I want to interject my own comments into the debate that Jim West and Joe Cathey are carrying on about historical methodology in biblical studies with a couple of points.
(1) Jim repeatedly insists that the Bible is theology and not history. While I understand the point Jim is trying to make and in a sense can agree with him, he presses this idea beyond its limits. His perspective bespeaks a very monolithic and hamfisted take on biblical literature not all that different—flip side of the same coin really—from a Fundamentalist conviction that the Bible is all history. The Bible is a collection of texts written in diverse genres: mythography, etiology and folklore, social and cultic legal material, speeches, historiography, all sorts of poetic genres, allegory, fable and fiction, aphorisms, philosophical discourse, and so on. Certainly, all of these genres are employed by their ancient authors to express truths about their god and that god's relationship to his people and his creation but it is manifestly obvious that the writers had other interests too and that there are different and varied levels of truth claims in the text in accordance with the genres that are employed. To simply classify the Bible as "theology" in the way that Jim seems to do is absurd and, quite frankly, anachronistic. Indeed, I've never read a theology that looked anything like the Hebrew Bible.
(2) To insist, as Jim does, that the Bible must be independently verified by another witness in order to assert any given historical fact is, on the surface, a very prudent and judicious methodology. It is, however, a standard that is ultimately too rigorous and few operate according to it; indeed, I'd argue that the minimalists actually don't either. Documents are at the center of a lot of historical reconstruction and it is not infrequent that only one document comes to bear on a particular matter. The task of the historian is to evaluate the relative reliability of the source under analysis and then judiciously fit its claims into a portrait or reconstruction that best explains all the available evidence. Historians, whether working on the ancient or even the more recent past, rarely have the luxury of a complete and full library of documents and material evidence. There are always judgments to be made and the academy exists to evaluate the quality of those judgments. As it regards the study of the biblical text, this means that scholars must contend with genre and aesthetics, theology and ideology, language and culture. Historical reconstruction that draws on the Bible should not take for granted the historicity of biblical stories but it should not, a priori, deny it pending independent verification. A responsible, and pragmatic, methodology will contextualize and interpret the stories in order to elucidate what claims have historical resonance and then test those claims within the broader context of the ancient world.
PS. If I'm misunderstanding you, Jim, please correct me.
PPS. I ask that my readers don't falsely assume I'm in complete agreement with Dr. Cathey because I am critiquing Jim. Indeed, I would be uncomfortable invoking the names Albright, Wright, and Bright with the same love, esteem, and affection that Dr. Cathey confesses.
Historical Methodology and the Bible
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