Thomas L. Thompson (born January 7, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American-born Danish biblical scholar and theologian. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993 to 2009. He currently lives in Denmark.
Thompson is a part of the minimalist movement known as the Copenhagen School, a group of scholars who hold that the Bible cannot be used as a source to determine the history of ancient Israel, and that "Israel" itself is a problematic concept.
Biblical minimalism, also known as the Copenhagen School because two of its most prominent figures taught at Copenhagen University, is a movement or trend in biblical scholarship that began in the 1990s with two main claims:
Minimalism is not a unified movement, but rather a label that came to be applied to several scholars at different universities who held similar views, chiefly Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson at the University of Copenhagen, Philip R. Davies, and Keith Whitelam. Minimalism gave rise to intense debate during the 1990s—the term "minimalists" was in fact a derogatory one given by its opponents, who were consequently dubbed "maximalists", but in fact neither side accepted either label.
Philip R. Davies (1945–2018) was a British biblical scholar. He was Professor Emeritus of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield, England. In the late 1990s, he was the Director for the Centre for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was also the publisher and editorial director of Sheffield Academic Press. He was the author of books and articles on ancient Israelite history and religion, including Scribes and Schools (1998) in the Library of Ancient Israel. Davies promoted the theory of cultural memory. He and David Clines edited the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament and its Supplement Series.
Davies was a part of the Copenhagen School, along with Niels Peter Lemche, Keith Whitelam, and Thomas L. Thompson. They were dubbed biblical minimalists by colleagues with different opinions from theirs, a loosely knit group of scholars who hold that the Bible is a composite work, and that those books in the Hebrew Bible which narrate the history of the ancient Israelites should be viewed first and foremost as literature, as the invention of postexilic scribes who sought to unify the postexilic Jerusalemite community by creating a past for it. This group of biblical scholars suggest that all characters and events in these stories of Israel's past should be viewed with skepticism unless they are corroborated by epigraphic or archaeological evidence.