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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If only you understood how what you posted totally supports the other position.

Every single point you make drives home the similarities.  It's like that SNL sketch, "No it's fine, we call ourselves Jon Bovi! It's totally different!" :-)

Also, you responded to a post that admitted a man Jesus may have existed, and even prominent scholars and atheists like Bart Ehrmann believe  that is true;  however that gives no documentation to the historicity of the supernatural Jesus, and none of the supernatural aspects have any contemporaneous accounts.

Wouldn't they have been big news? [/quote]

Well. It created the world’s largest religion with approximately 2.4 billion members 2 thousand years later, so you could say big news is an understatement.

The Bible documents Jesus well....the most read book in the world is the Bible. Writer James Chapman created a list of the most read books in the world based on the number of copies each book sold over the last 50 years. He found that the Bible far outsold any other book, with a whopping 3.9 billion copies sold over the last 50 years.

Pretty good for a troublesome Jewish boy who never existed.

[/quote]

The Bible is a wonderful book but it's not documentation in the historical or archaeological sense. It's not independent evidence. Which isn't to say that events or personages mentioned didn't exist, but if someone wants proof, there has to be independent proof. There's never been any historical proof found of Israelites in Egypt, for example. That doesn't stop Jews from celebrating a major religious holiday associated with liberation, but if one is interested in archaeology, it must be acknowledged.

There's enough evidence of Jesus that it's pretty clear he existed. Of course there can never be evidence that he performed miracles or was the son of G-d because those are matters of faith and not archaeology. [/quote]

I agree with you but also think the issue of Jewish people in Egypt has been proven to be true.

The Exodus: Fact or Fiction?
Evidence of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/exodus/exodus-fact-or-fiction/

Were Hebrews Ever Slaves in Ancient Egypt? Yes
Ancient Egypt had intimate relations with Canaan, and most of the Semitic peoples migrating there would have been Canaanite. But not all.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/.premium-were-hebrews-ever-slaves-in-ancient-egypt-yes-1.5429843

According to "Prof. Israel Finkelstein, a senior researcher at the Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of biblical archeology today. "The question of historical accuracy in the story of Exodus has occupied scholars since the beginning of modern research," says Prof. Finkelstein. "Most have searched for the historical and archaeological evidence in the Late Bronze Age, the 13th century BCE, partly because the story mentions the city of Ramses, and because at the end of that century an Egyptian document referred to a group called ’Israel‘ in Canaan. However, there is no archaeological evidence of the story itself, in either Egypt or Sinai, and what has been perceived as historical evidence from Egyptian sources can be interpreted differently. Moreover, the Biblical story does not demonstrate awareness of the political situation in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age – a powerful Egyptian administration that could have handled an invasion of groups from the desert. Additionally, many of the details in the Biblical story fit better with a later period in the history of Egypt, around the 7-6th centuries BCE – roughly the time when the Biblical story as we know it today was put into writing. “However, this was not a story invented by later authors, since references to the Exodus appear in Hosea and Amos' chapters of prophecy, which probably date to the 8th century BCE, suggesting that the tradition is ancient. In this sense, some scholars propose that the origin lies in an ancient historical event – the expulsion of Canaanites from the Nile Delta in the middle of the second millennium BCE. In any case the Exodus story is layered and represents more than one period. “It seems that the story of the exodus was one of the founding texts of the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and that it came to Judah after the destruction of Israel. It is possible that in the later days of Judah, a time of approaching confrontation with Egypt, the story expressed hope, showing a clash with mighty Egypt of the distant past, in which the Children of Israel prevailed. Later the story held a message of hope for those exiled in Babylon, that it was possible to overcome exile, cross a desert and return to the land of the forefathers. Above all, the story of Exodus has been an eternal metaphor for escaping slavery for freedom, in Jewish and other traditions.""

https://english.m.tau.ac.il/news/exodus_history_and_myth

[/quote]

I'm sorry to be rude but you need to check your reading comprehension, because that is manifestly not what the article you're quoting says. It says there is no archaeological evidence that would support the story, physically, and also that the details in the Torah do not correspond with an understanding of the contemporary political situation. It says that at best there may have been some kind of historical parallel such as an expulsion from another place that was then recorded as Egypt. It says that the story is best understood as a metaphor. Metaphor -- not truth.

You need to understand what you're reading and what it does and doesn't support before you quote it or form beliefs based on it.
[/quote]

“I’m not arguing that everything in the Bible is factual. I may not believe, for example, that the world was created in seven days, or that humanity began with two naked people and a magic tree and a talking snake. But real evidence exists that the Exodus is historical, with text and archaeology mutually supporting one another. What lies next for us is to give due consideration to this evidence and refine it further in our work.”

https://reformjudaism.org/exodus-not-fiction

The Exodus Is Not Fiction

Richard Elliott Friedman, who holds a Th.D from Harvard, is the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, and was a visiting fellow at Cambridge and Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. He is the author of seven books, including the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible? and Commentary on the Torah. He participated in the City of David Project archaeological excavations of biblical Jerusalem and served as a consultant for PBS’s Nova: The People of the Covenant: The Origins of Ancient Israel and the Emergence of Judaism and A&E’s Who Wrote the Bible? and Mysteries of the Bible.

Following publication of Reform Judaism’s Spring 2013 edition in which Professor David Sperling and Rabbi David Wolpe asserted that the biblical Exodus is a fiction, you wrote expressing concern to the magazine editors. Why?

After reading those articles, your readers may have concluded that scholarship shows that the Exodus is fictional, when, in fact, that is not so. There is archaeological evidence and especially textual evidence for the Exodus.

I respect Professor Sperling and Rabbi Wolpe. They were understandably following the claims of some of our archaeologists. Those archaeologists’ claims that the Exodus never happened are not based on evidence, but largely on its absence. They assert that we’ve combed the Sinai and not found any evidence of the mass of millions of people whom the Bible says were there for 40 years. That assertion is just not true. There have not been many major excavations in the Sinai, and we most certainly have not combed it. Moreover, uncovering objects buried 3,200 years ago is a daunting endeavor. An Israeli colleague laughingly told me that a vehicle that had been lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was recently uncovered under 16 meters—that’s 52 feet—of sand. Fifty-two feet in 40 years!

Still, all of us would admit that two million people—603,550 males and their families, as the Torah describes—should have left some remnants that we would find. But few of us ever thought that this number was historical anyway. Someone calculated long ago that if that number of people were marching, say, eight across, then when the first ones arrived at Sinai, half of the people would still be in Egypt!

There is no archaeological evidence against the historicity of an exodus if it was a smaller group who left Egypt. Indeed, significantly, the first biblical mention of the Exodus, the Song of Miriam, which is the oldest text in the Bible, never mentions how many people were involved in the Exodus, and it never speaks of the whole nation of Israel. It just refers to a people, an am, leaving Egypt.

It wasn’t until a much later source of the Exodus—the so-called priestly source, some 400 years later—that the number 603,550 males was added to the story.

So are you suggesting that a smaller group may have left Egypt? And if so, who might they have been?

Yes. At a recent international conference entitled “Out of Egypt” on the question of the Exodus’ historicity, one point of agreement, I believe, among most of the 45 participating scholars was that Semitic peoples, or Western Asiatics, were in fact living in Egypt and were traveling to and from there for centuries. And the evidence indicates that the smaller group among them, who were connected with the Exodus, were Levites. The Levites were members of the group associated with Moses, the Exodus, and the Sinai events depicted in the Bible. In the Torah, Moses is identified as a Levite. Also, out of all of Israel only Levites had Egyptian names: Moses, Phinehas, Hophni, and Hur are all Egyptian names. We in the United States and Canada, lands of immigrants, are especially aware of how much names reveal about people’s backgrounds. The names Friedman, Martinez, and Shaughnessy each reveal something different about where they came from. Levites have names that come from Egypt. Other Israelites don’t.

Present scholarship on the question of who wrote the Bible bolsters this picture that the Levites were the group who departed Egypt. The Five Books of Moses were not written by Moses but by authors of four main texts, known as J, E, P, and D. Three of the four texts—E, P, and D—are traced to authors who were Levite priests, and these three are the only ones telling the story of Moses, Pharaoh, and the plagues. The fourth main source, called J, the one that shows no signs of having been written by a Levite priest, makes no mention of the plagues. It just jumps from Moses’ saying “Let my people go” to the story of the event at the sea.

The Levite authors also devote more ink in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers to the Tabernacle—the Tent of Meeting which held the ark in the Exodus account—than they do to any other subject. The non-Levite text, J, doesn’t mention it. This is also significant because the architecture of the Tabernacle and its surrounding courtyard matches that of the battle tent of Pharaoh Rameses II, for which we have archaeological evidence, as was shown by Professor Michael Homan in a brilliant combination of archaeology and text (To Your Tents, O Israel, 2005). Professor Sperling had emphasized in the RJ article that, archaeologically, there are no Egyptian elements in Israel’s material culture. But in the Tabernacle we do have those Egyptian elements. Egyptian culture is present, but, again, only among the Levites, not all of Israel.

There’s different opinions and I respect yours.

[/quote]

Still not proof. He is admitting there is no proof and explaining why that may be. And he may be right. But it's not archaeological proof. It's not science. And you do a disservice to yourself and others to pass it off as though it is. [/quote]

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