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Monday, February 3, 2025

Antisemitic trope

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_trope

Antisemitic tropes, also known as antisemitic canards or antisemitic libels, are "sensational reports, misrepresentations or fabrications" about Jews as an ethnicity or Judaism as a religion.

Since the 2nd century, malicious allegations of Jewish guilt have become a recurring motif in antisemitic tropes, which take the form of libels, stereotypes or conspiracy theories. They typically present Jews as cruel, powerful or controlling, some of which also feature the denial or trivialization of historical atrocities against Jews. These tropes have led to pogroms, genocides, persecutions and systemic racism for Jews throughout history. Antisemitic tropes mainly evolved in monotheistic societies, whose religions were derived from Judaism, many of which were traceable to Christianity's early days. These tropes were mirrored by 7th-century Quranic claims that Jews were "visited with wrath from Allah" due to their supposed practice of usury and disbelief in His revelations. In medieval Europe, antisemitic tropes were expanded in scope to justify mass persecutions and expulsions of Jews. Particularly, Jews were repeatedly massacred over accusations of causing epidemics and "ritually consuming" Christian babies' blood.

In the 19th century, lies about Jews plotting "world domination" by "controlling" mass media and global banking spread, which mutated into modern tropes, especially the libel that Jews "invented and promoted communism". These tropes fatefully formed Adolf Hitler's worldview, contributing to World War II and the Holocaust, which killed at least 6 million Jews (67% pre-war European Jews).Since the 20th century, antisemitic libels' usage has been documented among groups that self-identify as "anti-Zionists".

Most contemporary tropes feature the denial or trivialization of anti-Jewish atrocities, especially the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust,or of the Jewish exodus from Muslim countries. Holocaust denial and antisemitic tropes are inextricable, typical of which is the libel that the Holocaust was "fabricated" or "exaggerated" to "advance" Jews' or Israel's interests. The most recent example is the denial or trivialization of the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel, with the victims overwhelmingly Jewish, including several Holocaust survivors.

Political tropes

World domination

A Nazi German cartoon c. 1938 depicting Churchill as a Jewish-natured octopus reaching across the globe

The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature. The trope embodied by the book is manifested in both writings and imagery, where Jews are accused of plotting world domination nefariously. Typical examples include Nazi-originated cartoons depicting Jews as a giant octopus reaching across the globe.A 2001 Egyptian reprint of Henry Ford's antisemitic text The International Jew, with the same octopus imagery on the front cover.

Among the earliest refutations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times in 1921, which revealed the forgery's content to have been plagiarized from the unrelated satire The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Russian imperial state popularized the forgery to discredit the Bolsheviks by accusing Jews of organizing the Russian revolution. The forgery scapegoated Jews as the leading subversive force to try to dispel mass revolt and keep the empire united.

Later, the trope spread westward when the Great Depression and Nazism's rise catalyzed its dissemination. A Polish equivalent goes by Judeopolonia, which posited an imaginary Jewish domination of Poland. Contemporarily, the trope often goes by Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), which accuses the Jews of "controlling Western governments" for selfish ends, like benefitting Israel. The ZOG is widely peddled by antisemites, such as the Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, Islamists and black supremacists.

Malcolm X, a well known Black American activist, believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he introduced to the Nation of Islam (NOI) for circulation among their Black American audience. In 2003, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed drew a standing ovation at an OIC conference after alleging:

Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them [...] They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong [...] they have gained control of the most powerful countries.

The New Black Panther Party (NBPP), a black separatist group, has actively peddled the myth. Prior to a 2006 Democratic primary runoff in the U.S. state of Georgia, the NBPP alleged,

So-called Jews in Israel in what's really Palestine…some player haters, some Zionists, some so-called Jews who the Book of Revelations […] calls the Synagogue of Satan.

When the NBPP-backed candidate Cynthia McKinney lost to her rival Hank Johnson, NBPP's members alleged "Jewish electoral domination".

In April 2017, the Politico magazine published an article alleging "links" between the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Jewish religious group Chabad. Jonathan Greenblatt (CEO) of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned the article as "evok[ing] age-old myths about Jews". In December 2023, Australian Green MP Jenny Leong, echoed Mahathir Mohammed's 2003 speech at a Palestine Justice Movement forum:

the Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby are infiltrating into every single aspect of what is ethnic community groups [...] they rock up to every community event because their tentacles reach into the areas that try and influence power.

Leong apologized after being condemned. Whereas, the "Jewish power" myth is often veiled as the "criticism" of "Jewish plutocrats" allegedly behind political changes. For instance, QAnon conspiracy theorists believe in the existence of a "satanic cabal" of global elites (globalists) "drinking children's blood" to achieve "world domination". Two-time heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury also believes in a "Zionist plot" to "lower" public moral standard via the media and finance. As per Argentine-Israeli educator Gustavo Perednik, antisemites often pass off their aggressive instinct as a "struggle" of "the oppressed" against the "powerful" to maximize its appeal to left-wing audience.

Controlling the media

1930 Spanish reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Another common antisemitic trope is that "the Jews control the media and Hollywood". In Eastern Europe, the Czech politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, believed that Jews "controlled the press", despite his previous objection to antisemitism during the Hilsner affair. In Western Europe, Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Féin party decisive to Ireland's independence, was subscribed to the "Jewish media control" trope. Griffith alleged that Dublin newspapers were

almost all Jew rags [...] Fifty other rags like those which have nothing behind them but the forty or fifty thousand Jewish usurers and pick-pockets in each country and which no decent Christian ever reads except holding his nose as a precaution against nausea.

Griffith's antisemitism is still present in the party. For instance, lower house parliamentarian Réada Cronin alleged in 2020 that Jews were "responsible for European wars" and "Adolf Hitler was a pawn of the [Jewish] Rothschilds [...may] not have been too far wrong". In the United States, J.J. Goldberg, The Forward's editorial director, published a study of such trope in 1997. He concluded that Jewish Americans "do not make a high priority of Jewish concerns" despite holding prominent positions in the American media industry. Variants on this theme focus on Hollywood, the press and the music industry.

White genocide conspiracy theory

Since 2015 when the European migrant crisis happened, the White genocide conspiracy theory has gained traction among white nationalists. Jews are often accused of facilitating unrestricted non-white immigration to alter the fabric of White-majority societies. Such libel is often peddled in conjunction with older myths, like the "Jewish power", to raise its plausibility among the targeted audience. Much of such sentiment stems from an extinction anxiety about the majority White population becoming outnumbered by the non-white population, who are often assumed as "foreign" and "incompatible" with the mainstream. Elon Musk, the current owner of X (formerly Twitter), has also been accused of endorsing the theory, when he showed approval of the theory in a tweet.

In the US, there have been several terrorist attacks associated with the belief in the theory, the most recent of which include the 2017 Unite the Right rally, where dozens of casualties occurred in a car ramming attack, and the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, where 11 were killed and 7 injured. The SPLC noted,

The "great replacement" theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory's proponents characterize as "inferior," will displace a white majority. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the "great replacement" do not explicitly attribute the plot to Jews. Instead, they blame powerful Jewish individuals such as financier and philanthropist George Soros or use coded antisemitic language to identify shadowy "elites" or "globalists."

Economic tropes

Controlling the global financial system

The ADL documented several tropes that had associated Jews with banking, including the myth that "global banking is dominated by the [Jewish] Rothschild family"traceable to the medieval prevalence of Jews in moneylending.

Usury and profiteering

In the Middle Ages, Jews were restricted from most professions and pushed into marginalized occupations, such as tax collection and moneylending, due to the Roman Catholic Church's prohibition on Christians charging interest for loans. In 1179, the Third Council of the Lateran threatened excommunication for any Christians lending money at interest, prompting borrowers to turn to Jews for loans. Natural tension between gentile debtors and Jewish creditors reinforced pre-existing anti-Jewish biases. In England, the departing Crusaders were joined by debtors in the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190. In 1275, Edward I of England punished Jewish creditors by passing the anti-usury Statute of Jewry. Many English Jews were arrested, 300 of whom were hanged. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. German-American Jewish historian Walter Laqueur noted,

The issue at stake was not really whether the Jews had entered it out of greed [...] The high tide of Jewish usury was before the fifteenth century; as cities grew in power and affluence, the Jews were squeezed out from money lending with the development of banking.

Propagation of Communism

In the 20th century, newer allegations of Jews masterminding the propagation of Communism emerged, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903). Judeo-Bolshevism was popularized by Hitler's to conflate Jews with communists and present them as an existential threat to justify the Holocaust. A Polish equivalent of this trope is Żydokomuna, which accused "most Jews" of having "collaborated with the Soviet Union" in "importing communism" to Poland. Candace Owens, a twenty-first century American "ultraconservative" pundit, endorses such libel. She alleged that "Stalin was a Jew" and his followers were "part of a Jewish cabal".

Kosher tax

The "Kosher tax" trope claims that food producers are "forced" to pay an exorbitant premium to indicate that their products are kosher, which is allegedly passed on to consumers by price increase. It is mainly spread by white supremacists. Refuters contended that food producers would not engage in the certification process if it was not profitable to obtain the "kosher certification", which is actually a voluntary business decision, while the "resultant" increased sales would lower the average cost.

Religious tropes

A protest alleging *Jewish deicide*, held by members of the Westboro Baptist Church

Guilt for the death of Jesus

Jews have been blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus throughout history:

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

– Matthew 27:24–25

Jewish deicide was legitimized in Christian theology by Saint John Chrysostom (c. 4th century), a prominent Church Father. In the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, Pope Paul VI issued the Nostra aetate to refute the libel,

What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.

Against radical traditionalists' objections, it was distantly followed up by an apology in 2000 for the two millennia of Catholic persecution of Jews, amid claims that the Second Temple menorah is still being hidden in the Vatican. Radical Traditionalist Catholics (rad trads) who oppose Christian–Jewish reconciliation have continued to peddle Jewish deicide. Subreddits r/Catholicism and r/AskAChristian on Reddit are reportedly frequented by rad trads for years. As per the SPLC, the rad trads frequently circulate content from the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Notably, the rad trads have peddled:

Jews are the "perpetual enemy" of Christ
Adolf Hitler was the end-product of the Kulturkampf of the "Freemason" Otto von Bismarck
Nazism was the "result" of a 400-year "revolution" against the Divine Plan to effect man's return to Him via His Catholic Church abetted by Talmudists
Jews have "infiltrated" the Catholic Church to induce changes in church doctrine for selfish gain
Catholics cannot trust the Jews
The Vatican II dialogue with the Jews is a pantomime to destroy Catholic militancy against Judaism

The ADL noted,

Traditionalist Catholics [...] continued to incorporate explicit antisemitism into their theology [...] a paranoid belief in Jewish conspiracies to undermine the church and Western civilization [...] preach that contemporary Jews are responsible for deicide, endorsed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and claimed that there was a factual basis for the medieval blood libel. One of its bishops, Richard Williamson, is a well known Holocaust denier.

Nevertheless, the Vatican and many Catholics worldwide are still denying the scale or brutality of the Inquisition, most of the victims of it were Jewish. Some Catholics exaggerate their role in the rescue of Jews during World War II in an attempt to downplay the Catholic Church's history of brutal systemic antisemitism.

Blood libel

The blood libel accusation's origin dates to the 12th century. The first recorded accusation against Jews was associated with the death of William of Norwich. Torture and human sacrifice in the blood libel run contrary to Judaism. The Ten Commandments forbid murder. The use of blood in cooking is banned by Kashrut as blood is deemed ritually unclean. The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and Halakha portray human sacrifice as one of the evils separating the pagans of Canaan from the Hebrews. Jews were prohibited from performing these rituals. Ritual cleanliness for priests prohibited even being in the same room with a human corpse. Historian Alexis P. Rubin noted,

Church and secular leaders sharply denounced these defamations [...] people refused to abandon this myth [...] Popes, kings and emperors declared that Jews, if for no other reason than their strict dietary laws banning even the smallest drop of blood in meat or poultry, were incapable of the crime. The Christian populace was not impressed.

Among those who refuted the blood libel included the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick IIand Pope Gregory IX, while Pope Clement VI said that the Black Death could not be blamed on Jews. Contemporarily, the blood libel still appears frequently in Muslim countries' state media, publications and online platforms as per their official anti-Zionism. A few Arab writers, who happened not to be antisemitic, condemned the blood libel. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published articles by Osama Al-Baz, a senior advisor to the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, explaining the origins of the blood libel. Whereas, the blood libel is still peddled by Christian fundamentalists, including the Radical Traditionalist Catholics (rad trads) and American ultraconservative pundit Candace Owens, who alleged that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 over false allegations of killing a girl.

Host desecration

In medieval Europe, Jews were often accused of stealing hosts and desecrating them to reenact the crucifixion of Jesus by stabbing or burning. The first allegation of Jewish host desecration was made recorded in 1243 in Beelitz, near Berlin, and all Jews in Beelitz were burned alive, subsequently called the Judenberg. In the following centuries, similar libels circulated throughout Europe and caused several pogroms, which did not subside until Sigismund II Augustus repudiated it in 1558. However, massacres resulted from host desecration libels happened until the 19th century. The last recorded accusations were brought up in Barlad, Romania, in 1836 and 1867 respectively.

Accusations of anti-Christian conspiracy

Throughout history, Christians alleged that Jews either dislike or sought to destroy Christianity. A 65,000-word treatise written by Martin Luther, a pioneering 16th-century Christian reformer, also consists of such a libel that is still being promoted. For instance, radio host James Edwards alleged that Jews "hate Christianity" and were "using pornography as a subversive tool against us". The ADL noted,

This is not to say that Jews have historically borne no animus towards Jesus and the Apostles, or towards Christianity as a whole. In the two-thousand year relationship between Judaism and Christianity, many of them marred by anti-Jewish polemic and Christian persecution of Jews, some rabbis have fulminated against the church [...] But contemporary anti-Semitic polemicists are not interested in learning or reporting about the historical development of Jewish-Christian relations. Their goal is to incite hatred against Judaism and Jews by portraying them as bigoted and hateful.

Demonization in Christianity

As early as the 4th century, Church Father Saint John Chrysostom described a synagogue as

worse than a brothel and a drinking shop [...] a den of scoundrels, the repair of wild beasts, a temple of demons, the refuge of brigands and debauchees, and the cavern of devils, a criminal assembly of the assassins of Christ.

His anti-Jewish homily was legitimized in Christian theology as the basis of Christian antisemitism for the following millennia, ultimately subject to Nazi co-optation to garner Christian support for the Holocaust. In such regard, historian Jeremy Cohen wrote,

Yet the very impulse that propelled the Christian imagination from the Jew as a deliberate killer of Christ to the Jew as a perpetrator of the most heinous crimes against humanity also led to the portrayal of the Jew as inhuman, satanic, animal-like, and monstrous [...] the bestiality of the Jew climaxed in the image of the Judensau.

Judensau (German for Jews' sow) is a dehumanizing imagery of Jews that appeared around the 13th century. Its popularity lasted for six centuries until Nazi revival. Sculptures of Jews, typically portrayed as "obscene human contact" with unclean animals like pigs and owls, were often found on cathedral or church ceilings, pillars, utensils, etchings etc. The images always combined multiple antisemitic motifs, which sometimes included derisive prose or poetry. Martin Luther, a 16th-century Reformation's pioneer, was noted for his vicious antisemitism. Luther wrote a 65,000-word thesis demonizing the Jews in which he not only described Jews as

a base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth [...] and the synagogue [...] incorrigible whore and an evil slut,

but also called for extreme violence towards Jews within Europe. Martin Luther was elevated to an unprecedented status in Nazi Germany. Luther's antisemitic thesis is considered by many Western historians to have brought about the Holocaust, despite the 400-year lapse.

Demonization in other religions or movements

Beyond Abrahamic religions, the demonization of Jews is also common among new religious movements, one of which is the Black Hebrew Israelites. Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) believe that African Americans are descendants of ancient Israelites. However, the BHI are not associated with either Jews or Christians.

Just as the "Messianic Judaism" founded by Conservative Baptist Association's Evangelical priest Moishe Rosen, the BHI do not meet any criteria for being Jewish. The BHI have seen themselves as the only "real Jews". They deny contemporary Jews' Jewish ancestry and historical connection to Israel. BHI have accused contemporary Jews of being "European converts to Judaism" and running the Atlantic slave trade, implying that they are "White oppressors". Several BHI sects have been classified as hate groups by at least three American civil rights groups, the ADL, SPLC and SWC, with the ADL claiming that not all BHI sects were anti-Semitic.

Such BHI-espoused antisemitic tropes have been popularized to discredit Jews by associating them with White supremacy. BHI sects deemed antisemitic include the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge (ISUPK), House of Israel (HOI), Nation of Yahweh (NOY), Israelites Saints of Christ, True Nation Israelite Congregation and The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ (ICGJC). The ADL summarized the commonly used BHI slurs:

Jew-ish: Negative term for depicting Jews as "imposters"
So-called Jews: Casting doubt on the Jewish identity of mainstream Jews
Synagogue of Satan: An ancient slur borrowed to express dislike of Jews

BHI groups or members have also been involved in domestic terrorism towards Jewish Americans since the 1970s, the most recent of which include the Jersey City Shooting (7 dead and 3 injured).The BHI, to some extent, managed to desensitize the public to their anti-Jewish terrorism by appropriating Jewish symbols and misusing their historically oppressed status to gain sympathy from anti-racist intellectuals.

The Unification Church (UC), founded by South Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon in 1954, was criticized for demonizing Jews in its manifesto Divine Principle. A multi-faith panel that included Rabbi A. James Rudin, the assistant director of the American Jewish Committee's department of interreligious affairs, pointed out 125 antisemitic references in their manifesto, including the libel that Jews were "collectively responsible" for the crucifixion of Christ. Rudin argued that UC's manifesto included "pejorative language, stereotyped imagery, accusations of collective sin and guilt", including its claim that "Jews had gone through a course of indemnity" due to John the Baptist's "failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah". It is also found that the UC's text portrayed the Holocaust as a "divine punishment". The UC denied the AJC's charges as "distortion" and "obscurations".

Male menstruation

The false belief of Jewish male anal menstruation emerged in the 16th century, which formed part of the canard that all Jews were somehow female. The false belief was allegedly based on scripture associating Jews with bleeding, particularly the description of Judas' death in Acts 1:18–19, where his belly was allegedly burst open, which inspired further accounts of heretics having their blood or entrails spilled via the anus at death. It was, in the 12th century, referenced to the blood curse invoked by the Jews at Jesus' trial before Pilate. In the following century, a pseudoscientific explanation based on humoral medicine was added, supplemented by a verse from Psalms 78:66. By 1302, it was claimed that Jewish male descendants of those alleged to have "taken responsibility" for the crucifixion of Jesus would suffer a monthly bleeding. A 1503 account of the 1494 ritual murder trials at Tyrnau consisted of the earliest mention of the alleged monthly male bleeding. In 17th-century Spain, the notion was revived by physicians, including the king's, conflating menstruation with hemorrhoids, which contributed to the "legal concept" of "impure blood" in a family or race.

Well poisoning

Medieval depiction of a Jew poisoning a well during an alleged ritual murder

During the devastating 14th century Black Death, crowded cities were hard hit, with death tolls as high as 50%. Emotionally distraught survivors scapegoated Jews opportunistically. Soon after the Black Death's entry to Europe in 1346, a massacres of Jews broke out between 1348 and 1351 based on false charges of Jews "spreading" the epidemic. The first massacres happened in Toulon in 1348, where the Jewish quarter was sacked and 40 Jews murdered, then in Barcelona. In 1349, massacres and persecution spread across Europe, including the Erfurt massacre, Basel Massacre and massacres in Aragon and Flanders. 2,000 Jews were also burned alive in the Strasbourg massacre on 14 February 1349 by antisemites who justified the massacre as a "preventive measure". Such accusation later became an antisemitic trope, which evolved into the one fabricated by Joseph Stalin as the doctors' plot in the early 1950s, then the charges of Jews "spreading" intractable diseases like the AIDS and COVID-19.

Other tropes

Causing wars, revolutions and calamities

German politician Heinrich von Treitschke in the 19th century coined the phrase "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" ("The Jews are our misfortune!"), which became Der Stürmer's motto. Israeli-British historian Efraim Karsh noted,

Jews have traditionally been accused of lacking true patriotism to their countries of citizenship, and instead seeking to embroil their non-Jewish compatriots in endless conflicts and wars on behalf of such cosmopolitan movements and ideals as 'world imperialism', 'international bolshevism', or 'world Zionism'.

Both ends of the political spectrum accused American Jews of "dragging" the country into World War II and the Iraq War, exaggerating the influence of an alleged Israel lobby. It was also promoted by political scientist John Mearsheimer in a 2007 book, which was criticized for legitimizing the "Jewish domination" trope and encouraging antisemitism. The Franklin Prophecy was unknown before its appearance in 1934 in William Dudley Pelley's pro-Nazi magazine Liberation. As per the 2004 U.S. Congress report Anti-Semitism in Europe: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations,

The Franklin "Prophecy" is a classic anti-Semitic canard that falsely claims that American statesman Benjamin Franklin made anti-Jewish statements during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It has found widening acceptance in Muslim and Arab media, where it has been used to criticize Israel and Jews [...]

Turning people LGBT

In 2016, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) highlighted a video in which a Kuwaiti Salafi preacher alleged that SpongeBob SquarePants and other youth cartoons were created by Jews in order to promote homosexuality, atheism, Satanism and the "emo movement". In 2018, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan accused Jews of "turning men into women and women into men" with a "specially concocted strain of marijuana" invented to make Black men gay and effeminate.

In 2020, conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles endorsed a claim by some "Messianic Jews" that "Zionists" seek to "make all of humanity androgynous" as per the Kabbalistic concept of Adam Kadmon. They alleged that the plot involved "Zionist" support for transgender rights to "make people LGBT" by "putting specific things in food, in drink".Contrarily, some lesbian feminists have accused Jews of being "killers of the Goddess" over their perception of the god of Israel being male to blame Jews for women's mistreatment under the "patriarchy".

Controlling the weather and causing natural disasters

On March 16, 2018, Council of the District of Columbia member Trayon White posted a video on his Facebook page showing snow flurries falling, alluding to the conspiracy theory of the Rothschild family conspiring to manipulate the weather. In his post, he stated, "Y'all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation ... And that's a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful." The comment was widely reported in Washington and worldwide media as an endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The Washington City Paper reported on March 19 that this was not the first time in which White alluded to a Jewish conspiracy to control global weather.

The belief that Jews use space lasers to manipulate the weather, or the belief that Jews use space lasers to cause natural disasters, also dates back to 2018, when U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that the Camp Fire wildfires in Butte County, California were caused by lasers which were emitted from "space solar generators" in a scheme which companies such as Rothschild & Co and Solaren were involved in. Despite her denial of antisemitic intent in relation to her belief in this theory, supporters of Greene quickly blamed the wildfires on Jews. Greene was condemned by the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Christians United for Israel. Journalist and author Mike Rothschild, who is unrelated to the Rothschilds, also condemned these statements.

Provoking or fabricating antisemitism

During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler accused "international Jewish financiers" of seeking to start a world war, but that this would be turned against them in an "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe", for which the Jews would be fully to blame.

In 2002, the then-Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi asked, "People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, 'What did the Jews do to the Germans?'" Gilad Atzmon stated, "Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler's 28 March 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership." In January 2005, 19 members of the Russian State Duma demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned in Russia, alleging that "most antisemitic actions in the whole world are constantly carried out by Jews themselves with a goal of provocation." After sharp protests by Russian Jewish leaders, including Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, human rights activists and the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Duma members retracted their appeal.

Dual loyalty

A trope found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but originating long before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since Israel's reestablishment in 1948, libels of Jews being more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence and citizenship have become widespread in different countries.

Cowardice and lack of patriotism

With the rise of racist theories in the 19th century, "[a]nother old anti-Semitic canard served to underline the putative 'femininity' of the Jewish race. Like women, Jews lacked an 'essence'". In Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations, Kurt Jonassohn and Karin S. Björnson wrote:

Historically, Jews were not allowed to bear arms in most of the countries of the diaspora. Therefore, when they were attacked, they were not able to defend themselves. In some situations, their protector would defend them. If not, they only had a choice between hiding and fleeing. This is the origin of the anti-Semitic canard that Jews are cowards.

Jews were frequently accused of being insufficiently patriotic. In late 19th-century France, a political scandal known as the Dreyfus affair involved the wrongful conviction for treason of a young Jewish French officer. The political and judicial scandal ended with his full rehabilitation. During World War I, the German Military High Command implemented the Judenzählung (German for "Jewish Census"), which was designed to "confirm" allegations of the "lack of patriotism" among German Jews, but the results of the census disproved the accusations and were not made public. After the end of the war, the stab-in-the-back myth alleged that internal enemies, including Jews, were responsible for Germany's defeat.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, the statewide campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans", a Soviet euphemism for Jews, was set out on 28 January 1949 with an article in the party's official newspaper Pravda:

unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitans, profiteers with no roots and no conscience [...] Grown on rotten yeast of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, decadence and formalism [...] non-indigenous nationals without a motherland, who poison with stench [...] our proletarian culture.

Such propaganda was followed by state campaigns of persecution until Stalin's death in 1953, which involved mass termination of Soviet Jewish doctors and liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee based on false charges of treason, espionage and association with Zionism. The anniversary of the murders was commemorated by Soviet Jewry Movement's activists from the 1960s until the end of the Soviet Union.

In 1968, the Soviet-dominated Polish communist state exploited pre-existing antisemitism to peddle similar claims, equating Jewish origins with "disloyalty" and "Zionist sympathies", to blame Polish Jews for the anti-communist mass protests. A purge of Polish Jews, most of whom were Holocaust survivors, ensued. The purge caused the exodus of 5,000-10,000 Polish Jews – around 20-33% of those remaining back then. An apology was made by the democratic Polish government in March 2018.

Ethnocentrism

Many antisemitic conspiracy theory websites cherry-picked quotes from Jewish religious writings to justify the libel that Judaism is "racist [...] teaching Jews to hate non-Jews." As per rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,

Even as the Jew is moved by his private Sinaitic Covenant with God to embody and preserve the teachings of the Torah, he is committed to the belief that all mankind, of whatever color or creed, is "in His image" and is possessed of an inherent human dignity and worthiness. Man's singularity is derived from the breath "He [God] breathed into his nostrils at the moment of creation" (Genesis 2:7). Thus, we do share in the universal historical experience, and God's providential concern does embrace all of humanity.

As per the minutes of a 1984 U.S. Congress hearing concerning the Soviet Jewry, the demonization of Jews based on bogus "ethnocentrism" charges was common:

This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Fabricating or exaggerating the Holocaust

Holocaust denial consists of claims that the genocide of Jews during World War II – usually referred to as the Holocaust – did not occur at all, or it did not happen in the manner or to the extent which is historically recognized. Key elements of these claims are the rejection of the following facts:

The Nazi regime had a policy of deliberately targeting Jews for extermination as a people
At least six million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies
Genocide was carried out at extermination camps using tools of mass murder, such as gas chambers.

Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a "hoax" committed out of a "deliberate Jewish conspiracy" to advance the "Jewish interests". Nowadays, outright denial is no longer socially acceptable. It has, however, morphed into more devious forms involving antisemitic tropes' usage to distort relevant events for fabricating Jewish guilt and legitimizing antisemitism. As such, Holocaust denial is antisemitic. Holocaust deniers are condemned for ignoring all the evidence disproving their falsehood.

Holocaust deniers include the late "anti-Zionist" Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser,former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, late French professor Robert Faurisson, French teacher Vincent Reynouard, British author David Irving and Germar Rudolf.

In 2010, a poll found that 56% of citizens in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the UAE believed that the Jews "deserved the Holocaust", most of whom were found to hold the false beliefs that

A Jewish propaganda machine had promoted the Holocaust myth to extract huge sums of money from Germany and justify the founding of the state of Israel
The Jewish victims died of natural causes or were sentenced to death for criminal reasons
The Allied Powers deliberately inflated the number of Jews killed during the war

In 2014, another global survey found that almost half of the world did not know that the Holocaust ever happened, making them more susceptible to the tropes as mentioned.

Holocaust inversion

Antisemitic poster spotted at an allegedly anti-war rally in San Francisco on February 16, 2003, which incorporated both the motifs of "money-minded Jews" and "Zio-Nazis". The slur *ZIONIST PIGS* was also used.

Antisemitic graffiti in Madrid, 2003, equating the Star of David with the dollar and Nazi swastika

Whereas, "[t]he main motif in Arab cartoons about Israel features 'the devilish Jew'" and "[t]he core anti-Semitic motif of the Jew as the paradigm of an "absolute evil" has a set of submotifs. These, in turn, recur over the centuries but are differently cloaked according to the predominant narrative of the period." Such demonization by association with Israel is termed the Holocaust inversion. Holocaust inversion is an inversion of reality where Jews, the Holocaust's primary victims, are transposed into being the primary perpetrators to erase their historical victimhood and justify antisemitism. It is deemed a form of Holocaust trivialization. The World Jewish Congress noted that Holocaust inversion could be manifested as:

Portraying Jews as Nazis
Comparing Israeli prime ministers to Hitler and portraying the Star of David as equal to the swastika
Images showing Anne Frank wearing a kaffiyeh
Comparing the Nakba to the Holocaust
Comparing the Gaza Strip to Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust

In such regard, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy remarked,

[...] a mass movement demanding the deaths of Jews will be unlikely to yell "Money Jews" or "They Killed Christ." [...] for such a movement to emerge, for people to feel once again [...] the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large number of rabbis [...] an entirely new discourse way of justifying it must emerge.

Zio, Zio-Nazi and even Zionist are used deceptively by antisemites to promote antisemitism while maintaining plausible deniability. David Duke, the former KKK's Grand Wizard, reportedly invented Zio as an anti-Jewish slur based on Zionism's popularity among contemporary Jews, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer saw Zio-Nazi as hate speech, while the Meta restricted these terms on Facebook and Instagram.

Yossi Klein Halevi, the author of The New York Times bestseller Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, considered the trope a transmutation of an archaic dehumanizing motif of Jews:

The deepest source of anti-Israel animus is the symbolization of the Jew as embodiment of evil. The satanic Jew has been replaced by the satanic Jewish state [...] The end of the post-Holocaust era is expressed most starkly in the inversion of the Holocaust [...] The Jew-as-Nazi is the endpoint of political supersessionism: Not only have we forfeited our identity as "Israel," but we've assumed the identity of our worst enemy.

Nevertheless, it is notable that Cold War communist regimes, including the Soviet Union and its puppet state in Poland, had an often neglected history of persecuting their Jewish subjects based on "anti-Zionism".

Controlling the Atlantic slave trade

Exploiting the pre-existing racial tension between Black and Jewish Americans, antisemites have exaggerated Jews' role in the Atlantic slave trade in an attempt to demonize them in the eyes of Black Americans. The belief that Jews "orchestrated" the Atlantic slave trade is the central tenet of the American Islamist hate group Nation of Islam (NOI), led by Louis Farrakhan. A number of historians, including Saul S. Friedman, conducted research into the matter. Friedman published the book Jews and the American Slave Trade to summarise his findings, concluding that Jewish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was negligible, thereby disproving the rumour. Also, in 1995, the American Historical Association (AHA) explicitly condemned "any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic slave trade".

Organ harvesting

Palestinians

In August 2009, an article in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet accused Israeli troops of harvesting organs from Palestinians who died in their custody. Henrik Bredberg wrote in the rival newspaper Sydsvenskan: "Donald Boström publicized a variant of an anti-Semitic classic, the Jew who abducts children and steals their blood." In a video on their website, Time magazine quoted the 2009 Swedish Aftonbladet's unbacked variant of the classic antisemitic blood libel accusation as fact and retracted the allegations that Israeli soldiers had harvested and sold Palestinian organs in 2009 within hours on 24 August 2014 after a denouncing report from HonestReporting came out.

In December 2009, Israel's Channel 2 published an interview with Yehuda Hiss, the former chief pathologist at L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, where he accused workers at the forensic institute of taking skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from deceased Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers without permission in the 1990s. Hiss was dismissed as head of Abu Kabir in 2004 after discovery of the use of organs. Israeli officials acknowledged that isolated incidents had taken place, but the vast majority of cases involved Israeli citizens and no such incidents had occurred for a protracted period, while Hiss had already been removed from his position. In a state inquiry report, they also found "no evidence that Hiss targeted Palestinians...The families of dead Israeli soldiers were among those who complained about Hiss's conduct." Despite this, similar accusations are still made by different members of society, including the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

During the 2023–present Israel–Hamas war conspiracy theories were spread that the IDF was harvesting the organ of Palestinians. There has been no evidence presented to substantiate this outside of claims made by the Gaza Ministry of Health. Despite this the claim has been spread and been used to incite anti-Jewish sentiments online.

Haiti

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Israel sent 120 staff, doctors and troops of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to Port-au-Prince.The IDF set up a field hospital that performed 316 surgeries and delivered 16 babies. On 18 January, an American "activist" called T. West posted a YouTube video calling on Haitians to be wary of "personalities who are out for money", which he referred to as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). To explain his allegations, West stated that in the past "the IDF [had] participated in stealing organ transplants of Palestinians and others", thus echoing the Aftonbladet Israel controversy. West, who claimed to speak for a black-empowerment group called AfriSynergy Productions, stopped short of making more explicit accusations against the IDF's behaviour in Haiti but he noted that there was "little monitoring" of it in the quake's aftermath, insinuating that organ theft was at the very least a strong possibility. The Iranian state outlet Press TV promoted the allegations. In a speech on 22 January, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said "There have been news reports that the Zionist regime, in the case of the catastrophe of Haiti, and under the pretext of providing relief to the people of Haiti, is stealing the organs of these wretched people", again without citing any evidence. On 27 January, a Syrian TV reporter described T. West's video as "document[ing] this heinous crime and [...] show[ing] Israelis engaged in stealing organs from the earthquake victims" (despite the fact that the video quite evidently does no such thing).

On 1 February 2010, "The Palestine Telegraph" accused the IDF of harvesting organs in Haiti for sale based on the said YouTube video by T. West whose material was re-used from Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV. In the United Kingdom, Baroness Jenny Tonge was removed from her role as Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman as a result of an interview in which she suggested that an independent inquiry should be established. Israeli media and Jewish groups fought back against the claims immediately. In an interview with the Ynetnews, West re-iterated his accusation of IDF's past organ theft and cited Operation Bid Rig as further "evidence" of Jewish "involvement" in organ trafficking. The Anti-Defamation League responded, labeling West's allegations as an antisemitic "Big Lie", while an author for the Jewish Ledger referred to the rumors as a renewed blood libel.

9/11 conspiracy theories

Some conspiracy theories hold that Jews or Israel played a key role in carrying out the September 11 attacks. As per a paper published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have not been accepted in mainstream circles in the U.S.", but "this is not the case in the Arab and Muslim world". A claim that 4,000 Jewish employees skipped work at the WTC on 11 September has been widely reported and widely debunked. The number of Jews who died in the attacks – typically estimated at 400 – tracks closely with the proportion of Jews living in the New York area. Five Israelis died in the attack.

In 2003, the ADL published a report which attacked "hateful conspiracy theories" that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Israelis and Jews, saying that they had the potential to "rationalize and fuel global anti-Semitism". The ADL's report found that "The Big Lie has united the American far-right, white supremacists and the Arab and Muslim world". It also found that many of those were modern manifestations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The ADL has characterized the Jeff Rense website as carrying antisemitic materials, such as "American Jews staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their own financial gain and to induce the American people to endorse wars of aggression and genocide on the nations of the Middle East and the theft of their resources for the benefit of Israel". Accusations of Jews masterminding the 9/11 attacks have also been made by the black supremacist New Black Panther Party (NBPP), which have gained traction among anti-Zionist Black Americans.

Contradictory accusations

Various researchers noted the irrational contradictions in antisemitic tropes. Leon Pinsker noted as early as in 1882:

Friend and foe alike have tried to explain or to justify this hatred of the Jews by bringing all sorts of charges against them. They are alleged to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited the peasant, and so on. These and a thousand and one other charges against an entire people have been proved groundless. They showed their own weakness in that they had to be trumped up wholesale in order to quiet the evil conscience of the Jew-baiters, to justify the condemnation of an entire nation, to demonstrate the necessity of burning the Jew, or rather the Jewish ghost, at the stake. He who tries to prove too much proves nothing at all. Though the Jews may justly be charged with many shortcomings, those shortcomings are, at all events, not such great vices, not such capital crimes, as to justify the condemnation of the entire people.

In her 2003 book The Holocaust and Antisemitism: A Short History, Jocelyn Hellig wrote:

Michael Curtis has pointed out the many directly contradictory accusations, claiming that Jews are simultaneously:
alienated from society but also cosmopolitans
isolationed but also intermingled among other peoples
individualist but also communal
capitalist exploiters and international financiers but also revolutionary Marxists
materialistic but also people of the Book
militant aggressors but also cowardly pacifists
arrogant but also timid
superstitious but also promoters of secularism
upholders of rigid law but also morally decadent
a chosen people but also an inferior race
crucifiers of Christ but also inventors of Christianity

Curtis stated:

no single group of people could feasibly have such a total monopoly on evil.

Gustavo Perednik wrote in Judeophobia:

The Jews were accused by the nationalists of being the creators of Communism; by the Communists of ruling Capitalism. If they live in non-Jewish countries, they are accused of double-loyalties; if they live in the Jewish country, of being racists. When they spend their money, they are reproached for being ostentatious; when they don't spend their money, of being avaricious. They are called rootless cosmopolitans or hardened chauvinists. If they assimilate, they are accused of being fifth-columnists, if they don't, of shutting themselves away.

Comments about tropes

As per defense attorney Kenneth Stern, "Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel anti-Semitism. The myths that all Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, or poisoned wells, or killed Christian children to bake matzos, or 'made up' the Holocaust, or plot to control the world, do not succeed each other; rather, the list of anti-Semitic canards gets longer." Hannah Arendt, in analyzing antisemitism in the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, shared a joke:

An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asked the one; the other replied: Why the Jews?

Historicity of the Bible

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. Questions on biblical historicity are typically separated into evaluations of whether the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible accurately record the history of ancient Israel and Judah and the second Temple period, and whether the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.

When studying the books of the Bible, scholars examine the historical context of passages, the importance ascribed to events by the authors, and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and other historical evidence. Being a collaborative work composed and redacted over the course of several centuries, the historicity of the Bible is not consistent throughout the entirety of its contents.

According to theologian Thomas L. Thompson, a representative of the Copenhagen School, also known as "biblical minimalism", the archaeological record lends sparse and indirect evidence for the Old Testament's narratives as history.Others, like archaeologist William G. Dever, felt that biblical archaeology has both confirmed and challenged the Old Testament stories. While Dever has criticized the Copenhagen School for its more radical approach, he is far from being a biblical literalist, and thinks that the purpose of biblical archaeology is not to simply support or discredit the biblical narrative, but to be a field of study in its own right.

Some scholars argue that the Bible is national history, with an "imaginative entertainment factor that proceeds from artistic expression" or a "midrash" on history.

Materials and methods

Manuscripts and canons

The Bible exists in multiple manuscripts, none of them an autograph, and multiple biblical canons, which do not completely agree on which books have sufficient authority to be included or their order. The early discussions about the exclusion or integration of various apocrypha involve an early idea about the historicity of the core. The Ionian Enlightenment influenced early patrons like Justin Martyr and Tertullian—both saw the biblical texts as being different from (and having more historicity than) the myths of other religions. Augustine was aware of the difference between science and scripture and defended the historicity of the biblical texts, e.g., against claims of Faustus of Mileve.

Historians hold that the Bible should not be treated differently from other historical (or literary) sources from the ancient world. One may compare doubts about the historicity of, for example, Herodotus; the consequence of these discussions is not that historians shall have to stop using ancient sources for historical reconstruction, but need to be aware of the problems involved when doing so.

Very few texts survive directly from antiquity: most have been copied—some, many times. To determine the accuracy of a copied manuscript, textual critics examine the way the transcripts have passed through history to their extant forms. The higher the consistency of the earliest texts, the greater their textual reliability, and the less chance that the content has been changed over the years. Multiple copies may also be grouped into text types, with some types judged closer to the hypothetical original than others.

Writing and reading history

The meaning of the term "history" is itself dependent on social and historical context. Paula McNutt, for instance, notes that the Old Testament narratives,

Do not record "history" in the sense that history is understood in the twentieth century. ...The past, for biblical writers as well as for twentieth-century readers of the Bible, has meaning only when it is considered in light of the present, and perhaps an idealized future.
— Paula M. McNutt, Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel, page 4

Even from the earliest times, students of religious texts had an awareness that parts of the scriptures could not be interpreted as a strictly consistent sequence of events. The Talmud cites a dictum ascribed to the third-century teacher Abba Arika that "there is no chronological order in the Torah". Examples were often presented and discussed in later Jewish exegesis with, according to Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), an ongoing discourse between those who would follow the views of Rabbi Ishmael (born 90 CE) that "the Torah speaks in human language", compared to the more mystical approach of Rabbi Akiva (c. 50–135) that any such deviations should signpost some deeper order or purpose, to be divined.

During the modern era, the focus of biblical history has also diversified. The project of biblical archaeology associated with W.F. Albright (1891–1971), which sought to validate the historicity of the events narrated in the Bible through the ancient texts and material remains of the Near East, has a more specific focus compared to the more expansive view of history described by archaeologist William Dever (b. 1933). In discussing the role of his discipline in interpreting the biblical record, Dever has pointed to multiple histories within the Bible, including the history of theology (the relationship between God and believers), political history (usually the account of "Great Men"), narrative history (the chronology of events), intellectual history (treating ideas and their development, context and evolution), socio-cultural history (institutions, including their social underpinnings in family, clan, tribe and social class and the state), cultural history (overall cultural evolution, demography, socio-economic and political structure and ethnicity), technological history (the techniques by which humans adapt to, exploit and make use of the resources of their environment), natural history (how humans discover and adapt to the ecological facts of their natural environment), and material history (artifacts as correlates of changes in human behaviour).

Sharply differing perspectives on the relationship between narrative history and theological meaning present a special challenge for assessing the historicity of the Bible. Supporters of biblical literalism "deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood." "History", or specifically biblical history, in this context appears to mean a definitive and finalized framework of events and actions—comfortingly familiar shared facts—like an omniscient medieval chronicle, shorn of alternative accounts, psychological interpretations, or literary pretensions. But prominent scholars have expressed diametrically opposing views:

[T]he stories about the promise given to the patriarchs in Genesis are not historical, nor do they intend to be historical; they are rather historically determined expressions about Israel and Israel's relationship to its God, given in forms legitimate to their time, and their truth lies not in their facticity, nor in the historicity, but their ability to express the reality that Israel experienced.

Modern professional historians, familiar with the phenomenon of on-going historical revisionism, allow new findings and ideas into their interpretations of "what happened", and scholars versed in the study of texts (however sacred) see all narrators as potentially unreliable and all accounts—especially edited accounts—as potentially historically incomplete, biased by times and circumstances.

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Authorship

A central pillar of the Bible's historical authority was the tradition that it had been composed by the principal actors or eyewitnesses to the events described—the Pentateuch was the work of Moses, the Book of Joshua was by Joshua, and so on. As early as the Middle Ages, scholars such as Abraham ibn Ezra noted internal contradictions that suggested the Pentateuch was not authored by Moses. For example, Moses could not have written an account of his own death in Deuteronomy 34.

These ideas became more common during the Protestant Reformation. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his major work Leviathan (1651) argued that the biblical texts themselves provide significant evidence for when they were written. Readers, he notes, should be guided by what the text itself says rather than relying on later tradition: "The light therefore that must guide us in this question, must be that which is held out unto us from the books themselves: and this light, though it shew us not the author of every book, yet it is not unuseful to give us knowledge of the time wherein they were written." Using such textual clues, Hobbes found it was impossible for Moses to have authored the Pentateuch. He also believed Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were written long after the events they describe.

The Jewish philosopher and pantheist Baruch Spinoza echoed Hobbes's doubts about the provenance of the historical books in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (published in 1670), and elaborated on the suggestion that the final redaction of these texts was post-exilic under the auspices of Ezra (Chapter IX). He had earlier been effectively excommunicated by the rabbinical council of Amsterdam for his perceived heresies. The French priest Richard Simon brought these critical perspectives to the Catholic tradition in 1678, observing "the most part of the Holy Scriptures that are come to us, are but Abridgments and as Summaries of ancient Acts which were kept in the Registries of the Hebrews," in what was probably the first work of biblical textual criticism in the modern sense.

In response Jean Astruc, applying to the Pentateuch source criticism methods common in the analysis of classical secular texts, believed he could detect four different manuscript traditions, which he claimed Moses himself had redacted (p. 62–64). His 1753 book initiated the school known as higher criticism that culminated in Julius Wellhausen formalising the documentary hypothesis in the 1870s, which identifies these narratives as the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source. While versions of the documentary hypothesis vary in the order in which they were composed, the circumstances of their composition, and the date of their redaction(s), their shared terminology continues to provide the framework for modern theories on the composite nature and origins of the Torah.

By the end of the 19th century, the scholarly consensus was that the Pentateuch was the work of many authors writing from 1000 BCE (the time of David) to 500 BCE (the time of Ezra) and redacted c. 450, and as a consequence whatever history it contained was more often polemical than strictly factual—a conclusion reinforced by the then-fresh scientific refutations of what were at the time widely classed as biblical mythologies.

Torah (Pentateuch)

Genesis creation narrative

There is a Christian tradition of criticism of the creation narratives in Genesis dating back to at least St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and Jewish tradition has also maintained a critical thread in its approach to biblical primeval history. The influential medieval philosopher Maimonides maintained a skeptical ambiguity toward creation ex nihilo and considered the stories about Adam more as "philosophical anthropology, rather than as historical stories whose protagonist is the 'first man'." Greek philosophers Aristotle, Critolaus and Proclus held that the world was eternal. Such interpretations are inconsistent with what was after the Protestant Reformation to be "commonly perceived in evangelicalism as traditional views of Genesis".

The publication of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1788 was an important development in the scientific revolution that would dethrone Genesis as the ultimate authority on primeval earth and prehistory. The first casualty was the Creation story itself, and by the early 19th century "no responsible scientist contended for the literal credibility of the Mosaic account of creation." The battle between uniformitarianism and catastrophism kept the flood alive in the emerging discipline, until Adam Sedgwick, the president of the Geological Society, publicly recanted his previous support in his 1831 presidential address:

We ought indeed to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic Flood. For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a single trace among the remnants of the former world entombed in those deposits.

All of which left the "first man" and his putative descendants in the awkward position of being stripped of all historical context, until Charles Darwin naturalized the Garden of Eden with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Public acceptance of this scientific revolution was, at the time, uneven, but has since grown significantly. The mainstream scholarly community soon arrived at a consensus, which holds today, that Genesis 1–11 is a highly schematic literary work representing theology/symbolic mythology rather than actual history or science.

The Patriarchs

In the following decades Hermann Gunkel drew attention to the mythic aspects of the Pentateuch, and Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth and the tradition history school argued that although its core traditions had genuinely ancient roots, the narratives were fictional framing devices and were not intended as history in the modern sense. Though doubts have been cast on the historiographic reconstructions of this school (particularly the notion of oral traditions as a primary ancient source), much of its critique of biblical historicity found wide acceptance. Gunkel's position is that

if, however, we consider figures like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be actual persons with no original mythic foundations, that does not at all mean that they are historical figures. ...For even if, as may well be assumed, there was once a man call "Abraham," everyone who knows the history of legends is sure that the legend is in no position at the distance of so many centuries to preserve a picture of the personal piety of Abraham. The "religion of Abraham" is, in reality, the religion of the legend narrators which they attribute to Abraham.
— Gunkel, 1997, page xviii

This has in various forms become a commonplace of contemporary criticism.

In the United States the biblical archaeology movement, under the influence of Albright, counterattacked, arguing that the broad outline within the framing narratives was also true, so that while scholars could not realistically expect to prove or disprove individual episodes from the life of Abraham and the other patriarchs, these were real individuals who could be placed in a context proven from the archaeological record. But as more discoveries were made, and anticipated finds failed to materialise, it became apparent that archaeology did not in fact support the claims made by Albright and his followers.

Following Albright's death, his interpretation of the patriarchal age came under increasing criticism: such dissatisfaction marked its culmination with the publication of The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives by Thomas L. Thompson and Abraham in History and Tradition by John Van Seters. Thompson, a literary scholar, argued on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns, while Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations. Van Seter and Thompson's works were a paradigm shift in biblical scholarship and archaeology, which gradually led scholars to no longer consider the patriarchal narratives as historical. Some conservative scholars attempted to defend the patriarchal narratives in the following years, but this position has not found acceptance among scholars.

Nevertheless, some biblical scholars argue that the names of Patriarchs correspond to Amorite personal names typical of the Middle Bronze Age (2000 BCE – 1550 BCE) rather than to other names from later periods, which suggests that the Patriarchal narratives were based on traditions originating in the second millennium BCE. Other scholars argue that the narratives fit better the historical reality of the late Judahite monarchy. The narratives refer to camel-based traders carrying gum, balm, and myrrh, which they hold it is unlikely prior to the first millennium, as such activity only became common in the 8th–7th centuries BCE when Assyrian hegemony enabled this Arabian trade to flourish into a major industry. In 2013, excavations in the Timna Valley discovered what may be the earliest bones of domesticated camels found in Israel or even outside the Arabian peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE. This is seen as evidence that the stories of Abraham, Joseph, Jacob and Esau were written after this time. In 2021, Martin Heide and Joris Peters argued that camels were already domesticated in the early second millennium BCE and that their presence in the Patriarchal narratives was not anachronistic.

Today, although there continues to be some debate on the historical background of the narratives, many scholars (possibly most) reject the existence of the Patriarchal age. William Dever stated in 1993 that

[Albright's] central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum. ...The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer "secular" archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not "Biblical archaeology".
— William Dever, The Biblical Archaeologist, "What Remains of the House that Albright Built?", March 1993, pp. 25–35

The Exodus

Most mainstream scholars do not accept the biblical Exodus account as history for a number of reasons. It is generally agreed that the Exodus stories reached the current form centuries after the apparent setting of the stories. The Book of Exodus itself attempts to ground the event firmly in history, dating the exodus to the 2666th year after creation (Exodus 12:40–41), the construction of the tabernacle to year 2667 (Exodus 40:1–2, 17), stating that the Israelites dwelled in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:40–41), and including place names such as Goshen (Gen. 46:28), Pithom and Ramesses (Exod. 1:11), as well as stating that 600,000 Israelite men were involved (Exodus 12:37). The Book of Numbers further states that the number of Israelites in the desert during the wandering were 603,550, including 22,273 first-borns, which modern estimates put at 2.5–3 million total Israelites, a clearly fanciful number that could never have been supported by the Sinai Desert. The geography is vague with regions such as Goshen unidentified, and there are internal problems with dating in the Pentateuch. No modern attempt to identify a historical Egyptian prototype for Moses has found wide acceptance, and no period in Egyptian history matches the biblical accounts of the Exodus. Some elements of the story are miraculous and defy rational explanation, such as the Plagues of Egypt and the Crossing of the Red Sea. The Bible also fails to mention the names of any of the pharaohs involved in the Exodus narrative.

While ancient Egyptian texts from the New Kingdom mention "Asiatics" living in Egypt as slaves and workers, these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites, and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large-scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible. The earliest surviving historical mention of the Israelites, the Egyptian Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BCE), appears to place them in or around Canaan and gives no indication of any exodus.

Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence, a majority of scholars agree that the Exodus probably has some historical basis,with Kenton Sparks referring to it as "mythologized history." Scholars posit that small groups of people of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites, and then contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel. William G. Dever cautiously identifies this group with the Tribe of Joseph, while Richard Elliott Friedman identifies it with the Tribe of Levi. Most scholars who accept a historical core of the exodus date this possible exodus group to the thirteenth century BCE at the time of Ramses II, with some instead dating it to the twelfth century BCE at the time of Ramses III. Evidence in favor of historical traditions forming a background to the Exodus narrative include the documented movements of small groups of Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples into and out of Egypt during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, some elements of Egyptian folklore and culture in the Exodus narrative, and the names Moses, Aaron and Phinehas, which seem to have an Egyptian origin.

Scholarly estimates for how many people could have been involved in such an exodus range from a few hundred to a few thousand people.

Donald Redford held that the Exodus narrative is a Canaanite memory of the Hyksos' descent and occupation of Egypt.

Deuteronomistic history

Many scholars believe that the Deuteronomistic history preserved elements of ancient texts and oral tradition, including geo-political and socio-economic realities and certain information about historical figures and events. However, large portions of it are legendary and it contains many anachronisms.

The "conquest narrative" in Joshua and Judges

A major issue in the historicity debate was the narrative of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, described in Joshua and Judges. The American Albright school asserted that the biblical narrative of conquest would be affirmed by archaeological record; and indeed for much of the 20th century archaeology appeared to support the biblical narrative, including excavations at Beitin (identified as Bethel), Tel ed-Duweir, (identified as Lachish), Hazor, and Jericho.

However, flaws in the conquest narrative appeared. The most high-profile example was the "fall of Jericho", excavated by John Garstang in the 1930s. Garstang originally announced that he had found fallen walls dating to the time of the biblical Battle of Jericho, but later revised the destruction to a much earlier period. Kathleen Kenyon dated the destruction of the walled city to the middle of the 16th century (c. 1550 BCE), too early to match the usual dating of the Exodus to Pharaoh Ramses, on the basis of her excavations in the early 1950s. The same conclusion, based on an analysis of all the excavation findings, was reached by Piotr Bienkowski. By the 1960s it had become clear that the archaeological record did not, in fact, support the account of the conquest given in Joshua: the cities which the Bible records as having been destroyed by the Israelites were either uninhabited at the time, or, if destroyed, were destroyed at widely different times, not in one brief period.

The consensus for the conquest narrative was eventually abandoned in the late 20th century.

Peake's Commentary on the Bible argues that the Book of Joshua conflates several independent battles between disparate groups over the centuries, and artificially attributes them to a single leader, Joshua. However, there are a few cases where the biblical record is not contradicted by the archaeological record. For example, stratum in Tel Hazor, found in a destruction layer from around 1200 BCE, shows signs of catastrophic fire, and cuneiform tablets found at the site refer to monarchs named Ibni Addi, where Ibni may be the etymological origin of Yavin (Jabin), the Canaanite leader referred to in the Hebrew Bible. The city also shows signs of having been a magnificent Canaanite city prior to its destruction, with great temples and opulent palaces, split into an upper acropolis and lower city; the town evidently had been a major Canaanite city. Israel Finkelstein theorized that the destruction of Hazor was the result of civil strife, attacks by the Sea Peoples or a result of the general collapse of civilization across the whole eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, rather than being caused by the Israelites.

Amnon Ben-Tor (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) believes that recently unearthed evidence of violent destruction by burning verifies the biblical account. In 2012, a team led by Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman discovered a scorched palace from the 13th century BC in whose storerooms they found 3,400-year-old ewers holding burned crops; however, Sharon Zuckerman did not agree with Ben-Tor's theory, and claimed that the burning was the result of the city's numerous factions opposing each other with excessive force. Biblical scholar Richard Elliot Friedman (University of Georgia) argues that the Israelites did destroy Hazor, but that such destruction fits better with the account of the Book of Judges, in which the prophetess Deborah defeats the king of Hazor.

Books of Samuel

The Books of Samuel are considered to be based on both historical and legendary sources, primarily serving to fill the gap in Israelite history after the events described in Deuteronomy. According to Donald Redford, the Books of Samuel exhibit too many anachronisms to have been compiled in the 11th century BCE. For example, there is mention of later armor (1 Samuel 17:4–7, 38–39; 25:13), use of camels (1 Samuel 30:17), and cavalry (as distinct from chariotry; 1 Samuel 13:5, 2 Samuel 1:6), iron picks and axes (as though they were common; 2 Samuel 12:31), and sophisticated siege techniques (2 Samuel 20:15). There is a gargantuan troop called up (2 Samuel 17:1), a battle with 20,000 casualties (2 Samuel 18:7), and a reference to Kushite paramilitary and servants, clearly giving evidence of a date in which Kushites were common, after the 26th Dynasty of Egypt, the period of the last quarter of the 8th century BCE. Alan Millard argues that those elements of the Biblical narrative are not anachronistic.

United Monarchy

Much of the focus of modern criticism has been the historicity of the United Monarchy of Israel, which according to the Hebrew Bible ruled over both Judea and Samaria around the 10th century BCE.

The minimalist Thomas L. Thompson has written:

There is no evidence of a United Monarchy, no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem or of any coherent, unified political force that dominated western Palestine, let alone an empire of the size the legends describe. We do not have evidence for the existence of kings named Saul, David or Solomon; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period. What we do know of Israel and Judah of the tenth century does not allow us to interpret this lack of evidence as a gap in our knowledge and information about the past, a result merely of the accidental nature of archeology. There is neither room nor context, no artifact or archive that points to such historical realities in Palestine's tenth century. One cannot speak historically of a state without a population. Nor can one speak of a capital without a town. Stories are not enough.

In Iron Age IIa (corresponding to the Monarchal period) Judah seems to have been limited to small, mostly rural and unfortified settlements in the Judean hills. This contrasts to the upper Samaria which was becoming urbanized. This archaeological evidence as well as textual criticism has led many modern historians to treat Israel as arising separately from Judah and as distinct albeit related entities centered at Shechem and Jerusalem, respectively, and not as a united kingdom with a capital in Jerusalem.

Excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, an Iron Age site located in Judah, support the biblical account of a United Monarchy. The Israel Antiquities Authority stated: "The excavations at Khirbat Qeiyafa clearly reveal an urban society that existed in Judah already in the late eleventh century BCE. It can no longer be argued that the Kingdom of Judah developed only in the late eighth century BCE or at some other later date."

The status of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE is a major subject of debate. The oldest part of Jerusalem and its original urban core is the City of David, which does show evidence of significant Judean residential activity around the 10th century. Some unique administrative structures such as the Stepped Stone Structure and the Large Stone Structure, which originally formed one structure, contain material culture dated to Iron I. On account of the alleged lack of settlement activity in the 10th century BCE, Israel Finkelstein argues that Jerusalem in the century was a small country village in the Judean hills, not a national capital, and Ussishkin argues that the city was entirely uninhabited. Amihai Mazar contends that if the Iron I/Iron IIa dating of administrative structures in the City of David are correct (as he believes), "Jerusalem was a rather small town with a mighty citadel, which could have been a center of a substantial regional polity."

It has been argued that recent archaeological discoveries at the City of David and the Ophel seem to indicate that Jerusalem was sufficiently developed as a city to be the capital of the United Monarchy in the 10th century BCE.

Since the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele dated to the 9th or 8th century BCE containing bytdwd, interpreted by many as a reference to the "House of David" as a monarchic dynasty in Judahanother possible reference occurs in the Mesha Stele), the majority of scholars accept the existence of a polity ruled by David and Solomon, albeit on a more modest scale than described in the Bible. Most scholars believe that David and Solomon reigned over large sections of Cisjordan and probably parts of Transjordan. William G. Dever argues that David only reigned over the current territories of Israel and West Bank and that he did defeat the invading Philistines, but that the other conquests are fictitious.

New Testament

Historicity of Jesus

The majority of modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically, and that he was crucified by order of Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. The "quest for the historical Jesus" began as early as the 18th century, and has continued to this day. The most notable recent scholarship came in the 1980s and 1990s, with the work of J. D. Crossan, James D. G. Dunn, John P. Meier, E. P. Sanders and N. T. Wright being the most widely read and discussed. Other works on the matter were published by Dale Allison, Bart D. Ehrman, Richard Bauckham and Maurice Casey.

The earliest New Testament texts which refer to Jesus, the Pauline epistles, are usually dated in the 50s CE. Since Paul records very little of Jesus' life and activities, these are of little help in determining facts about the life of Jesus, although they may contain references to information given to Paul from the eyewitnesses of Jesus.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has shed light into the context of 1st century Judea, noting the diversity of Jewish belief as well as shared expectations and teachings. For example, the expectation of the coming messiah, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and much else of the early Christian movement are found to have existed within apocalyptic Judaism of the period. This has had the effect of centering Early Christianity much more within its Jewish roots than was previously the case. It is now recognised that Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity are only two of the many strands which survived until the Jewish revolt of 66 to 70 CE.

Most historical critics agree that a historical figure named Jesus taught in the Galilean countryside c. 30 CE, was believed by his followers to have performed supernatural acts, and was sentenced to death by the Romans, possibly for insurrection.

Miracles of Jesus

Scholars are divided on the matter of miracles with no consensus on their historicity; some ruling them out a priori, others defending the possibility of miracles, and others defending them outright. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman argues that though some historians believe that miracles have happened and others do not, due to the limitations of the sources, it is not possible for historians to affirm or deny them. He states "This is not a problem for only one kind of historian—for atheists or agnostics or Buddhists or Roman Catholics or Baptists or Jews or Muslims; it is a problem for all historians of every stripe. According to Mike Licona, among general historians there are some postmodern views of historiography that are open to the investigation of miracles.

Burial

In the gospel accounts, the resurrection tradition appears in Mark 16, Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20 to 21 where the risen Jesus appears to different people after his tomb was found empty by women. A topic of debate among scholars is whether Jesus was ever buried in a tomb, and if such a tomb was indeed found empty. An argument in favor of a decent burial before sunset is the Jewish custom, based on the Torah, that the body of an executed person should not remain on the tree where the corpse was hung for public display, but be buried before sunrise. This is based on Deuteronomy 21:22–23, but also attested in the Temple Scroll of the Essenes, and in Josephus' Jewish War 4.5.2§317, describing the burial of crucified Jewish insurgents before sunset.

Scholars such as Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan doubt that Jesus had a decent burial, or that the disciples even knew what had happened to his body. Ehrman argues that crucifixion was meant "to torture and humiliate a person as fully as possible", and the body was normally left on the stake to be eaten by animals. Ehrman further argues that criminals were usually buried in common graves, and Pilate had no concern for Jewish sensitivities, which makes it unlikely that he would have allowed for Jesus to be buried.

In contrast, James Dunn argues that the burial tradition is "one of the oldest pieces of tradition we have", referring to 1 Cor. 15.4; burial was in line with Jewish custom as prescribed by Deut. 21.22-23 and confirmed by Josephus War; cases of burial of crucified persons are known, as attested by the Jehohanan burial; Joseph of Arimathea "is a very plausible historical character"; and "the presence of the women at the cross and their involvement in Jesus' burial can be attributed more plausibly to early oral memory than to creative story-telling". Similarly, Dale Allison, reviewing the arguments of Crossan and Ehrman, considers their assertions strong but "find[s] it likely that a man named Joseph, probably a Sanhedrist, from the obscure Arimathea, sought and obtained permission from the Roman authorities to make arrangements for Jesus’ hurried burial."

According to religion professor John Granger Cook, there are historical texts that mention mass graves, but they contain no indication of those bodies being dug up by animals. There is no mention of an open pit or shallow graves in any Roman text. There are a number of historical texts outside the gospels showing the bodies of the crucified dead were buried by family or friends. Cook writes that "those texts show that the narrative of Joseph of Arimethaea's burial of Jesus would be perfectly comprehensible to a Greco-Roman reader of the gospels and historically credible."

Empty tomb and resurrection appearances

Scholars have tackled the question of establishing what contents of the resurrection tradition are historically probable. For example, it is widely accepted among New Testament scholars that Jesus' followers soon came to believe they had seen him resurrected shortly after his death. Robert Funk writes that "the disciples thought that they had witnessed Jesus’ appearances, which, however they are explained, “is a fact upon which both believer and unbeliever may agree."

Most scholars believe that John wrote independently of Mark and that the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John contain two independent attestations of an empty tomb, which in turn suggests that both used already-existing sources and appealed to a commonly held tradition, though Mark may have added to and adapted that tradition to fit his narrative. Other scholars have argued that the Apostle Paul is aware of an empty tomb in his earlier creed in 1 Cor. 15 and thereby corroborating the gospel accounts.

Scholars have identified legendary or unoriginal details within the resurrection tradition. For example, the story of the guards at the tomb in Matthew 27 is "widely regarded as an apologetic legend" meant to refute Jewish critics. Quoting a published dissertation on the empty tomb tradition in Mark, Mike Licona writes that “not a few, but rather a majority, of contemporary scholars believe that there is some historical kernel in the empty tomb tradition."

According to Geza Vermes, "had the accounts been the products of wholesale manufacturing, it is highly unlikely that they would have provided female witnesses who “had no standing in a male-dominated Jewish society.” Moreover, they would have gotten the number of women in the various narratives correct. In short, had the narratives been the result of complete invention, they would have been more uniform and they would have included credible witnesses. In contrast, Bart D. Ehrman rejects the story of the empty tomb, and argues that "an empty tomb had nothing to do with [belief in the resurrection] [...] an empty tomb would not produce faith". Ehrman argues that the empty tomb was needed to underscore the physical resurrection of Jesus.

As with miracles, there is no single approach by scholars to the question of the resurrection of Jesus and if it really happened or not. "Historical Jesus" scholars in general tend to avoid the topic since many believe the matter to be about faith, or lack thereof. Nevertheless, scholars have sought to make their own cases for and against the historicity of the resurrection. Skeptical scholars generally argue that the resurrection appearances were caused by hallucinations. For example, Gerd Lüdemann argues that Peter had a vision of Jesus, induced by his feelings of guilt for betraying Jesus. The vision elevated this feeling of guilt, and Peter experienced it as a real appearance of Jesus, raised from dead.However, scholars such as N.T. Wright and Dale Allison, among others, argue that hallucinations would not lead or correspond to a belief in resurrection. In contrast to the skeptical view, Christian biblical scholars typically argue for a historical, physical resurrection of Jesus based on biblical evidence. For example, scholars such as Mike Licona argue that the diversity of different witnesses, such as skeptics Paul and James, are of important value to historians and, writing further, that attempts to downplay such value don't work. According to Wright, there is substantial unanimity among the early Christian writers (first and second century) that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead.

Historicity of the Gospels

Most modern scholars hold that the canonical gospel accounts were written between 70 and 100, four to eight decades after the crucifixion, although based on earlier traditions and texts, such as "Q", Logia or sayings gospels, the passion account or other earlier literature (See List of Gospels). Some scholars argue that these accounts were compiled by witnesses although this view is disputed by other scholars.

Some scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark shows signs of a lack of knowledge of geographical, political and religious matters in Judea in the time of Jesus. Thus, today the most common opinion is that the author is unknown and both geographically and historically at a distance from the narrated events; however, opinion varies, and scholars such as Craig Blomberg accept the more traditional view. J. A. Lloyd argues that recent archaeological research in the Galilee region shows that Jesus' itinerary as depicted by Mark is historically and geographically plausible. The use of expressions that may be described as awkward and rustic cause the Gospel of Mark to appear somewhat unlettered or even crude. This may be attributed to the influence that Saint Peter, a fisherman, is suggested to have on the writing of Mark. It is commonly thought that the writers of the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke used Mark as a source, with changes and improvement to peculiarities and crudities in Mark.

Historicity of Acts

Archaeological inscriptions and other independent sources show that Acts contains some accurate details of 1st century society with regard to titles of officials, administrative divisions, town assemblies, and rules of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. However, the historicity of the depiction of Paul the Apostle in Acts is contested. Acts describes Paul differently from how Paul describes himself, both factually and theologically. Acts differs from Paul's letters on important issues, such as the Law, Paul's own apostleship, and his relation to the Jerusalem church. Scholars generally prefer Paul's account over that in Acts.

Schools of archaeological and historical thought

Overview of academic views

According to Spencer Mizen of BBC History Magazine, "The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery. When was it written? Who wrote it? And how reliable is it as an historical record?"

An educated reading of the biblical text requires knowledge of when it was written, by whom, and for what purpose. For example, many academics would agree that the Pentateuch was in existence some time shortly after the 6th century BCE, but they disagree about when it was written. Proposed dates vary from the 15th century BCE to the 6th century BCE. One popular hypothesis points to the reign of Josiah (7th century BCE). In this hypothesis, the events of, for example, Exodus would have happened centuries before they were finally edited.

The documentary hypothesis claims, using the biblical evidence itself, to demonstrate that the current version of the Bible is based on older written sources that are lost. It has been modified heavily over the years, and some scholars accept some form of this hypothesis. There have also been and are a number of scholars who reject it, for example Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen and Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser, Jr., as well as R. N. Whybray, Umberto Cassuto, O. T. Allis, Gleason Archer, John Sailhamer, Bruce Waltke, and Joshua Berman.

Maximalist–minimalist dichotomy

There is great scholarly controversy on the historicity of events recounted in the biblical narratives prior to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. There is a split between scholars who reject the biblical account of Ancient Israel as fundamentally ahistorical, and those who accept it as a largely reliable source of history—termed biblical minimalists and biblical maximalists, respectively. The major split of biblical scholarship into two opposing schools is strongly disapproved by non-fundamentalist biblical scholars, as being an attempt by conservative Christians to portray the field as a bipolar argument, of which only one side is correct. The Quest for the Historical Israel by Israel Finkelstein et al attempted to be more balanced.

Biblical minimalism

The viewpoint sometimes called biblical minimalism generally holds that the Bible is principally a theological and apologetic work. The early stories are held to have a historical basis that was reconstructed centuries later, which are supported by archaeological discoveries. In this view, the stories about the biblical patriarchs are believed to be fictional. Furthermore, biblical minimalists hold that the twelve tribes of Israel were a later construction, the stories of King David and King Saul were modeled upon later Irano-Hellenistic examples, believing that the united Kingdom of Israel—where the Bible says that David and Solomon ruled over an empire from the Euphrates to Eilath— never existed.

It is hard to pinpoint when the movement started but 1968 seems to be a reasonable date. During this year, two prize-winning essays were written in Copenhagen; one by Niels Peter Lemche, the other by Heike Friis, which advocated a complete rethinking of the way we approach the Bible and attempt to draw historical conclusions from it.

In published books, one of the early advocates of the current school of thought known as biblical minimalism is Giovanni Garbini, Storia e ideologia nell'Israele antico (1986), translated into English as History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (1988). In his footsteps followed Thomas L. Thompson with his lengthy Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written & Archaeological Sources (1992) and, building explicitly on Thompson's book, P. R. Davies' shorter work, In Search of 'Ancient Israel' (1992). In the latter, Davies finds historical Israel only in archaeological remains, biblical Israel only in scripture, and recent reconstructions of "ancient Israel" to be an unacceptable amalgam of the two. Thompson and Davies see the entire Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as the imaginative creation of a small community of Jews at Jerusalem during the period which the Bible assigns to after the return from the Babylonian exile, from 539 BCE onward. Niels Peter Lemche, Thompson's fellow faculty member at the University of Copenhagen, also followed with several titles that show Thompson's influence, including The Israelites in history and tradition (1998). The presence of both Thompson and Lemche at the same institution has led to the use of the term "Copenhagen school". The effect of biblical minimalism from 1992 onward was debate with more than two points of view.

Biblical maximalism

There is great scholarly controversy on the historicity particularly of those events recounted in the biblical narratives prior to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. Regarding the debate over the historicity of ancient Israel, the maximalist position holds that the accounts of the United Monarchy and the early kings of Israel, David and Saul, are to be taken as largely historical.

Decreasing conflict

In 2001, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman published The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts which advocated a view midway toward biblical minimalism and caused an uproar among many conservatives. In the 25th anniversary issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2001 edition), editor Hershel Shanks quoted several biblical scholars who insisted that minimalism was dying, although leading minimalists deny this and a claim has been made "We are all minimalists now" (an allusion to "We are all Keynesians now").

Apart from the well-funded (and fundamentalist) "biblical archaeologists," we are in fact nearly all "minimalists" now.
— Philip Davies.

The fact is that we are all minimalists—at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. When I began my PhD studies more than three decades ago in the USA, the "substantial historicity" of the patriarchs was widely accepted as was the unified conquest of the land. These days it is quite difficult to find anyone who takes this view. In fact, until recently I could find no 'maximalist' history of Israel since Wellhausen. ...In fact, though, "maximalist" has been widely defined as someone who accepts the biblical text unless it can be proven wrong. If so, very few are willing to operate like this, not even John Bright (1980) whose history is not a maximalist one according to the definition just given.
— Lester L. Grabbe.

However, other more mainstream scholars have rejected these claims:

The skeptical approaches peaked in the 1990s, with the emergence of the minimalist school which attempted to deny the Bible any relevance for the study of the Iron Age, but this extreme approach was rejected by mainstream scholarship.
— Avraham Faust.

In 2003, Kenneth Kitchen, a scholar who adopts a more maximalist point of view, authored the book On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Kitchen advocated the reliability of many (although not all) parts of the Torah and in no uncertain terms criticizes the work of Finkelstein and Silberman.

Jennifer Wallace describes archaeologist Israel Finkelstein's view in her article "Shifting Ground in the Holy Land", appearing in Smithsonian Magazine, May 2006:

He (Israel Finkelstein) cites the fact—now accepted by most archaeologists—that many of the cities Joshua is supposed to have sacked in the late 13th century B.C. had ceased to exist by that time. Hazor was destroyed in the middle of that century, Ai was abandoned before 2000 B.C. Even Jericho (Tell es-Sultan), where Joshua is said to have brought the walls tumbling down by circling the city seven times with blaring trumpets, was destroyed in 1500 B.C. Now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the Jericho site consists of crumbling pits and trenches that testify to a century of fruitless digging.
— Wallace

However, despite problems with the archaeological record, some maximalists place Joshua in the mid-second millennium, at about the time the Egyptian Empire came to rule over Canaan, and not the 13th century as Finkelstein or Kitchen claim, and view the destruction layers of the period as corroboration of the biblical account. The destruction of Hazor in the mid-13th century is seen as corroboration of the biblical account of the later destruction carried out by Deborah and Barak as recorded in the Book of Judges. The location that Finkelstein refers to as "Ai" is generally dismissed as the location of the biblical Ai, since it was destroyed and buried in the 3rd millennium. The prominent site has been known by that name since at least Hellenistic times, if not before. Minimalists all hold that dating these events as contemporary are etiological explanations written centuries after the events they claim to report.

Both Finkelstein and Silberman do accept that David and Solomon were really existing persons (not kings but bandit leaders or hill country chieftains) from Judah about the 10th century BCE, but they do not assume that there was such a thing as United Monarchy with a capital in Jerusalem.

The Bible reports that Jehoshaphat, a contemporary of Ahab, offered manpower and horses for the northern kingdom's wars against the Arameans. He strengthened his relationship with the northern kingdom by arranging a diplomatic marriage: the Israelite princess Athaliah, sister or daughter of King Ahab, married Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat (2 Kings 8:18). The house of David in Jerusalem was now directly linked to (and apparently dominated by) the Israelite royalty of Samaria. In fact, we might suggest that this represented the north's takeover by marriage of Judah. Thus in the ninth century BCE—nearly a century after the presumed time of David—we can finally point to the historical existence of a great united monarchy of Israel, stretching from Dan in the north to Beer-sheba in the south, with significant conquered territories in Syria and Transjordan. But this united monarchy—a real united monarchy—was ruled by the Omrides, not the Davidides, and its capital was Samaria, not Jerusalem.
— Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

Others, such as David Ussishkin, argue that those who follow the biblical depiction of a United Monarchy do so on the basis of limited evidence while hoping to uncover real archaeological proof in the future. Gunnar Lehmann suggests that there is still a possibility that David and Solomon were able to become local chieftains of some importance and claims that Jerusalem at the time was at best a small town in a sparsely populated area in which alliances of tribal kinship groups formed the basis of society. He goes on further to claim that it was at best a small regional centre, one of three to four in the territory of Judah and neither David nor Solomon had the manpower or the requisite social/political/administrative structure to rule the kind of empire described in the Bible.

These views are strongly criticized by William G. Dever, Helga Weippert, Amihai Mazar and Amnon Ben-Tor. Dever stated that in the 10th century BCE Judah was an "early inchoate state" "one that will not be fully consolidated until the 9th century BCE", and Israel had a separate development in the 9th century BCE.

André Lemaire states in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple that the principal points of the biblical tradition with Solomon are generally trustworthy. Kenneth Kitchen shares this view, arguing that Solomon ruled over a comparatively wealthy "mini-empire", rather than a small city-state.

Recently, Finkelstein has joined with the more conservative Amihai Mazar to explore the areas of agreement and disagreement and there are signs the intensity of the debate between the so-called minimalist and maximalist scholars is diminishing. This view is also taken by Richard S. Hess, which shows there is in fact a plurality of views between maximalists and minimalists. Jack Cargill has shown that popular textbooks not only fail to give readers up-to-date archaeological evidence, but that they also fail to correctly represent the diversity of views present on the subject. Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle provide an overview of the respective evolving approaches and attendant controversies, especially during the period from the mid-1980s through 2011, in their book Biblical History and Israel's Past.

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