I’m mostly look at this at the moment:
There’s a lot on that webpage! Clearly an attempt to be very thorough and accurate in its claims. In the comments at the bottom he notes that:
The following must be removed:
-all discussion on the exodus dating to 1446 BC
-dating of Jericho
-the new stele at Berlin does not support the exodus
-dream stele does not support the exodus
-conversion of akhenaten
-abandonment of Avaris
-use of Amarna lettersWhat is still valid;
-Oasis of Hazeroth
-Brickmaking and foreign slaves convergence
-everything about customs, geography, etymology
The honesty is great to see, though I do have a few separate questions regarding how far we should take certain claims. An example could be regarding the ‘extensive geography’ that the Biblical writers knew about Egypt like that it was ‘well watered’ (Gen 13:10). That, and avoiding military encampments along certain paths… don’t really require well a Moses who was “trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” or a people group being enslaved for 400 years to know of a few cultural customs and geography from surrounding nations. Maybe the truth is not in a 400 year enslavement of 2 million people but a middle ground like Richard Friedman?
I get the papers that Christian scholars write (thankfully my papers are on biophysics!), though there is a problem that we can face in certain fields that Pete Enns notes: we can ask any question but must arrive at predetermined conclusions. Such predetermined conclusions is the opposite of scholarly inquiry where you go anywhere the evidence takes you. But therein lies the tension in that there is this book that makes many supernatural claims that cannot and will not be accessible to any sort of testing.
All in all, kudos to @ManiacalVesalius for wrestling a lot with various claims and being open to changing his mind!
I’m sure of it! I think many of us might have a built in bias one way or the other. Perhaps the truth lies not in a minimalist or maximalist approach but somewhere in the middle??
Maybe its distracting to the topic, but what are you referring to explicitly? Certain we have little evidence of any sort before this and so perhaps it may follow a similar mistake that 19th century Biologists did in that they had no fossils before a certain point and then boom, the Cambrian ‘explosion.’ While certainly still impressive, that turned out to be a misnomer in that we now have 25-30 million years worth of microfossils (that we didn’t find until well into the 1900s) and even earlier trace fossils that suggest while rapid, it was not an overnight explosion as we tend to imagine.