Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.

(And of the things I mentioned, the Exodus is less likely to line up with the Bronze Age Collapse's chronology anyways. But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.)

> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt

I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.

I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.

> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.

The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.

Everyone, including you, me, and the most expert of scholars, brings their own biases, assumptions, evidentiary standards that will allow us to accept something as truth.

I actually got more dialed into this while listening to Bart Ehrman on a NYT podcast recently. I was interested in him: an atheist who ascribes historicity to certain bits of the Bible, Jesus in particular. But ultimately I wasn't really impressed: If a detail is wrong, that's proof that everything is suspect; if a detail is right, sometimes that means "if I wanted to invent a credible story, of course I'd say that" and sometimes that means "I think it's obviously credible", and there didn't seem to be any meaningful heuristic to distinguish.

And, when he talked about his journey away from faith, all of that had nothing to do with it - it was him getting hung up on the problem of evil. In other words, the underlying value changed, then his interpretation of historical claims changed as a result.

I can live with the idea that one might look at the body of evidence and draw a different conclusion than I do; I just don't like the conceit that one conclusion is somehow objectively correct, especially because of some broad appeal to authority. I can live with "Troy may have existed but we haven't found any archaeological evidence", but I greatly dislike "we haven't found any archaeological evidence, therefore Troy didn't exist", which is what a lot of the replies under my first comment seem to be speaking. (There's be a lot of "we would expect to find..." as well: even if that's true, sometimes we just haven't found it yet! And surely we'll never find everything!)

That's not to say that scholars can't know more or contribute more work: in a case like Jericho, scholarly work seems to have settled the question of whether or not a city named Jericho exists, having walls that were destroyed suddenly. Now, we dispute when exactly that might have happened and how that compares to Biblical chronology, but just because one person gives a date that aligns with my priors or your priors doesn't mean the matter is settled.

I've sat on this tab for too long haha, just gonna send it and step out for a bit.

But there is much we know about who and when wrote the various books of the Bible, and we have lots of archaeological evidence about what was happening in the area of north Egypt and Canaan for that entire duration. And for example we know with high confidence that the Book of Exodus, the Book of Joshua, and the Book of Judges were written hundreds of years after the events that they purport to describe - so they aren't very trustworthy sources to begin with, for those of us who don't presuppose divine authorship.

Note also that atheists, whether scholars or not, have no particular bias against the historicity of the non-miraculous elements of the Bible. The general narrative of the story of the Book of Exodus could be explained in naturalistic terms, so it isn't dismissed outright by atheists the way, say, the Book of Genesis is. Moses could well have been some historical semitic leader that led a group of semitic slaves from captivity in Egypt up into freedom in Canaan, perhaps in the midst of a series of calamities hitting Egypt that allowed for their escape in the first place. That's why many serious scholars have looked for signs of these events, in many forms of historical sources - they simply didn't find any.

Contrast this to the story from the Book of Kings. Again, atheists will generally dismiss the story of the fire from the sky and the other miracles out of hand - but when they went and looked for evidence of a King Ahab and a religious leader Elijah, they did actually find it, and so they have no problem in attesting that these were real people who really lived.

In relation to the Book of Joshua - while it's true that Jericho exists as a city, and seems to have indeed existed at the right times to match the accounts, other parts of the narrative do not fit. In particular, the city of Ai was abandoned much earlier than any possible time for the narrative of the conquest (it was abandoned in 2400 BCE) and it wasn't re-settled until much later when a village was founded there during the Iron Age. So Jericho - maybe; Ai - no. Beyond this, there is simply no evidence to suggest that early Jewish settlements were conquered from "the Philistines" - the evidence suggests much more so that they were simply peacefully founded by Jewish people (that is, people who spoke Hebrew, followed Jewish dietary practices, and worshiped Yahweh).

There's a lot I could say in response to your comment (most notably, I think we literates underrate the ability of oral cultures to transmit information) but I just want to highlight that merely acknowledging your presupposition as a presupposition removes one of the biggest things that riles me up when I get into discussions like this. It's very much appreciated.

But I like to start with Jericho because there's a lot of evidence that the actual city-state of Jericho was dedicated to a Moon god, and the Moon god was worshipped there. But if you think about how Jericho and its conquest is described...

Does this mean the war is entirely fictional? Ancient sources tend to be strongly mythologized, but “entirely fictional” is a very strong claim.

This of course doesn't mean that there cannot be a trace of truth in the story! It just has to have been morphed substantially over time. For example, it was common in the time to kidnap and move foreign nobility and artisans, while no-one much cared about the identity of the average farmer or goatsherd. It could well be that "the people of Israel" who were kidnapped meant the people who actually mattered, ie, a fairly small upper class group, who could move from the Nile valley to the levant without leaving much trace in either society.

I'm still personally partial to the observation that the story seems to originate during the Babylonian captivity, and the situation of the story greatly mirrors the conditions they were living under, but while complaining about their Babylonian overlords was probably not allowed, writing stories about the plucky underdogs outwitting the horrible Egyptian overlords with divine assistance was fine, even if it contained themes of returning home and of liberation from foreign rule. (Note that Egypt was the main rival of Babylon in this period, and the Kingdom of Judah was on-again off-again vassal of the Egyptians. The captivity was party imposed to prevent this relationship from continuing.)

Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).

A more reasonable claim would be: "we cannot verify much of what's in Exodus using sources external to the Torah/Pentateuch." It's fair to also say something like "if X happened, it's surprising that we would not see physical evidence of it."

If you're interested in the topic of the Old Testament in general, I highly recommend [Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540960214_anci...).

It starts with a survey of the academic field, an overview of relevant primary documents from surrounding cultures, and in-depth discussions of historical records and archaeological finds. There's meta-discussion about the role of comparative literature that I also found useful. I benefited from the author's perspective that there's a lot to learn from the Old Testament regardless of whether or not existing physical evidence satisfies our personal standard for determining whether something happened verbatim.

I like that it does so in a way that does not try to push an agenda. I interpret the author as trying to provide an entrypoint for anyone interested in the related academic fields, regardless of their background.

I've recommended the book to both religious and non-religious friends who enjoyed it. Take this recommendation as one made in good faith, and an opportunity to look at something from a new perspective. You're free to disregard it as you see fit.

The only reason to treat this with kid gloves is because a large portion of the population believes in it.

Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."

The stronger claim is a valid one to make because the primary source doesn't have any corroboration.

> Nobody has a problem saying that "Romulus and Remus is an entirely fictional account it's not based on any real historical events."

I wouldn't go so far as to say this. We have artifacts and historical texts talking about them, so we at least know that Romulus and Remus are figures that ancient humans talked about.

If we had a time machine, could we go back in time and meet them? If there were two guys named that who generally did the things the Romans thought, were they actually raised by wolves? No idea with the former. The latter sounds unusual.

My point is that there are more interesting questions to ask than these. The book I recommended does a good job of this. It's a good read if you're interested in the cultural backdrop of the ancient near east.

Well, yeah, but you seem to be confusing the authenticity of the writings as ancient artifacts with the historical accuracy of the contents of the writings. I don’t think anyone disputes that the Torah contains stories that had been widely spread and believed among the writers, compilers, and intended audience at the time.

Come to find out that so many of these myths were not actually true: that they were legends built through the centuries to fluff up the importance and gravity of the United States in the eyes of naïve schoolchildren.

It was with some sadness that these myths were dispelled for me, but no less a sense of wonder to learn what had actually happened in this relatively recent history. There is still plenty of room for myth and legend in the popular imagination.

Either way, there's a large gulf between "Romulus and Remus weren't real" and "Romulus and Remus weren't exposed as infants." You obviously don't believe Cyrus is fictional.

What's the corroborating evidence from ~750BC documenting their existence? Heck, where's that evidence from 650BC?

This is a totally unfruitful line of inquiry, unless you are an academic historian doomed to publish-or-perish; in that case, it's perfectly understandable that you have to make these arguments as part of your career.

Better questions, when it comes to ancient history are:

1. Is there any negative evidence? 2. Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have? 3. Did ancient historians with better sources believe it? 4. Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?

In this case there isn't any negative evidence, there's no reason to expect more evidence than what we have, ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it - someone had to found the polity, and to declare them fictional results in there still existing a first king of Rome, just a guy with a different name for whom there is no evidence at all. You can certainly apply (4) to specific details of the different stories - for example, it seems much more likely Romulus was murdered by Senators than raptured by Jupiter, though perhaps something altogether different happened. There's even very weak archeological evidence - a chamber was found in an area where Romulus' (empty) tomb was supposed to be, although archeologists are debating over whether it really is that.

It's really not. This is the line of inquiry that leads you to understand the founding myth of Rome and what the motivations might have been to create such a myth. It also helps to place in time when the myth was concocted.

> Is there any negative evidence?

Is there any negative evidence against unicorns?

Things that don't exist don't leave evidence.

But yes, there is evidence. The lack of corroboration and the fact that the earliest mention of Romulus was ~300BCE is a pretty strong indicator that he didn't actually exist. Further, the fact that his story is a mishmash of common tropes and that his very name is a derivative of Rome is a pretty strong indicator that he was simply a product of myth making. There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.

But further, we also have evidence that Rome itself is a lot older than Romulus is supposed to be. There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.

The fact that the first records of Romulus trace the lineage of the rule of the city directly back to him is a very good indicator that the author was myth making.

> Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have?

Yes. People write about their leaders. It's quite common. And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.

That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.

> Did ancient historians with better sources believe it?

You'd expect passing references to Romulus if they did. That doesn't exist.

> Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?

Yes, we have evidence Rome is a lot older than the Romulus myth. Seems pretty unlikely that Romulus founded Rome in 753BCE unless he was some sort of time traveler.

> ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it

Ancient historians who wrote over 1000 years after the actual founding of Rome.

Imagine if I dubbed myself a historian and started writing about how China was founded by Jackie Chinamus in 1000AD, who also just so happen to have an army of pandas and consumed only bamboo. That is the problem with the Romulus founding myth. The historian placed the foundation WAY later than it actually was and wrote a fantasy story about Romulus where the only thing that could possibly be true is his name (Unless you want to claim it's possible Mars was his father).

These are almost always absurdly simplistic, when they're not simply projections of how modern peoples think and what motivates them. It's really not useful to speculate about motives because you feel events resemble patterns of myth.

> Further, the fact that his story is a mishmash of common tropes and that his very name is a derivative of Rome is a pretty strong indicator that he was simply a product of myth making.

You could make precisely the same argument about Alexander founding Alexandria.

> There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.

Very, very few, precious few. There are zero comprehensive timelines or histories of notable events of cities in the region at that time. Indeed this is transparently not true, because obviously if there were written records contradicting the early history of Rome we have, then we would be talking about those. Indeed most of what we do have we cannot understand, because it's in Etruscan, which we have a very limited understanding of...because a very limited amount of text survived. [Ed - in fact from a brief survey, and given what we can read of Etruscan, it appears there are no surviving Etruscan references to Rome at all. Maybe Rome didn't exist!]

> There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.

Cities were seldom founded in desert wastes. They were almost always founded on prior settlements where people were already living. There were settlements in the general area of Rome for many, many thousands of years, not just going back to 1600 BC.

> The fact that the first records of Romulus trace the lineage of the rule of the city directly back to him is a very good indicator that the author was myth making.

So who was the first king of Rome?

> That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.

Egypt famously has some of the best records and archeological evidence in the ancient world. (And there are nevertheless huge gaps and mysteries in ancient Egyptian history!) The amount of records and archeological evidence for this time period in southern Europe is comparatively scanty.

> And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.

I see no reason to believe Romulus and Remus would have been "very influential" outside of central Italy, and even then, the phrase is probably a stretch.

> The historian placed the foundation WAY later than it actually was and wrote a fantasy story about Romulus where the only thing that could possibly be true is his name

And somehow magically convinced everyone else all the history they knew was wrong. And convinced all the people in the cities around them. Interesting hypothesis. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation to say that there really was a Romulus that ruled Rome and founded or refounded the city, and that's why all the Romans thought there was. It also conveniently explains why there is an ancient temple under the Forum with an empty sarcophagus dated to the 500s BC that appears to be dedicated to Romulus.

https://apnews.com/general-news-8996e6a7d9983ce25290408d2146...

Bad article.

Here's a better one [1]. What the archeologists found was a shrine to a "holy king". Because of it's location and time, the title of "Romulus" was given to it by the modern archeologists.

> So who was the first king of Rome?

Who knows. That could easily be lost to history. After all, Rome started small before it grew to it's historical peek size. But if a figure like Romulus existed, there would be additional documentation that didn't show up 1000 years later.

> And somehow magically convinced everyone else all the history they knew was wrong. And convinced all the people in the cities around them. Interesting hypothesis.

Not really magic or hard to believe. It's not as if the entire population was literate. And a founding myth is quite useful for current politics. For example, using the founding myth of Romulus allowed for the ancient Romans to claim the Senate was created by him and thus divinely inspired.

The parallel to this is the Bible, where the creation of Abraham and Moses served the original authors in endowing their king with supernatural power and origin. Much like the Egyptians did with their Pharaoh. It was a common practice in the region and at the time.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/possible-shrine-ro...

The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time after time AND everyone else bought into it - is clearly absurd. Just pointless cynicism with no basis in actual human psychology.

Egypt exists even though the Exodus never happened. The mere existence of factual elements doesn't mean a foundational myth is real. Myths are normally interwoven with real elements.

Moses is almost entirely distinguished as a personage by elements we know are nonsense. If you found a Jewish leader named Moses who lived in a different year who experienced an entirely different history you wouldn't have found the real Moses so much insofar as the symbol Moses is a reference to the myth not the hypothetical actuality. Likewise finding an early leader wouldn't mean Remus was real

I don't see anything particularly counterfactual or unlikely about a group of Egyptian or Caananite-descended Egyptians leaving Egypt and returning to Caanaan, where they fused with an existing population. Can you explain this?

It's really not. It's exactly how Romans changed from their Roman worship to christianity. It's how they converted the pagans. It's how Muslims were able to rewrite Christianity into their own religion. It's how Mormons did the same.

This is such a fundamental part of humanity, it happens all over the place.

Having a charismatic and/or politically powerful person say "This is how things are, believe it or die" does wonders to spread belief.

Yeah, and in the process of converting to Christianity, Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now. You claimed "The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time after time AND everyone else bought into it - is clearly absurd." And I'm giving you clear historic examples where exactly that happened. But now you want to make it about whether or not the people that did that existed or not.

> Or are you saying there was never any man named Jesus who was crucified?

Likely a man named Jesus existed because we have non-biblical documents from the time period (Josephus and the Sanhedrin) recording that he existed. Further, there are parts of the biblical narrative that are indicative that he was a real person. The census story in Luke, for example, is a convoluted story that you'd only tell if there was a real problem with Jesus, that he was well known to be from Nazareth and not Bethlehem. Were Jesus a complete myth there's no reason the gospel author wouldn't just say "And he was born in Bethlehem as prophesied"

> I guess you may as well argue that - both him and Paul could have been invented.

Again, nope, because we actually have a fair bit of contemporary documents about the existence of both. Something we don't have for Romulus.

> used incorporated what he knew of what he believed to be true history.

Right, I'm not arguing about Mohamed existing, I'm arguing that he made up history which people believed. Or more precisely, his followers did. Mohammad was illiterate and the Quran was written some 50 years after he died.

> I think Joseph Smith is rather too well attested to claim he did not exist.

Joseph claimed to be a historian who documented the events of the ancient americas. He claimed to have found records of those events and "transcribed" a book.

Quite similar to Romulus. And as it turns out, yeah, an entire religion of people believe him that Mormon and Moroni, Nephi and Lehi are all real people that really existed.

I mean, almost uncannily, the events he wrote about were 1000 years in the past from him.

Yes, Joseph Smith played a similar role to Romulus in the founding of Rome: the leader and lawgiver. It's the Joseph Smith of Rome you are wishing away, not Moroni. It also seems highly unlikely that Smith simply "made up" everything as some cynical ploy for power, as you describe the motivation of the ancient Romans and Jews. It seems much more likely he was a true-believing wacko.

> Likely a man named Jesus existed because we have non-biblical documents from the time period (Josephus and the Sanhedrin) recording that he existed. F

You continually imagine historical sources that do not exist. Josephus is real, of course (although the extent to which the alleged reference to Jesus is an interpolation is debated; I personally side with no), but there are no "Sanhedrin" documents about Jesus. You should probably ask yourself why you keep committing gross errors of historical fact (like your argument that there were plenty of records contemporary with the traditional date for the founding of Rome) while making this argument.

No he didn't. You obviously know nothing about what his role was.

> It also seems highly unlikely that Smith simply "made up" everything as some cynical ploy for power

Literally exactly what he did, and it's well documented that's exactly the sort of person he was.

You are very uninformed on this topic.

> but there are no "Sanhedrin" documents about Jesus

> You should probably ask yourself why you keep committing gross errors of historical fact

Please just google before insulting someone that knows more about a topic than yourself.

Here's what I'm referencing [1] [2]. "In Sanhedrin 43a, the Talmud records that Jesus was "hung" because no one came to his defense for charges of practicing sorcery and apostacy."

Now that you are simply insulting me and not engaging, I'm done. Good luck with yourself.

[1] https://mainstreamapologetics.org/evidences/HIS-EV63.html

[2] https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.43a.20?lang=bi&with=all&la...

Not only that the identification with that figure as the Jesus is highly contested.

I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to copy them faithfully. Of course we are talking about a highly literate society with a strong tradition of analytical history (which was very unique by pre-medieval standards at least).

> Quite similar to Romulus

The claim that some specific historian might have invented him out of thin air is far fetched and not really substantiated. Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down. Based on other similar cases it's highly likely that there were many competing traditions by Livy's time. So yes, he did very likely tried to reconcile them and picked how to synthesize the narrative but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.

I don't really dispute that this is the likely case. I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome.

The name and the stories come a very long time after Romulus supposedly existed.

> but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.

I disagree that they'd be called out, especially if this was something commissioned by the political powers of the time. These sorts of fanciful stories about the great founding of a powerful nation were commonplace. The Greeks and the Romans also enjoyed telling stories and integrating them in with their mythology. There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play. If someone wanted to say, for example, the founder of Rome was raised by a she wolf, then it makes for an interesting story and imagination so it gets passed off.

Similar to how Athens was supposedly named because Athena gave them an olive tree beating Poseidon in a competition.

You won't find a greek historian calling that story out as a fake or dubious.

You and many Romans. I mean we have Cicero's letters where he's saying that all the legends about Rome's founding are probably nonsense because nobody has any real records.

> There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play

Polybius and Thucydides might feel sad about you saying that.

They happen to have created the whole concept of analytical history. It's like saying that engineers in ~1800 didn't have a notion of how steam engines worked. I mean the invented the whole concept in the first place (however primitive their early methods were.

Even Herodotus often goes to great effort trying to separate fact from fiction even if understandably now always succeeding) although that would indicate what sort of poor sources historians had to work with when researching the earlier periods. It's a bit like if modern 19th century historians had to work without having any access to books and newspapers or other extended written material with their main source being the great-grandchildren of the people who actually lived then and the memories they passed down in addition to maybe some legal contracts, obscure religious texts and chronological lists (and if they wanted to go 5-10 generations further its even much worse). That doesn't mean they (largely) weren't doing their best.

Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. After the Church become more established scholars spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine which ones were "accurate" or not and suppressing the other narratives. It's not like anyone can verify it they got it right or not, though.

Usually the arguments are not about whether a major historical figure like Christ or Mohamed etc. existed but the exact context and accounts of their lives, beliefs and actions. Also both of these men live in literate societies yet just a few hundred years after the deaths the facts already were very blurry and uncertain. Hypothetical Moses on the other hand lived in an illiterate society and history wasn't written down for 500+ (if not quite a bit more) years, even if there is a grain of truth in them (i.e. some sort of migration or interaction between Canaan and Egypt - which is not at all far fetched) the actual details might have become 99% fictional after being passed down orally through dozens of generations.

There were meaningful competing theologies, there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the historical events.

Of course, they all agree on a broad narrative - Jesus was born of a virgin Mother in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth for some time, wandered for 40 days in the wild where he was tempted, then returned and was baptized by John the Baptist, collected a number of disciples while preaching in Galilee and performing various miracles, then during Passover entered Jerusalem, came into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities and/or the Roman authorities, had a last supper with his disciples, and was crucified, died, was buried in a tomb, and was resurrected.

This is about it in terms of the major plot points that are common. Major acts, such as expelling the money lenders from the Temple or the resurrection of Lazarus, are not part of the shared narrative - they either occur at different times (in John, expelling the money lenders is one of the first acts of Jesus, at the start of his ministry, not one of his last public acts at the end), or not at all (the story of Lazarus is only present in John).

I would say that there are indeed major narrative differences between the Gospels.

Then you have all the ancient texts here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Non-canonical_(apocryph... which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives. We can assume that this is just an only very small sample of all the stories floating around.

Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

They were not likely written very early in almost all of those cases (your own link dates every single one to well after the canonical gospels), and almost none of them have meaningful narrative differences (once again, as opposed to theological differences.)

> Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

The canonical gospels were all likely written within decades, not "hundreds of years"; and while you can argue canonization did not officially happen until much later, de facto canonization occurred very, very early. The others floated around, yes, but they were never mainstream in any sense.

Not on purpose, it's just that without written history it's very easy for stories to drift very far from the historical facts. There might haven been a Roman king Romulus who did something important (then again he might have been created over time by merging several figures - i.e. it's more likely that he was named after the city and not the other way around).

We actually have real documented historical cases of this process occurring, the whole genre of Germanic heroic legends. They include various historical figures like Theodoric, Attila the Hun and others but the actual facts were mostly corrupted beyond recognition. Also this process took 500-800 years and developed in environment in which existing historical written sources on the same events did exist (even if they weren't directly accessible to most).

There's a lot of claims in the exodus story which would have left behind corroborative histories. For example, the death of a large amount of the population along with the pharaohs son. The destruction of pharaoh's army. Records of ancient hebrew slaves.

Ancient Egyptians left behind a pretty large amount of history and documentation. They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation.

Given what we know about how the Egyptians recorded history, we would definitely not expect to find them writing about stuff that would have embarrassed them.

>Records of ancient hebrew slaves

Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

>They were also surrounded by other civilizations that also left a decent bit of documentation

Israel being one of them!

That's exactly the sort of stuff they wrote about all the time. We know about the various wars and political conflicts throughout the second intermediate period precisely because that's what the Egyptians liked documenting.

And, in particular, during the supposed time of the exodus the Egyptian kingdom was fairly divided. Even if one kingdom was too proud to write about a defeat, the others would be sure to document it.

> Look up Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446 - it shows that Egypt held slaves with Semitic names in roughly the correct time period.

Read up about the Canaanites. They were on the uprise during this period and they are also believed to be the actual origin of the Hebrews.

> Israel being one of them!

No even according to the bible. Israel didn't exist before the exodus. Definitely not for decades and even centuries afterwards. The oldest records of the exodus are nowhere near the event. The closest record we have is around 900BCE.

What we'd expect if the exodus was real is either proto-semitic writings about the event or even Egyptian writings. Because, fun fact, slaves tend to speak the language of their masters. The fact that the only document we have about it is written in Ancient Hebrew, a language that first debuted around 900 BCE, puts a lot of this into question.

The exodus was supposed to have happened anywhere from 1400BCE to 1200BCE (the bible gives at least 2 dates).

There's a lot of distance between having claims in the account not supported by evidence and it being an "entirely fictional account."

I wouldn't be surprised if truth is that it has a factual core with significant embellishment, to the point where the boundary is not discernible by history/archeology.

The Hebrew language came long after the exodus. We have no earlier records of it that aren't written in Hebrew.

So what we have is writings written hundreds of years later documenting an event with no earlier writings verifying that documentation.

It's possible that a small group of slaves escaped egypt and that was the actual origin of the exodus story which just kept growing and growing with retellings.

It is easy to imagine a large group of slaves escaping or being freed from Egypt. Maybe they or their ancestors were war captives. But wandering the desert for 40 years? Yeah right. Even if you want to grant miracles the idea that all of Egypt would even know about such events at that time is bananas. Information didn't travel that fast. Probably one group of people in one city. And the antagonist could easily have been a local lord. Over time it became the Pharaoh and the 18 months of wandering turned into 40 years. Only then it was written down.

Unfortunately, this is the case for much of ancient history. Doesn’t mean nothing happend, just that it can be difficult to figure out what is myth and what are actual events.

Sure. Although I'd say that if you want to study history that's _all_ you can do - use different sources, corroborate, cross-check, link and, generally, try to make the different events and interpretation "fit" together. If you have no documentation for it or supporting evidence then you've got nothing to work with.

Otherwise one could just use a semi-apologetic argument: the Exodus story DID happen as outlined in OT but God hid all signs of it so it couldn't be confirmed.

Sure, but I think 1) a lot of objections in this thread come because people seem to conflate "nothing to work with" and "so obviously it didn't happen" and 2) there's not no documentation for anything people have argued about in here.

A big disagreement that's probably been unsaid in this thread has more to do what counts as corroboration. Speaking abstractly, I think that if a group of people from 500 years ago strongly attest to something that happened 1000 years ago, that is not definitive proof in and of itself, but it is absolutely a form of supporting evidence.

While the sources are all from greek authors, we have 6 different sources about the battle with Herodotos, Diodoros, and Ktesias all writing within 100 years of the battle happening.

What we can deduce from these many sources and most of them in living memory of the battle is that the battle likely happened and was a real historic event.

We've got nothing like that with the exodus story. There's not a second author detailing the exodus or making even a vague reference to it.

We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.

I feel like you haven't read Exodus because it describes in detail the early Israelites' predilection for idolatry.

There is documentation in Egypt of slaves around this time, and of the subsequent departure of some unstated number of slaves. There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration, and there is evidence of a shift in religious practices along the migration path. So there is some evidence of an event similar to the Exodus occurring.

We're talking about something that occurred over 3000 years ago. Most events back then weren't recorded, and even then it was still so difficult and time consuming that Egypt and Ancient Greece generally left out the embarrassing parts, most of which we only know about because their contemporaries wrote about it to disgrace them (and most historians now suspect that the vast majority of negative accounts of other civilizations were wholly made up, especially those written by the Ancient Greeks).

Very few nomadic migrations left evidence on the way. There is more evidence of the some sort of exodus having occurred than of the human migration from Asia into South America (note: an increasing number of historians claim the first migration was by sea from Africa, not over land from Asia).

No one claimed the Egyptians didn't own slaves.

> There is evidence of pig bones disappearing from trash sites on the path of the migration

There are also many Jewish sites that had pig bones in their trash. That mandate had not yet solidified.

I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is. IIRC, that stuff is in the actual Bible. Like, a significant chunk of the Old Testament is about "Israelites [not] worship[ing] Yahweh alone as the only God."

IIRC, I'm pretty sure there's also a lot about that in the Bible too (e.g Israelites worshiping other gods like Baal, people up to and including kings).

Imagine just how much is not recorded.

As the last Ice Age melted away (20k–8k years ago), there were very likely several major floods in the region.

It may be the case that the Exodus tale is a recontexualization of various historical memories of nomadic resettlement combined with political narrative, but the actual story as described in the actual Bible didn't happen.

Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:

- matter exists (i.e., physicalism or dualism is the correct metaphysical worldview)

- the universe is strictly a physics simulation

- there's no God who's capable of fiddling with human affairs (or interested in doing so)

> witness something that defies all natural explanation

> write about it

> people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element

You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future."

Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happened, and the authors want people to know about them.

I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to stake out a position of "supernatural elements cannot happen" and there are absolutely cogent responses to what I just did rhetorically, I just don't like that people who think that way try to assume the center; it's worth pointing out that it's the tail that wags the dog in big chunks of historicity debates.

Sure there is. I could tell you that I am a mostly-anon web developer; I could also tell you I am President of the United States, or a founder of a prominent company that came out of YCombinator. For practical purposes you would evaluate my claims based on your wits and perhaps my comment history, and you would believe that one story is more likely than the others.

All are equally possible but not all are equally plausible.

I'm guessing you'd agree with that, but you'd disagree with what counts as credible evidence. Which I can understand. But the idea that you'd see "random guy on HN makes up a theory involving a fictional wormhole from a 90s television show" as no different from Biblical claims is troubling to me, most notably because the narrative itself doesn't make any claim that could be remotely construed to align with that.

> But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!

> And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.

This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science.

In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang.

If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc).

And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary.

Impossible things by definition didn't happen.

People observe and record all sorts of crazy things all the time, including for all of the religions you don't believe in, but that doesn't mean anything. You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real, and offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible. I don't think you understand how profoundly unconvincing that argument is to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do.

If you're trying to convert people with apologetics, this specific line of attack isn't going to be effective.

Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations?

>You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real

I don't think that's what happened there.

>offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible

No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.

>to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do

How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?

Possibly, but I fully believe science is capable of explaining these mechanisms, because thus far science has been able to explain everything that theists claimed was supernatural in nature, while no evidence has been found to justify belief in the supernatural.

So this is, at best, an argument that scientific models are incomplete (which no one would disagree with) but not that scientific models are invalid, or that the supernatural is real.

>I don't think that's what happened there.

Their claim was that science cannot prove the supernatural, but the only possible evidence would be personal testimonials - and we're in a subthread litigating the supernatural claims surrounding the Exodus story - which only exist in the Bible. So I respectfully disagree. They were literally arguing that the fact that these claims were written in the Bible was evidence of their veracity.

Also, science should be able to prove the supernatural, as every claim about the supernatural is that it manifests in some physical, tangible form in our universe, which means it must leave some kind of evidence.

>No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.

It is, though. Claims alone don't prove anything. We prove that things happened in the past by discovering evidence of it, through artifacts or documents, and finding corroborating evidence, which is science.

>How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?

First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.

If you're referring to my post, that is not what I argued. I argued that a claim of supernatural events could not be dismissed as "cannot have happened", but must be evaluated on the quality of the evidence for that event.

I did not apply that to events in the Bible, but that is how claims of supernatural events in the Bible must be evaluated. Sure, they're eyewitness claims. All history from that era is eyewitness or derived from it, or archaeology or derived from it. The point is to not say "can't have happened", but rather to actually evaluate how good the evidence is for any claim.

One could imagine God parting a sea with scientific mechanisms we know nothing about.

> Claims alone don't prove anything

You can be convicted for murder "beyond a reasonable doubt" on claims alone.

>First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.

Okay, I respect that. Thought of a better one later.

How would you explain what it means to be human to an ant? How would you get it to understand thermodynamics or whatever?

I dunno, it just seems like your overall thrust here is that humanity came out of the ooze through natural selection with everything that it needs to understand the mysteries of the universe. If we cannot see, touch, taste, smell, hear, or think it, either directly or through our instruments, it is impossible, and therefore it cannot happen.

Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.

If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.

And notwithstanding that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.

On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?

My understanding is that the shift can mostly be attributed to the rise of biblical minimalism as the dominant interpretive framework. Radiocarbon dating of the Jericho ruins did rule out Albright's preferred late Exodus date. But the radiocarbon date is consistent with an (in my opinion, far more interesting) earlier Exodus date, which would line up with the hypothesis that the Israeli people were the Hyksos, and which would also line up with a sequential interpretation of the timeline presented in Joshua, Judges, and Samuel.

> or are you implying that the interpretation of archaeological evidence either way is simply a matter of arbitrary personal preference?

Archaeological evidence constrains the set of defensible explanations. But the available evidence from this time period (Exodus, conquest of Canaan) is so scarce that it mostly comes down to personal preference.

> And notwithstanding that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.

How could it be otherwise? If there were reproducible evidence, then the phenomenon in question would be classified as natural.

> On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?

I'm quite certain that mind is more fundamental than matter, and I'm not very sure about a whole lot else.

Imagine that we found, today, the burning bush, still on fire but not consumed by it, thousands of years later. Say someone tried all known techniques to extinguish it, but it wouldn't. We may be able to study and characterize it precisely and call it "natural" in that sense, but I think many would agree that it would be very clear evidence that this claim in Exodus was actually historically based.

Similarly, say that we had credible videos, and other instrument recordings, of the blue fire that the Orthodox Patriarchs claim descends from the heavens on Jesus' tomb every year on Orthodox Easter. We may even develop a theory of what the substance is and what it represents and where it originates (spatially) and so on - but if it happens spontaneously and only affects certain things (candles held by the faithful) and not others (say, gasoline-soaked rags prepared by a scientist to test this out), then even a scientist would have to conclude that this phenomenon is real and outside the realm of physics as it is understood today.

But one very important thing to add here is that there is no bias against the naturalistic narratives of the Bible in mainstream archaeology / Bible scholarship / historiography. Huge swaths of the Bible are considered firmly historical, with many important Bible characters being well attested to and many events in the Bible being accepted as historical facts. For example, the prophet Elijah and King Ahab are widely considered to be real people. The events of the exile to Babylon are (now) considered as well to be real historical events.

> “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday”

I have memories from before last Thursday; therefore, this claim would contradict what currently seems to be true. That's the best I can do. If you're a physicalist, you cannot deny this claim with certainty either: if electrical activity in the brain is truly the substrate of consciousness, then you have to admit to the possibility that you could be a brain in a vat, hooked up to some kind of world simulator.

> “I am the only entity that exists”

That would imply that I'm God. And I'm pretty sure I'm not God. Therefore, other conscious entities must exist.

> “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”

To be is to be perceived, in my view. I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between the two.

Doesn't mean I believe it's true, though: I think the point is more being willing to admit that humans might not be the pinnacle of existence, fully able to comprehend every mystery of the universe.

Personally, this is the first time I've ever heard Norse mythology being tied into the ancient Hebrew text. I've heard a lot but clearly not everything, and I have no interest in all of the crazy. I'm tired of dealing with all of the crazy I've had to deal with up to now

Similarly, anyone claiming descent from King David is indeed claiming that the he was a real historical figure, but we don't need to accept their claim.

As for tracing Odin's lineage back to the Hebrew patriarchs, that is of course a form of syncretism, where people who believe in multiple religions create a mix of them for various purposes.

I have absolutely backed by nothing theory that ancient Armenians and Jews are the same people that got separated. For some tribe living on the shores of east black sea - a myth about massive flood and some saving boat that stopped on Ararat is easy to see how it could be created.

Of course it takes incredible levels of incompetence to be lost in sinay for 40 years. But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.

The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the original claims.

Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).

The Exodus narrative explicitly describes the early Israelites flocking to worship idols like that.

> Jeremiah, weeping and sighing: yes I know

(That's a tweet that pops up from time to time when exchanges like this happen.)

> the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time

I mean...yes, this is thoroughly documented throughout all of Judges/Kings/Chronicles/etc. Elijah is the one who stands against 450 prophets of Baal, and when he feels totally alone later on, God tells him that 7,000 haven't bent the knee - big enough to be reassuring, but certainly not a huge percentage of the northern kingdom's population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit

We knew Troy existed long before that because it remained as a city at least into the 3rd century CE. We just didn't know which ruins it was.

But until we dig up a boat in "the Holy Land" with biological samples from South America, Australia, and Siberia...

Pretty much every ancient religion/group has a "biblical" flood story. Even those from different continents. Haven't you seen Ancient Aliens?

I thought that was a story from when the Sumerians were driven up to Mesopotamia as the water level in the Persian Gulf rose when the glaciers of the last ice age melted.

That 40 years wandering in the wilderness was "lost" only in a poetic or opportunity cost sense. More literally, it was divinely-assigned Punishment Detail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Spies

Also note that the story is in Numbers and Deuteronomy, not in Exodus.

8,000 years ago.

> But apply exponential reduction for each generation of oral account and you may get to something resembling truth.

Unfalsifiable claims are not truth.

My favorite color is orange.

For the rest of HN, while that video is from someone who takes the Bible seriously, you can also view it as an interesting examination of the historical time period, even if with a particular lens and slant. Who doesn't have a particular lens and slant anyhow?

Painting the kingdoms as LARPing pastoralists who belonged to an older time is basically exactly what it would have looked like to the Tzorim, who had apparently bad relations with Israel from the mid-iron age onwards. Reinvoking that imagery is basically stoking a 2500 year old brotherly inferiority complex, if a highly esoteric one.

Not sure if you mean it this way but: I don't think the Tanakh itself claims otherwise. Its portrayal is basically an ~80-year run of David and Solomon accumulating a ton of land, wealth, and prestige; then the kingdom splits, and it's a directionally downward spiral from there, with near-constant pressure and incursion from greater powers.