The Quotable Bible: Fact or Fiction?

Our culture is awash with Biblical quotations uttered by Biblical personalities. You can quote God, or Moses, or Jesus, or Noah, or any of the dozens of others from the various chapters and verses in the Bible. The question is how much faith can you muster and attribute to the bona-fide accuracy of those you quote? If you’re really honest with yourself, the answer is bugger-all!

Odds are, if you go to church on Sunday, or tune in to a televangelist, or even hold a conversation with colleague, friend or neighbour on the topic of religion, you will hear whoever is speaking quote God and/or Jesus and/or some other Biblical figure about this, that or the next thing. The one and only source for these quotations is of course the Bible. But who was actually there at the appropriate time and place to act as scribe, secretary or minutes taker? The answer is often nobody!

Let’s take one set of particulars. In the first couple of chapters of Genesis, you get conversations between God and Adam, between Adam and Eve, between Eve and the Serpent, between God and the Serpent; between God and Eve; between God and Cain. Who wrote all those conversations down? Did pen and paper even exist in the Garden of Eden and surrounding territory?

Even more puzzling, in the very first chapter of Genesis, God said “let there be light”; “let there be a firmament”; “let the waters under heaven be gather together”; “let the earth bring forth grass”; “let there be lights in the firmament”; “let the waters bring forth”; “let the earth bring forth” and “let us make man in our image”. Who, what mortal might I ask, was there with pen and paper in hand writing all of this down? This was an era way before there was any Pulitzer Prize winning human journalists around looking for a scoop!

Assuming there was no journalist on the spot taking down God’s immortal words “let there be light” for example, then who was God speaking to? Was God talking to himself here? Maybe not because of that “us” reference in “let us make man in our image”, whoever “us” refers to. Maybe “us” refers to the Titan god Prometheus, since that Greek deity is credited with creating humans from clay. That’s only one of many possibilities since one could name hundreds of deities from cultures around the world credited with creating mankind. 

Now I don’t believe Noah is accredited with writing Biblical chapter and verses, yet the Bible quotes God talking to Noah, as in “God said unto Noah”. Who wrote that conversation down? Abraham likewise isn’t credited with Biblical penmanship, yet we have “God said unto Abraham”. Then there’s “God said unto Jacob” and “God said unto Moses” (also “Moses said unto God”) and “God said unto Balaam” and “God said to Solomon” and “God said to Jonah” (and vice versa), and so it goes. How remarkable that each and every time “God said” that a scribe just happened to be Johnny-on-the-spot to write God’s sayings down for posterity, not to mention the replies of us mere mortals that He was addressing! 

Anytime anyone says anything that’s quoted on down the track, in the days before Dictaphone machines and tape recorders, etc. there had to of been someone there taking down the words verbatim for posterity. If they weren’t written down until well after the fact – well you know how reliable human memory is! What if they got it slightly wrong? What if they got it mainly wrong? What in fact if they made it all up?

Then the Bible (New Testament) says “Jesus said” a total of 65 times. No doubt Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all took secretarial, shorthand, stenography courses in order to accurately take minutes and record the wit and wisdom of Jesus. Except of course there were times when Jesus wasn’t in the presence of any scribes, like when Jesus and Satan had a bit of a private chinwag in the wilderness, yet Jesus is still quoted as if he was carrying around a portable tape recorder to record for posterity the exchange.

Jesus reminds me that there’s another slight problem with Biblical quotations. The Bible sometimes records conversations of a rather highly private and delicate nature where there was no one else was present to take down notes. In fact some of those conversations happened in dreams and thus couldn’t have been transcribed there and then by any scribe. Let’s take the delicate nature of Mary and Joseph’s relationship which was thrown into turmoil by Mary becoming in a family way without input from Joseph. 

If one consults Luke, chapter 1, verses 26 through roughly 35, there is a private conversation between the angel Gabriel and Mary in which the later is informed by the former that she will become pregnant without benefit of any intimate relationship of a sexual kind. 

Just to make sure that Mary’s husband-to-be doesn’t get all hot and bothered by this, we note the following quotation.

Matthew 1:20: But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

Now clearly all of this is of a highly personal nature and interviews on the subject are rather unlikely to have been granted. Not by Gabriel or Joseph’s angel of the Lord, and probably not by Joseph or Mary. Would you blab to the press about this if you were in their shoes (or sandals)? So how come all of this highly personal and intimate stuff gets into a public document for all to see and quote?

Here are two more examples within the nature of ‘God said’ via a dream. So who told tales out of school, God or the dreamer? And who did the interviewing and the recording?

Genesis 20:3: But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man's wife.

1 Kings 3:5: In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.

Finally, the Biblical Book of Revelation has dozens of quotations of various entities spouting off about this, that and the ‘End of Days’ in general. The issue I have with that is that the events in Revelation haven’t yet happened. How can you quote a saying related to a future event, an event and saying that hasn’t yet transpired? Here’s one famous example: 

Revelation 1:8: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

That quotation doesn’t appear previously – it’s an original to Revelation.

And here’s one more for the road to illustrate the point.

Revelation 8: 13: And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!

Now both God and Jesus are quoted extensively in the Old and New Testaments respectively. Seeing as how nobody had access to tape recorders or other sound recording devices back then, probably not even pen and paper, how can exact quotations from these Biblical deities be taken at face value? Perhaps the authors who penned the Biblical verses just made it up as they went along! It wouldn't be the first time that someone has put words in someone else's mouth! Sometimes making things up results in legal action; perhaps God and Jesus should sue for libel, slander or being quoted out of context.

IMHO the quotable God and quotable Jesus is pure myth. The Old and New Testaments weren't written by God and Jesus respectively. The Old and New Testaments weren’t even written down in real time. In fact the texts of the Bible were written down many decades to centuries after the fact. For example, in the case of the New Testament, the Gospels weren't penned until four to ten decades after Jesus left this mortal plane.

Anyway, the next time your local clergy preaches that "God said" or "Jesus said", just pipe up with a "hang on there a minute. How do you really know what God or Jesus said? You weren't there and neither were those Biblical scribes." In fact the next time anyone, anywhere, anyplace, anytime quotes you God or J.C., or anyone else from the Bible for that matter, demand to know how they know that, and if they say "well, the Bible says so", read them the riot act about Biblical accuracy. In other words, quoting God, Jesus or any other Biblical character is just plain impossible in terms of that quote being a really spot-on historically verbatim and accurate account of that they said, if they said anything at all since the Bible might have the same degree of historical bona-fides as “Alice in Wonderland".

Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part Two

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated; perhaps they fell in the lap, not of the gods, but of God.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Impossibility Three: Is God All–Knowing?  Hardly! If God is all knowing, what’s the point in the whole creation business? There’s no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be an all-knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That’s why people don’t usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven’t yet seen. If you’re told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

That applies equally to that final Biblical Book of Revelation. The Bible is God’s Holy Word. Revelation is therefore God’s Holy Word. Everything that is to come is spelt out in detail. The ending is not in doubt. How the ending is achieved is not in doubt. God knows all of this in advance. Satan, being a literate sort of entity, knows all of this as well. Therefore, what’s the point in enacting out the scenario? If everyone has to go through the fixed Revelation scenario, then that confirms everything is predestined and that there is no such thing as Free Will despite God’s utterances to the contrary. Just like in a novel or a film, the plot plays out the exact same each and every time. The characters have no choice but to follow the plot line – they have no Free Will.

Impossibility Four: Is God All-Powerful? Hardly! If God can not prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (see Impossibility Two above). If God allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share some responsibility for that evil. It’s akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

God is not all-powerful since not even God can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle’s precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, God, like gravity, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can’t operate at faster than light speed. If God wants to smite you down, and God is ten light-years away, then you’re safe for a decade before His bolt of lightning hits you.

If God exists in a physical location within the Universe, then God can’t know about an event until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from that event reaches God. Since light has a finite speed, God is in the ‘dark’ as it were until the light and information it contains reaches God. For example, if God is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason our Sun goes supernova, God (as well as the rest of humanity) won’t know about it for other eight-plus minutes – the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.

Not even God can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something, like going back in time and posting a “No Trespassing: Keep Out: Serpents Will Be Shot On Sight: This Means You” sign at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Not even God can accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Not even God can draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper.

If God is all-powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7^th day?

Impossibility Five: Is God A God for All People? If you believe the Bible, God has His Chosen People – the Hebrews. God has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn’t America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or Russia, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren’t the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called Israel; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that God is the “God of Israel”. So, if you ain’t associated with God’s Chosen People and God’s Promised Land, it’s impossible to believe that you are one of those in God’s holy grace! In short, it’s safe to give God your Big Middle Finger, even both of them! 

Impossibility Six: God versus Intelligent Design? Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems?  Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? God, that’s who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say “God”? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say “God” again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don’t think so! Did God fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

God does in fact have one ‘All’ quality. He’s an all-nothing. God, the supernatural deity, doesn’t exist. One line of evidence in support of that is that God hasn’t struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless ‘crime’. And no, I don’t hate God. You can’t hate something that doesn’t exist.

Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part One

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated; perhaps they fell in the lap, not of the gods, but of God.

I spotted a book* a while back and looked over the dust jacket. It was regarding the afterlife, and the jacket said something akin to God was One; and you were part of His oneness; and your afterlife with God was outside the realm of time and space. And I thought to myself what a load of utter claptrap! God is One – One what? Who knows; the book jacket didn’t say; it’s not explained for those thinking of buying the book. If there is an oneness, then that implies there must be a two-ness and a three-ness and a four-ness and so on down the line. If you exist in an afterlife outside of space and time then whatever you are in that afterlife, you have no volume, no area, no length – you are a zero dimensional dot point. Further, nothing can ever change in that afterlife since there is no time which is what gives substance or reality to change. So, what other impossible things of a godly nature can we pour the waters of scepticism on?

Impossibility One: The Concept or Nature of God is Impossible: There’s something odd about God’s origin and behaviour. It’s downright impossible!

If God created the Universe, then what, or who, created God? Who is God’s mother in other words? Cause and effect apply to God as well as anything else. And if something or someone created God, what then created that something or someone (and so on and so on)? It’s an infinite regression. It’s far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn’t mean our Universe didn’t have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to ‘who created God?’ is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way.  Humans created God in man’s image (and probably all other deities as well, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy), rather than the reverse – God didn’t create humans in God’s image. [Actually, perhaps man was created in God’s image. Based on the writings in the Old Testament, God has to be described as a dictator (‘thou shall not…’) and a tyrant, a hypocrite (do as I say, not as I do), someone who’s vain and petty, someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name (which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes), someone who’s cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist, someone who’s totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around SOB. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of?] 

If cats have a deity, I’m sure their god would have whiskers and claws and purr (or more likely go ‘meow-meow’). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question – the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if God has always existed, then God’s infinitely old, beating Methuselah’s longevity by a mile. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His (I’ll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) creation of our Universe – which is an absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What was God doing the ‘day’ before He created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is that God has always created universes, one after another after another – creating universes, that’s God’s thing! And if God is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence. Well, some cosmologists do postulate that our Universe is one of many – the concept of the Multiverse.

Speaking of creation, but assuming just one Universe, that’s an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if God created everything, then God created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moons). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can’t see Pluto with the naked eye. If Pluto didn’t exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that’s a fairly safe bet).  Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn’t it have been easier on God not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of God’s efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It’s sort of like buying a china teapot or a baseball bat, for your pet canary. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn’t see 99.999% of the observable universe, and 99.999% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What’s the point then of creating all that extra 99.999%?

If God exists, why doesn’t He show His face today? I mean, He wasn’t all that shy about getting in the human race’s face way back in Old Testament days, so what is God so afraid of today? Maybe He’s afraid of our nukes! That aside, it wouldn’t be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a show today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If God so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to God that something only God (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kiwi birds had been mentioned, or icebergs, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that sugar was a mixture of several things, or what about another commandment akin to “Thou shall not travel faster than the speed of light”.  Just one simple little sentence – that’s all it would have taken – something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn’t have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks God missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, God could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the surface of the Moon, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Red Sea split asunder for a spell! 

If God exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring a God hypothesis, the God has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself a total irrelevance!

Impossibility Two: Is God All-Loving, Merciful, Compassionate, and Forgiving? Yes you say?  You have got to be joking! Have those spouting off such nonsense actually read the Old Testament? From the universal flood, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to the tenth plague, to the invasion of the Land of Canaan, to countless other large-scale right down to individual (Abraham and Job) atrocities committed, God is the driving force. Hitler in his wildest dreams couldn’t conceive of such death and destruction as God inflicted on not only His enemies, but also on His own Chosen People. If ‘military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms, even more so is the phrase ‘a loving God’. I’d sooner take my chances with ‘a loving person-eating shark’! 

*Spong, John Shelby; Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell; HarperOne, New York; 2009.

To be continued…

Bibles Galore

We have all heard of ‘The Bible’, but that’s really a misnomer. What you have heard about, or have in your home, is ‘a Bible’, not just one copy of many, but one copy of the many versions of the so-called ‘The Bible’. Now the questions to be asked are if there is but one God, therefore but one holy word of God, why are there dozens of different versions with differing texts? And if no one version is more correct than another, then perhaps no one version is correct. All Bibles in all languages are works of fiction!

In the La-La, Never-Never Land of all things Biblical, is there one Bible or are there multi-Bibles? How can the Bible (let's say the King James Version) be considered a unified whole when not only are there two Testaments that are radically different in tone, but all up the Bible has been cobbled together with various bits and pieces included and excluded in a totally ad hoc fashion. No two scholarly or Biblical experts will agree on exactly what texts should comprise THE Bible.

Let’s consider the excluded bits, the Apocrypha. There are over a dozen writings or ‘books’ whose status as bona-fide Old Testament Biblical canonical texts have been in and out of the ‘official’ Bible depending on who had the authority to decide these things. Since the 16^th Century the verdict has been ‘out at the plate’! Some of these excluded ‘books’ include Tobit, Judith, the two to four books of Maccabees (depending on who you talk to), and the two books of Esdras, etc. Further, there are additional but excluded chapters and verses to the established books of Esther, Daniel and Psalms.

There’s also a whole library of excluded New Testament Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apocalypses. All up, it’s all like several chapters and paragraphs have been excluded from your favourite literary work, or even your common paperback novel.

Then you have the trilogy of books from Enoch, as well as Jubilees, which are even further outside of the fold. Depending on who you talk to, they form part of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. In fact the Pseudepigrapha all up is a collection of about 65 documents that have been excluded, though there is some overlap with the Apocrypha (like a few of those ‘books’ of Maccabees), again depending on who you talk to.    

Then too, some of the official canon was hotly disputed and only made it into the Bible by the proverbial skin of the teeth – like the Book of Revelation. 

Even taking just the ‘official’ Bible, depending on the version you consult, the ordering of the Books will be different. Try that with your paperback novel and see if it makes the same degree of sense!

Then too, there exists dozens of English language versions of the Bible, from the "Good News Translation" to the "New Living Translation" to the "American Standard Version" to the "New American Standard Bible" to the "Common English Bible" to the "English Standard Version" to the "English Standard Version Anglicised", and that's just for starters. Then there's the "King James Version", the "New King James Version", and the "21st Century King James Version", not to mention all those other languages the Bible is published in with those unavoidable mistakes, losses and uncertainties that must arise in translating from one language to another. It's like your favourite novel was amended or tweaked every couple of years. I’m sure if you read your favourite novel in English, then read it again but in a different language, say Italian or Japanese, there will be something lost, even strange to you in the translation.

I’m sure most viewers here read, write and speak modern English. Yet when it comes to the Bible, modern English is the foreign language. The pathway from the original cobbled together Biblical texts, to what you tend to find in your home, motel rooms, your church, local library and bookstore is so long and so tortuous it’s a wonder 100% of the Bible isn’t gibberish instead of just most of it.

In conclusion, the Bible as a one unified word-of-God text is an impossibility to accept at face value. It makes more logical sense to chuck it all out the window and accept that there just is no such animal in existence at all and never will be.

Biblical History: Fact or Fiction?

The Bible is apparently one of the best, if not the best selling books of all times. Why it isn’t for sale though in the mythology or fiction section of bookstores (or available in similar locations in libraries) is beyond me. Simply put, the Bible isn’t believable as non-fiction and as a historically accurate record of those ancient times.

Is Biblical history fact or fiction? Well, it's probably a mixture of both but the emphasis is weighted heavily on the fiction part - say by a ratio of 99% bovine fertilizer to 1% wheat among the chaff. I mean the Bible was written by a multitude of authors, with hidden agendas (who never had to take a polygraph test), over eons of time, and has suffered through dozens of versions and translations and mistranslations. I like an analogy of a row of twenty people - whisper a sentence into the ear of person number one and have that person whisper that sentence to person number two, hence person number three, and so on down the line. Have person number twenty then relate the sentence back to you. Odds are that there will be little similarity between what you originally whispered and what you ultimately heard after the twenty translations.

Since the texts of the Bible weren't written down until many decades after the 'fact', what does that tell you about the reliability of the texts being literally accurate? History is a very inexact science, written by the winners, patchy at best, and the farther one goes back in time, the patchier it gets. Historians often have a hard time documenting and agreeing on who, what, where, when and why of happenings 200 to 500 years ago. So how can we put faith in the literal truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth regarding events 2000 to 5000 years ago?

Anyone can make up or embellish stories and write them down and frequently do. Our bookshops and libraries are full of books labelled 'fiction'. Further, no one believes that all of those non-fiction books lining the shelves are without any shade of doubt always literally non-fiction from first page to last. One can easily find two non-fiction books on the exact same topic that are totally opposite in content and in context. Can anyone absolutely state that those who authored the various Testaments, those books, chapters and verses of the Bible weren't sort of making it up as they went along, or at least padding things a mite and slanting things according to their own worldview? In fact I've seen one book title that alleges that most of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament are downright fraudulent*. Humans at best can make mistakes in copying or in making translations; they like to embellish stories and tell little white lies (even whoppers), and at worst invent pure fiction (in the guise of truth) for their own purpose(s).

As has been often pointed out, including by me immediately above, history is written by the winners. Perhaps it would be interesting to have had Adam and Eve's side of the story, or Satan's side of history instead of just God's version of events!

So is the Bible literal history? There's no other historical or archaeological evidence for most of the people, places and events in the Bible: people, places and events like Noah and the Ark, Jonah, Solomon, Samson, David, the Exodus, the Battle of Jericho, Sodom & Gomorrah, or the Garden of Eden. Why isn't the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments tablet(s) in a museum - if they really exist? Does any rational person really suggest that a virgin birth happened; that there were literally giants in the earth; that angels are historical (or should that be hysterical), that the Star of Bethlehem, whatever it was (if it was) guided wise men; that all of the above reflect really real reality? All those Biblical tales read like modern sci-fi stories. There are just no independent sources, outside of the Bible, that verify any of these, IMHO, rather tall tales. The historical bona-fides of the Bible are seemingly impossible to independently verify and thus believe in. That said, I've often maintained that behind every mountain of mythology lies a molehill of reality. Still, the Biblical mountain as being an historical mountain and not a mythology, regardless of the hidden molehill, is an impossibility to swallow hook, line and sinker.

For a specific example, I’ve read quite a few dozen books on or about ancient Egyptian history over the years, and I have to note that certain words tend to be conspicuous by their absence in both text and index. I mean words like Joseph, Moses, Israel, Israelites, and Hebrews. Also, I have noted a lack of references to anything akin to all those plagues of frogs, locusts, boils, etc.; references all those firstborn kicking-the-bucket simultaneously, or pharaoh losing a hell of a lot of his army, horses and chariots by drowning in the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds). The King James Version of the Bible states that Rameses was the kick-off point in the N.E. Nile Delta for the Hebrew Exodus, yet all the maps of ancient Egypt fail to show any such place. Even my ancient Egyptian dictionary fails to note Rameses as a place. There is noted on the map a Per-Ramesses in the Nile Delta in ancient Egyptian history, but that’s not what the Bible mentions. Per-Ramesses, a.k.a. Qantir, which is right adjacent to Avaris, but those place names don’t get a Biblical mention either. The next stop off location according to the Bible was Succoth but that’s not a location noted on the ancient Egyptian map. Then the next Exodus location, according to the Bible was Etham. Guess what? That’s not on the map either!  Doubt my word? Kindly consult your own choice of scholarly texts dealing with ancient Egyptian history. In short, the Exodus and all associated with it is fiction pure and simple and any belief in it as an historical event is a purely delusional one, along with all the associated baggage, like the Passover.

*Ehrman, Bart D.; Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are; HarperOne, New York; 2011.