidacy and my finally leaving Tübingen in 1975. Although compromises and alternatives were sought, with consideration, for example of my taking my degree with the Protestant faculty in Tübingen or with another Catholic faculty, such as the faculty at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. These, however, did not prove to be acceptable, at times by me and at times by the faculty suggested. Finally, in the summer of 1974, Leonard Swidler from Temple University in Philadelphia, suggested that I come to the Department of Religion there to take my degree. This I accepted to do and, registering for the academic year in 1975-1976, I received my PhD with the support of the lecturer in Old Testament studies, Robert Wright, from Temple, in May 1976.
The book, Historicity, had been published early in 1974 and was already a significant issue of discussion and debate at the IOSOT congress in Edinburgh that year and my Tübinger Atlas volume on the Bronze Age settlements in Sinai and the Negev was published the following spring. The first response to my book of which I was aware by John Huesman in his presidential lecture at the 1974 annual meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association, who warned of a new hypercriticism in biblical studies. 1 At the Philadelphia meeting of the local chapter of the Society of Biblical Literature (I believe this took place in the early spring of 1976) a plenary session lecture was given by Dean McBride, from Yale University, which presented a strong and detailed critique of my dissertation. Even though I had been explicitly invited to attend the lecture and to give a response to it by the meeting’s coordinator, Jeff Tigay, during the discussion after the actual lecture, I was repeatedly denied a chance to respond to either McBride or other criticisms raised during the lengthy discussion period, except with a single question. No one protested the procedure of the meeting. In May, 1976, when I came up for the oral defense of my dissertation at Temple University, James Ross from Virginia Union Theological Seminary asked the faculty that he be invited as a special opponent, that he might debate and challenge my thesis. This debate lasted some 2 hours and was at times very antagonistic and strongly opposed to the acceptance of the thesis by the faculty. Temple’s faculty, however, unanimously granted me the PhD degree, with the etiquette: summa cum laude.
During the whole of this period, the reaction in the States to my dissertation, both from within the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature, was consistently negative, with a large number of review articles, criticizing and rejecting my work, my competence and my integrity. Attending the 1975 and 1976 annual meetings of the CBA and SBL and applying for some 45 teaching positions over this two year period, I received not a single response to or acknowledgement of any of my applications. In striking contrast, I was however asked to teach a number of part-time courses in Hebrew Bible from 1976-1979 at the University of North Carolina and was strongly supported in this by both John Van Seters and Jack Sasson, but the scholarly debates away from Chapel Hill were invariably harsh and negative. The first review of which I was aware, which broke this negative pattern, was the review by Matityahu Tsevat in the JBL of 1976. I was also invited to contribute an article on the Joseph and Moses stories for the new Israelite and Judean History, which was being prepared by John Hayes and J. Maxwell Miller at Emory University. The negative pattern of reviews, however, largely continued uninterruptedly. This pessimistic development was enhanced occasionally by, for example, a response to my letter of application for an assistant professorship at Harvard. This application was returned to me unopened, merely initialed FMC, as head of the search committee. There was also a letter from William Dever, quondam head of a search committee to fill a vacancy at the University of Arizona, making a “friendly” request that I withdraw my application for the position. After 1980, I lost track of the public debate for the most part. To the extent that I had kept up with it, it had been so consistently and mercilessly critical as to reject every conceivable contribution I could wish to make. As an unemployable scholar, I was very vulnerable and it broke my heart, erasing all the respect I once had had for American scholarship as an institution. At the very few local and national CBA and SBL congresses I was able to attend, the papers I offered to give were consistently rejected without explanation, even during a period when no other topic in fact competed with my and Van Seters’ work as a topic of interest at the very congresses in which I sought engagement. In contrast, my applications to speak at meetings of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the international IOSOT meetings were accepted, though I could not obtain travel grants to honor these invitations.
I had gone through a divorce, had taught three years in a St. Paul high school, had been a handyman and had become a journeyman house painter. I had also just begun my own business in the Fall of 1984, when I received a letter from the École Biblique, telling me that I had been awarded their annual professorship, which involved teaching at the École for a semester. The annual professorship was funded by the Catholic Biblical Association and I had been recommended for the honour by William Thompson (whom I had never personally met). I came close to refusing the appointment, but in the end I could not and left for Jerusalem in the late summer of 1985. It was not long before I discovered—with the help of the École’s fantastic library—that the project Van Seters and I had begun had really become almost mainstream in the course of the 1980s, not least because it had been so strongly supported in Germany, Holland, Denmark and England. Any self-congratulation, however, was short-circuited by the unfortunately heavy criticism which the École received—being openly accused by Sara Japhet of the Hebrew University of anti-Semitism for having appointed me to their annual professorship. Although I was ostracized by the Albright Institute, I worked well with the people at the British and German schools and got along well with Malamat, Paul and others from the Hebrew University and various colleagues and friends from the Department of Antiquities whom I had known from my earlier work on the Tübinger Atlas. At the end of my tenure at the École, I was appointed as director for the École Biblique’s UNESCO-sponsored project: Toponomie Palestinienne, which dealt with the integrity of ancient place names in modern Palestinian toponomy and, among other things in a work which was primarily one of historical geography, criticized the Israelis for de-Arabicizing Palestinian toponomy and doing damage to this region’s cultural heritage. When the project was accused of “anti-Semitism”, UNESCO dropped their support after Saudi funding was withdrawn.
I, of course, was unemployed again and, having returned to the States, took up painting while applying for an NEH fellowship for a book on the “History of Israel.” Thanks to Jack Sasson’s support, I received a one year fellowship which led me to the library of the Chicago Oriental Institute. There I met Gösta Ahlström and we had lunch together for many wonderful months. He recommended me for a teacher replacement job at Lawrence and from there I moved to the Jesuit University of Marquette in 1989, without once picking up a paint brush. Once in Milwaukee, however, serious problems faced me: on the one hand, from conservative Catholics at the university who well knew of Ratzinger’s opposition to my dissertation and, on the other, from a local rabbi, whose name I have repressed, who considered me a pacifist. In the conquest of the Iraq war, this was easily, however carelessly, translated as an enemy of Israel. As I was a pacifist and politically public in Milwaukee, I found it very difficult to avoid the associated accusation, given my experience and knowledge of daily life in Palestine. In the middle of these debates about Iraq, pacifism and the role of Israel in American politics, I was happy at Marquette, accumulated and loved my students, and continued writing my Early History of the Israelite People. It was also awkward at Marquette as I was also, internationally, the best known scholar in a faculty of 31 members, but I did not have tenure—and Marquette was at best a moderate and very conservative faculty. Tenure review had been set for Spring of 1992. I brought Philip Davies to Marquette for a semester and Lemche for lectures. I was happy and the votes for tenure were, I imagined, 30-1 in my favor. In the spring of 1992, a long and very favorable review of my Early History of the Israelite People appeared on the front page of the London newspaper, Independent on Sunday and was quickly picked up by the Sunday Times, and countless papers thereafter. Marquette University was the proud host of its greatest horror: a critical historian. Votes shifted and I was out of a job.
At the annual meeting of the SBL in New Orleans in 1990 I finally met Niels Peter Lemche and we immediately became fast friends. I invited him to Marquette to give a lecture to my students. When he came, he suggested I apply for the professorship which was open in Copenhagen. However, knowing how jealously professorater were guarded in Europe and, doubting very much whether any would wish to give away such a prize to an American, I did not take him seriously. And, besides, at the time I had 30-1 votes in favor of my getting tenure and I was teaching at a place that was very close to my “roots” (The title of a book published in the 1980s), so I smiled and said I was very happy where I was. That was over Thanksgiving turkey. When a few months later my Early History appeared and was unfortunately so favorably reviewed and I so suddenly and consequently lost support for tenure, I wrote Niels Peter to ask him whether he had been serious about what he had suggested concerning the post in Copenhagen. I not only was surprisingly and unexpectedly available, I was looking at an almost certain future of unemployment (I was 53 at the time). He became serious and before the year was out I received two dozen red roses and a request that I join the Copenhagen faculty as professor in Old Testament Exegesis. I arrived in Copenhagen in May, 1993 and lived happily ever after.
Notes
1 John Huesman, “Archaeology and Early Israel: The Scene Today” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 34 (1975), 1-16.
Comments (12)
I was directly told at Cornell that students should agree with their professors or go somewhere else to study, and that the ultimate truth or untruth of a student's argument was in fact irrelevant (agreement with the professor was relevant). This arose in the context of my own forced expulsion from Cornell over a paper I wrote arguing, albeit clumsily, for the now largely vindicated proposition that the biblical "Genesis patriarchal period" was contemporary with the biblical "judges period", which differed from my adviser's traditional dating of the patriarchs. My advisor ironically recommended half-seriously that I go find and study under one Thomas Thompson if I really believed something so outlandish as that the Genesis patriarchal period could be Iron I. As it turned out, that is what I did. I remember looking up Thompson in Milwaukee and taking him out to dinner where I listened spellbound to the story of Ratzinger and the other figures Thompson had encountered. I remember asking Thompson, "Could Ratzinger ever become Pope?" and Thompson assuring me that could never happen. Then Thompson went to Copenhagen and Thompson and Lemche invited me to Copenhagen to finish my degree, which I did. I asked Thompson once how I could thank him. He said: someday there will be a student you will help as you feel I have helped you; that is how you will repay me. There are so many comments raised by this understated, powerful personal story of Thompson. First, on antisemitism and criticism of Israel politically: I have known Thompson for many years now and whatever his political views, he is not antisemitic or anti-Jewish. Yet one cannot but suspect an unholy alliance of quasi-biblical mainstream neo-fundamentalism, an Albrightean school, with pro-Israel political views, in the background to the reactions Thompson experienced. Second, the role of Lemche deserves comment: some senior figures are threatened by brilliance, threatened by someone such as Thompson, yet Lemche was big enough to welcome Thompson to Copenhagen, and what a productive and fertile ground of scholarship that has been. Third, a personal connection to a figure mentioned by Thompson: I did not realize it until later, but James Ross, who Thompson had mentioned in my initial five-hour dinner with him (but I did not remember the detail that Ross had refused Tom's dissertation's publication for SBL until reading this article) . . . I was surprised to learn later was a relative of mine, though I never met him: his wife was a first cousin of my mother. I always wondered what Ross's version of the story was--his reason for attempting to prevent Thompson from receiving his PhD at Emory--but lacked the courage to make the family contact and ask him, until several years ago I finally worked up my courage and made the phone call. Sadly I learned I was too late; he had died before I made the call (and his wife before him so I could not ask her either). Studying under Thompson was a dream come true for me and resulted among other things in meeting my wife, so the happy ending in Thompson's story, or beginnings depending on how one looks at it, are not limited to Tom. Thompson's story has long been known by those who know him and I am aware of no inaccuracies or inconsistencies in Thompson's account as told in the present essay. I hope there may be meaningful discussion of the issues raised.
No comments:
Post a Comment