Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Ezra–Nehemiah" in English language version.
There are no compelling arguments for dating Ezra. The fact that the question cannot be decided from a historical perspective is due to the lack of any tangible historical details regarding Ezra, for whom no extrabiblical indications exist. Here, too, scholarship oscillates between the historical figure of a rich Aramean official and the literarily transfigured legend of Moses redivivus. As with Nehemiah, historical evaluation faces the difficulty of a highly artificial integration of notes about Ezra into a network of biblical reference texts, especially from the Torah. At the textual level, this presupposes the validity of the Torah, which is usually linked to Ezra 7. An evaluation depends on the source value of the Artaxerxes rescript in Ezra 7:12-26. In the maximalist view, Ezra's mission is considered historical because of the Aramaic language; in the minimalist view, even Ezra's existence is denied. Sebastian Grätz's analysis, for example, denies the Achaemenid period background of the document and assigns it to the Hellenistic period.
Since there are no extrabiblical testimonies for Nehemiah's person or work, one is initially dependent on the biblical data as a source…There is no clarity regarding the background, the concrete form, or the exact dating of Nehemiah's mission. For a long time the history of Nehemiah was reconstructed based on the assumption that Neh *1-7; *11-13 comprised an authentic so-called Nehemiah Memoir dating from the second half of the fifth century BCE. More recently, the historicity, background, and intention of these texts have become highly controversial. The maximalist position evaluates the details of the conflicts, Nehemiah's mission, and the actions initiated by him to be, as far as possible, historical, which then is authentically witnessed by Nehemiah's first-person report (e.g., Rainer Kessler, Titus Reinmuth, Ralf Rothenbusch). The minimalist position, on the other hand, doubts even the historicity of the person of Nehemiah. It does not see the Nehemiah Memoir as an authentic document but as a fictional account of later writers with theological intentions, who stylized Nehemiah as the model political leader. The Nehemiah Memoir is thus understood, as far as possible, to be an archetypal depiction without historical value (e.g., Joachim Becker, Erhard S. Gerstenberger).
