Biblical Maximists vs. Biblical Minimists

Recently, "The Bible Unleashed" has been aired on the History Channel over here in the UK. It is interesting, based on the book of the same name by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Siblerman.

The book argues that the Old Testament was written down by order of Josiah (who is actually documented in the Bible itself as purging out other religions in his kingdom and centralising all religious worship to Yahweh) as part of his political ambitions.

This is further proved by the fact that no Biblical texts pre-dating 200 BC has ever been found. Of course, this falls into the assumption that if we can't find it does not exist - a fallacious argument used by many creationists and IDers.

Actually, to tell you the truth, one of the reasons I set up this topic is to gather more information to put into the following article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_history

The above article is frankly very sparse with no evidence for either side of the argument. Obviously, minimalist is far too extreme a view, and maximalist is a general misnomer as that particular view is actually more than one view most of which is not fundamentalist and does not agree with fundamentalist, literal interpretations of the Bible.