Who is Abraham?

The Bible cites Abraham as the father of the faith who was chosen by God and responded in a faith which Christians, Jews, and Muslims strive to emulate.  But, who is this man?  Is he mere legend, a patchwork of exaggeration and mythological projection across the Jahwehists, Elohimists, Priests, and Deuteronomists?  Or, is there tangible historical evidence in favor of his existence?

On historical method, there is much to be said.  Roland Deines lists three different standards which Christians choose among when doing historical study.(Deines 9–20)  They are:

1. Ontological Naturalistic History – Founded by Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923)
2. Methodological Naturalistic History – Founded by Martin Hengel (1926-2009)
3. Critical Theistic History – Founded by Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI (1927 – present)

The first assumes an atheist/non-supernatural universe, defined by secular naturalism.  It would take every miracle claim as historically false or misinterpreted.  Here, faith and history are divorced. As this method is frequently taught in universities, some Christians might choose this approach. The second uses secular methodology, recognizing the theoretical possibility of miracles, allowing it only in cases where there is no better historical explanation available. As for the third, it is both critical and theistic.  For Ratzinger, history is not divorced from faith, but is the foundation upon which faith rests.  He distinguishes between the merely hypothetical certainty that the secular method can provide and the faith-based certainty that faith in the Bible can provide.  Rather than merely being inductively open to the possibility of the transempirical like Hengel, Ratzinger includes faith-based certainty as a kind of historical knowledge. He starts with the assumption that God exists and is acting in history.

There is the debate over the documentary-hypothesis.  That is, did Moses really write the first five books of the Bible? Or were there four separate sources (JEPD) which were only assembled together around 400 B.C.? John Sailhamer rejects the documentary-hypothesis (Sailhamer 22–25). As well, Bruce Waltke considers that Moses skillfully used multiple sources.(Waltke and Fredricks 24–27).  Walter Kaiser rejects the documentary-hypothesis.(Ankerberg 1). As does the Egyptologist, Kenneth Kitchen who writes:

Where do J, E, D, P now belong, if the old order is only a chimera? Or, in fact, do they belong at all?

Here we will be concise, open, and fairly staccato. First, the basic fact is that there is no objective, independent evidence for any of these four compositions (or for any variant of them) anywhere outside the pages of our existing Hebrew Bible. If the criterion of “no outside evidence” damns the existence of such as Abraham, Moses, or Solomon and company, then it equally damns the existence of these (so far) imaginary works.(Kitchen 492)

Also, there is discussion about biblical-maximalism vs. biblical-minimalism.  The position of maximalism is that the Bible is to be taken as a historical source unless proven otherwise, and furthermore that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In minimalism, all of the stories about the biblical patriarchs are fictional, and the patriarchs mere legendary eponyms to describe later historical realities.(“Historicity of the Bible” 1)

Though external evidence for Abraham has not yet been discovered, there is internal evidence for Abraham.

From the viewpoint of modern historiography, internal evidence within the Pentateuch supports the narrator’s inferred claim to represent what really happened. The religious practices of the patriarchs both remarkably agree and at the same time considerably disagree with the religious practices Moses commands. For example, … contrary to the Mosaic law and without the narrator’s censure, Jacob erects a stone pillar (maṣṣēḇâ, Gen. 28:18–22), Abraham marries his half-sister (Gen. 20:12), and Jacob simultaneously marries sisters (Gen. 29:15–30; cf. Deut. 16:21–22; Lev. 18:9, 18, respectively). Were the stories faked, one would expect the author of the Pentateuch to ground his law in the created order or in ancient traditions and, at the least, not cite data that could possibly undermine his teaching. These religious traditions are ancient, having been neither tampered with nor contrived.(Waltke and Fredricks 29–30)

Combining known external societal practices with the internal Bible data, Kitchen considers Abraham to have lived sometime between 1900 B.C. and 1600 B.C.(Kitchen 359).  Kaiser considers Abraham to be living around 2000 B.C. (Kaiser, Jr 96).   Provan, Long, and Longman aptly write:

“The claim to be a critical thinker is easy to make; the reality that lurks beneath it has all too often proved to be only a mixture of blind faith in relation to the writer’s own intellectual tradition and arbitrary, selective skepticism in relation to everything else.”(Provan, Long, and Longman III 50)

 WORKS CITED

Ankerberg, John. “Exploding the J.E.D.P. Theory - The Documentary Hypothesis.” John Ankerberg Show. N.p., 6 Sept. 2013. Web. 1 Mar. 2017.

Deines, Roland. Acts of God in History - Studies Towards Recovering a Theological Historiography. Ed. Christoph Ochs and Peter Watts. Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Print.

“Historicity of the Bible.” Wikipedia 1 Mar. 2017. Wikipedia. Web. 1 Mar. 2017.

Kaiser, Jr, Walter C. The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant? 2001st ed. Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2001. Print.

Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. annotated edition edition. Grand Rapids, Mich.; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2006. Print.

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. A Biblical History of Israel. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Print.

Sailhamer, John H. The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation. Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2009. Print.

Waltke, Bruce K., and Cathi J. Fredricks. Genesis: A Commentary. 1st edition. Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2001. Print.