Maximilist or Minamilist, Where do you stand?

Can everything in the Bible be accurate? I have spent the better part of the last 10 years studying biblical archaeology as a hobby. There is so much about ancient Biblical cultures that fascinates me. I love to keep up with excavations and new scholarship.

However in the early nineties a new school of scholarship began to emerge called Biblical Minimalism. Basically the adherents to this school , guys like Israel Finkelstien, believe the Bible to have been assembled by post exilic scribes, around 400 BCE. They came out in the early nineties declaring many aspects of the OT to be merely myths and not accurate history. These include:

1. Creation and flood as myth
2. Exodus and conquest as an allegory created to unify several displaced peasants in the highlands of Israel. These "peasants" would emerge as Israel under King Omri in the 8th century BCE.

3. They claim David and Solomon as myths or at the very least, small tribal leaders

*It is interesting to note that when these views were published, a few months later, they found this:This.
This view came to be labeled as the Low Chronology, basically saying that all of Israel history before the Omride Period is of little historical value and can not be accurate.

The opposing view, the High Chronology, or Maximalist, is defined as follows:

1. the Patriarchal accounts can be trusted as they present an accurate representation of 2nd and 3rd millennium BCE near eastern culture, even if literal Abram, Issac, and Jacob did not exist.

2. Exodus could have occurred, although in far less numbers than the Bible portrays.

3. Conquest could have occurred in much the same way as the exodus, on a smaller scale.

4. The United Monarchy was powerful and large. This find has been revolutionary in studying the Davidic period and seems to validate the Bible's claim of David being powerful.

There is a lot of study surrounding the Davidic period, known archaeologically as Iron Age II, and it should be exciting to see the forthcoming discoveries.

The whole point of this post is to get a feel for how you approach Biblical Scholarship. Being a Christian, I guess I would be considered a high Maximalist. This is based on Christ affirming the Hebrew cannon (which was set in Christ's time and is the same cannon we have today) in Luke 24:44. Here Christ affirms everything written in the OT, so if he validates it, I must also.



So are you a Maximalist, Minimalist, or somewhere in between? Or does it matter?