This is an excellent take down Harry. You have wrestled faith into the dust where it belongs. I hope this get as wide of a reading as possible.

Debunking Christianity has now (thanks to you and your tireless Blogging) reached a point to where we can now Kill Two Birds with One Stone. The Bible’s house of theological dominos is like a snake: You cut off its head (the Old Testament) and the body (Biblical Christianity) will die.

On Facebook "No CrossNoCrescent" said of this post:

"Incidentally John, it is bad news for Muslims too. The story is plagiarized in the Koran."

That's four religions in one, since we must include Orthodox Judaism.

Four? Three certainly. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What would be the fourth?

Zoroastrianism too.

Yes and Pope Francis will call an Ecumenical Council to announce Christianity is like Stage 6. We'll leave the light on for you, but close the door as you're leaving.

Oddly, there is nothing in the Bible which would condemn anyone from drawing the same conclusions I did in this post. Without the worship of other gods (required) or belief in and following of Biblical demons and Satan (required), the threats of the Bible are left little more than that of a harmless fruit eater.

Harry, it is very interesting that you reference William Dever. As it happens Dever is not a "minimalist" by any stretch of imagination; while he may have doubts about Exodus and Joshua, he is a firmer believer in existence of historical David and Solomon. Hector Avalos nicely destroys his case in "the End of Biblical Studies".

Dever's book got this whole idea going about 20 years ago: Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies) 1989.

I'm well aware of Dever's dislike for minimalist. He blasts them in John Day's edited book: In Search of Ancient Israel .

I dont recall Avolos destroying Devers arguments in his EOBS book. His argument from my recollection was that various scholars such as
Dever and Finkelstein have adopted sceptical positions on much previously accepted as historical fact by older archaeologists such as Allbright.

Dever and Finkelstein disagree intensely on certain issues. Dever does rail against the ultra minimalists but FInkelstein isnt really a minimalist when compared to the "Danish school" ( which isnt really that much in agreement anyway ).

And one really does not need to adopt or be convinced by the core minimalist schools arguments to see that even if some of the later stuff IS historical, the lack of any Exodus historicity serious damages christian claims. Not to mention that Jesus seems to think Moses wrote the Torah.

The key point is that both Dever and Finkelstein are in agreement on rejecting any historicity about Exodus.

I agree with what your saying , but you see god isnt
everything in a book , the alpha the omega is only only what is Peace and Love anything
that a book teaches that harms anything is the work of the devil. You
make fun of religious people because they follow a book and it makes
them delusional. The reason why you dont believe in god is because you
hate yourself. Anyways you are certainly a hypocrite, you say religion
is fake but what about you listening to the constitution, is it not a
way of life written down by a man like every other religion? so you are then delusional also because you listen to a book of laws just like the christians, jews, muslims etc. so don't hate if you dont know the truth.

You're an idiot. This does nothing to debunk Christianity. All its doing is confirming that biblical scholars see the exodus as theological not historical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

" exodus as theological not historical"

Good work. Recognizing this is a small step...but an important one. Next, work out that there was no talking snake in Eden and that no god advocated slaughtering livestock and Canaanites. Then move on to realizing one cannot redeem one's self by believing a god sacrificed himself to himself in some sort of primitive substitutionary sacrifice ritual where someone else pays for wrongs committed against one's fellow man. Then you're free.

"Good work. Recognizing this is a small step."

You assume too much. I understand theology & philosophy very well thanks. I am also not someone who has blinded faith or some YEC.

Again. A complete ignorance.

Grab a study bible and learn some theology. You can't read it like some scientific text book. The snake represented death and evil when the text was written. Oh the joys of hermeneutical principles - Ponder on that.

Next the Canaanites - their despicable behavior went of for over 400 years before anything was done about it. The picture changes upon deeper analysis to which I don't want to go into it because it takes a lot of explaining. So I suggest you should research that further too because all you're doing is appealing to rhetoric.

If you're spiritually and/or philosophically bankrupt then you will never understand the bible. So making such naive comments brings one to absurdity.

Having said that the very fact you are making a moral judgment raises even more questions. Do you really want to go into the objective moral duties and values argument.

Theology is religion's tool to deal with reality and lay the foundation for its myths (“myth” has been explained in religion as an event which never happened, but always was).

The Bible is one of the longest running Infomercial in history. Just as the wild and outlandish
statements of the mentally retarded can’t be supported in reality, the Bible’s wild and outlandish statements are protected here in the U.S. by law.

Not only can’t the Exodus cannot be considered historical, but there is not a single verse of the entire Old Testament out of the more than 7,000 verses textually older than 250 BCE! If you want to prove “God’s Word”, then you need to provide us with at least one a manuscript number and date older than 250 BCE.

Hey, pastors get paid to support all the myths in the Bible and most make a good living at it. Pastors
exploit Biblical myths to make believers open their check books and spend billions every year.

Money is the IV Life Support System that keeps God alive and the Bible pseudo-credible.

It doesn't mean what it says it means it means what you think it means. Gotcha. No wonder there are thousands upon thousands of different interpretations of what it actually means. I guess you do what you gotta do to keep believing.

On the contrary. If you believe the contents of the bible historically true, you are not only philosophically bankrupt but philosophically inept. Recently retired Episcopalian bishop, Dr John Shelby-Spong, a strong and abiding Christian and avowed follower of Jesus makes this assessment of the 'truths' of the Bible in light of reconciling what we understand and know about the nature of the world and universe today with what was known and understand of the world and universe by the authors of the bible at the time of writing it:

Twelve points
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

How clearer does one have to make it to demonstrate that the strength of your position is gossamer at best?

"1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological
God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found."

If you presume God dead you will never find him

You are an idiot ! Nearly all atheists start out believing that there is a "God" because the concept is so ingrained into our culture. The "presumption" actually is that there is a God, not that said God is dead. It is only after a person become aware of the untenability of the God belief, that people reach the atheist position.

"Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic term.."

Who decided on the above statement?

It's not a question of who. It's the issue that any theological rationale for the existence of a a god is both ontologically and epistemically groundless, with substantiation in fact. The Christology of the ages is intellectually bankrupt.

Believe me when I say that's that's the question.

No such thing as objective moral duties, or at least not how you mean them.

Also, your review of the serpent is erroneous. it did not just stand for death and evil. Every apologists ties it directly to Lucifer "the great Serpent or Dragon". This is spoken about in Revelations.

Please, try to pull the wool over less educated eyes. As an atheist I am a big fan of Christian Apologetics.

As far as the canaanites go, what they were doing were no worse than hebrews of their times, stoning people, animal sacrifices etc. But, let's say that what you assert is true.

In what context is genocide ever okay. Also, how do we know that ALL of Canaan was corrupt. So there wasn't even one good person? Just destroy everyone? Hmmmm...flood waters anyone?

Just like the lost tribes of Israel sailing to the New World and forming civilizations there is "theological not historical"? Or do you, as a non-Mormon, describe Joseph Smith's story with a different word, like "false" "make-believe," "fictitious," "lie," etc. rather than "theological?"

Clearly someone who so quickly rushes to use the word idiot and has to resort to a minimum apologetic position of interpreting exodus as being purely theological simply lost his case.

All you are doing is illustrating how any desperate answer counts in your head as being a "defence".

Defence ? possibly - a rebuttal ? nope. Once xtians start adopting a position such as yours - your walls have already begun crumbling. Exodus being true
historically is as important to Jews and fundamentalists as the historicity of Jesus' resurrection is to all but the most far gone liberal xtians.

"biblical scholars see the exodus as theological not historical".................. All theology is man made crap. The exodus is not metaphorical, allegorical or any other form of crapola. It is reality.

Could you remind us what Jesus said about the Exodus? I'm not debating that it's in the Bible, I'm just forgetting, for the moment, where.

One word: Moses!

Here is one reference:

John 6:30 So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'”

32 "Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven."

also this reference

"Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven." (Jn 6:49—51).

Isn't the manna in Numbers? Edit: Ah, it is in Exodus 16 too.

As to Jesus use of the Exodus, he kept the Exodus Passover. . . in fact it was in Jerusalem during the Passover that he was arrest and crucified. Jesus’ last meal with his disciples was a Passover Seder. The whole theology of Jesus’ death during Passover as a substitution is stressed in Christian theology. Jesus' spilled blood causes the wrath of God to “pass over” the sins of humanity just as the blood of a lamb on the door post of the Israelites’ houses in Egypt caused the death angel of pass-by the Jews as all the Egyptians’ first born were killed by God.

The Gospel of Matthew used Jesus, along with Joseph and Mary, to re-enact the Exodus. In this Gospel, Jesus is the New Moses as his family flees Herod by going down to Egypt and then (as a fulfillment of prophecy) Jesus (like Moses) comes out of Egypt to lead his people.

In Paul’s letters, the Exodus theme is even more pronounced.

This is excellent Harry. Sometimes as a Christian, I forgot that Jesus came primarily to the Jews and all of his acts and teaching was to the Jews. . I do believe that Matthew had to exhibit theological calisthenics to put Jesus in Egypt. I am reminded of what Hitchens said about why he believed that Jesus was probably a real person...because of the extent the gospel writers went through to place him in Bethlehem and Egypt. And Paul, of course being the Jew of Jews, needed to draw that conclusion. I am of the opinion that without Paul there would be no Christianity today.

the purpose as stated from the disciples and apostle paul was that they received teachings and further teachings after Christ's death. The point is that the chosen people of God will become the first messengers, and spread the good message to the corners of the world.

The writers of the New Testament gospels, at least the ones that made the canonical cut, make it very clear that Jesus had a fundamentalist, literalist, "maximal" view of the Old Testament. Why wouldn't he? A First Century AD rabbi would not be a 20th Century Copenhagen minimalist!

Jesus always talks about Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon as people that genuinely existed.
"Before Abraham Was, I am!" Jesus calls himself the son of David all the time. The Christian writers always tie Jesus to a "lamb," as though he were a Passover lamb. The Exodus is referenced in the epistles and Gospels as pure historical fact.. As Henry McCall rightly pointed out, the slaughter of the innocents and the flight to Egypt and all the sacrificial lamb verbiage in Matthew and the epistles is just an extended riff on Moses and the Passover.

You all are lying atheists, inspired by Satan to invent falsehoods about our holey book to tempt us from the true faith and salvation! You will all go to Hell!!!!
Even an atheist (X-catlicker) can think up BS arguments against this, these people as a whole will never give in to anything.we can say or show. But as we have seen excellent articles like this one can chip away at their foundations and little by little we gain in numbers. Keep up the really great posts.

Satan much like your god and the thousands of other gods doesn't exist. And the word is Holy. Spend more time in school and less in the church. You'll have a much better life. And your numbers are dwindling rapidly as more people get educated and realize the truth.

1) you should know irony when you read it.
2) it is holey as in full of holes.
3) it says X-catlick!
4) I will not tell you how to read as atheist don't need no in fightin'.

Are you in charge with the ironing around here?
The heating is commonly done to a temperature of 180–220°Celsius, depending on the fabric.
Do you know Celsius, or just English?

Well I do no metric & english, C & F
But Im afeard dat me keybord cant spel 2 good.
And I've also found that my brain to --sorry forgot I'm male--my dick to fingers connection has gone intermittent as well.
I dont worry too much about others spelling either-as you know-let he who is without sin throw...etc.

No problem.
I understand very well what you wrote.
Ironing is not for you. Try wooding.

So you respond to a factual post by calling all atheists "liars" and "inspired by satan". None of us believe in the bible, and yet, somehow we're inspired by a character we consider fictional. Simultaneously, because we seek the truth and don't believe what we read at face value, we are liars trying to deceive christians. Lastly, "you will all go to hell". Did you forget that we don't believe in that?

Your sarcasm detector is on the fritz.

Well, it seems that Jesus went to hell. He got a reservation made by his father. He got views, decor, service and probably the food as well (a little burned, but OK).

Jesus deserved a touristic relaxation to visit the hell after all that messy crucifixion.

"satan" is a Human created entity, as is "hell". Created by church leaders in order to CONTROL their followers.

Thanks John, an excellent summary.

Just heads-up there's a new book coming out this fall arguing for the Exodus as fact. One of the authors has also written books on the such "serious" topics as the Nephilim and reptillians... http://intrepidmag.com/the-...

Is that the "Dr. John R. Ward" who is a "professional dowser"? http://eg.linkedin.com/pub/... Does anyone have something on this guy's actual academic credentials? I can't find anything.

I couldn't find anything either. Seems odd that it would be difficult to find an academic's credentials.

The Exodus is lunacy

There are 10 plagues that nobody writes about, not even Egypt's rivals.
The Egyptian military is wiped out and the pharaoh is killed (!!!) and nobody writes about it, not even Egypt's rivals.

A number of slaves goes from 70 to over 2 million in 400 years, they all escape, nobody writes about it.
A population equivalent to the height of Egypt's population gallivants around "the wilderness" for 4 decades
and doesn't leave a single artifact in the desert, possibly the finest place for artifacts to be left.

That just makes it even more miraculous! ha ha