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Apr. 6, 2007 Probably everyone should be aware of the facts concerning the supposed exodus of Jews from servitude in Egypt around 1300 BCE under the leadership of Moses, but there are many who are not. Most importantly, despite the alleged 430-year enslavement in a highly literate society, there are absolutely no contemporaneous writings by either Egyptians or Jews that corroborate the tale. Not only is there no evidence of any such servitude, written or otherwise, but also there is nothing to attest even the presence of Jews in Egypt at that time. The first mention of Israel in Egyptian writings dates from 1209 BCE, and has nothing to do with servitude. It merely retells the foreign victories of Pharaoh Merneptah, Israel being one. The second noteworthy fact is that the oldest extant copy of the Book of Exodus is one of the ones found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which archeologists date to about 200 BCE. So what he have is a barely legible manuscript, riddled with grammatical and orthographical errors, that purports to report happenings that had taken place 1100 years earlier, and written by someone with an obviously scant knowledge of the Egypt of the supposed time of Moses. And the third fact is the nature of the narrative itself, whose miraculous occurrences fly in the face of the laws of physics, chemistry and biology as we know them. You simply do not make red blood corpuscles out of the hydrogen and oxygen of Nile water, or turn sticks into snakes, at least on this planet. And how many people are aware of the actual facts concerning the life of Jesus Christ? Even non-Christians seeking to appease Christians, while denying the divinity of Jesus, will praise him as a great teacher or at least as an historical wiseman. But there is not a scrap of contemporaneous evidence to support a belief in the real existence of Jesus as even a human being. There is not a garment, a personal effect, a piece of paper, a hand-drawn sketch or any other thing that can be established to have been used or touched by Jesus. Although there is much controversy surrounding the dates of the Epistles and the Gospels, the consensus of scholarly opinion puts the former at around 50 AD and the latter at 70 to 90 AD. So these were written years after the events they pretend to chronicle, and even the authorship of the Gospels is unknown or at least debated. Outside the Bible, there is a probably-spurious reference to Jesus by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian, written in 93 AD, but many consider it a later, monkish interpolation. So the earliest sound date we have is 115 AD in the Annales of Tacitus, but his information may have been derivative of the Gospels themselves. However the most telling evidence against Jesus is his teachings. You cannot move mountains by prayer. You cannot accomplish anything through prayer. God will not necessarily have mercy on the merciful, or bless the meek. It is not wise not to resist evil, as Jesus taught. Anyone living according to Christian teaching will not last more than a month or two. Thereat, he will die of hunger, be committed to an asylum or put in jail. The most realistic conclusion is that there was probably no Jesus at all, and that if there was, there certainly was no Resurrection, at least on this planet. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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