Malachi151

Basically, it seems that all of the so-called history of the Jews from prior to their being conquered by the Babylonian Empire in 586 is made up or highly exaggerated, and written down long after the fact.

It appears that many of the books of the Old Testament were written between the 6th and 2nd century BCE, but claim to have been written much earlier, and in these books the narrative follows the line of prophecies. In other words, someone writing in the 4th or 3th century wrote a story about something that supposedly happened around the 10th century, and in that story the narrative moves along by way of prophecy, such that they prophecy things that have already happened and then write of their fulfillment as though it were foretold.

This continues on for many centuries, until the Jewish people no longer have any memory otherwise, and these invented histories become their history and they believe them to be true. They think that they really had grand empires in the past, though none of this ever really existed.

This style of writing continues on, and this same style of writing produces the Gospels, which are written after the fact (of the destruction of Judea), and include back dated prophecies and references to old scriptures claiming prophecy fulfillment.

This religion crosses over into the Greek and Roman world and they, not having a background in the history of fabrication in Jewish writings, become amazed at the accuracy of Jewish prophecy, thus thinking that their religion must truly be "the one true religion", because their "powers of prediction" are so accurate that nothing can explain it other than the power of divine revelation.

In realty, however, Jewish history is mostly a fraud.

It seems that this is pretty much the case and what happened, which is really pretty amazing if you think about it.

Toto

There's nothing amazing about contructing a national history. You can see it happening now in many modern countries - the Religious Right has tried to convince us that our founding fathers were evangelical Christians, and you can go to any other nation or ethnic group and find comparable myth making.

I sincerely doubt that anyone was converted to either Christianity or Judaism because of its predictive value. People are converted for social reasons, then try to find reasons to back up their conversion.