[1] Thompson was raised as a Catholic and obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, in 1962.
[6] He continued as a private scholar while working as a high-school teacher, janitor, and house painter until he was awarded a guest professorship at the École Biblique in Jerusalem in 1984.
This appointment proved controversial among Israelis, who, according to Thompson, objected to his earlier study casting doubt on the historicity of the Jewish origin narratives.
In 1990, he met Danish theologian Niels Peter Lemche at a conference, and in 1993, joined the faculty of the department of theology at the University of Copenhagen as professor in Old Testament exegesis.
Archaeologist and Old Testament scholar William G. Dever has repeatedly criticised Thompson's views in his works, even devoting an entire book in challenging them (What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?
), in which he defended the historical value of the Bible from the Book of Judges and onwards: according to Dever, Thompson's theorems are dangerous, because it tends to eliminate altogether any study of ancient Israel prior to the Persian period.
[24] Even harsher criticism has come from evangelical scholars, such as Kenneth Kitchen (University of Liverpool), whose book On the Reliability of the Old Testament consistently defends the historicity of the Tanakh.
[25] Taking a different approach, A Biblical History of Israel, by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III (Regent College), argued that criterion of distrust set by the minimalists (the Bible should be regarded as unreliable unless directly confirmed by external sources) was unreasonable, and that it should be regarded as reliable unless directly falsified.
[26] Takamitsu Muraoka (Leiden University) also argues against the hypothesis that the entire Hebrew Bible was composed in the Persian period, associated with some minimalists like Davies, countering that there are specifically late Biblical Hebrew features, like some rare plene spellings, that are contained in books dated to the Persian era by minimalists as well, but unusual or absent elsewhere.
[27] Italian scholar Mario Liverani (Sapienza University of Rome) has also been critical of Thompson's views: in his book Israel's History and the History of Israel, Liverani accepts that the biblical sources are from the Persian period, but believes that the minimalists have not truly understood that context nor recognised the importance of the ancient sources used by the authors.
[29] Similar criticism came from Maurice Casey (University of Nottingham), who went even so far as to call Thompson "an incompetent" in the field of New Testament studies.