zog

Hello

It seems to me that the greatest problem with the Exodus story and the 1001 impossible things that occur in OT, is the way they are written they are very much products of the priests and upper class. An event like Exodus with the direct inteferance of God in history would produce ripples in society that would not be easily dislodged an event this spectacular would produce a whole parthenon of Heroes especially in an (Apparently) monothiestical society. Instead we basicly have Moses as the prime character in a story that is essentially one narrative following one character.
This is not the halmarks of a story that has in anyway been through an oral stage, even though it is clearly mythical; for me this demolishes any claim that it was based on a real event and went unwritten for many centuries.

However the claim that it was written down near contempory with events is not convincing due to the lack of any second hand reports i am not talking about historical evidence but from evidence from the society of the time of course it is impossible to go back and check but in a society such as this oral story tellers must have played a key role and if hundreds of thousands of peole witnessed these extraordinary events there would create dozens of stories of individual heroism, instead we have silence and the very suspicious non-crowd friendly Exodus story. These stories i feel would not have dissapeared look at how long they have lingered in traditional societies like the Pacific Ocean ones (which i wont attempt to spell); or the story tellers of Iran (still moaning about Alexander the Great no less); the events in the OT would have been the most extraordinary in all history and i doubt that the traditional eye witness anecdocal would have been forgotten it would have been passed down from Father to son especially amoung story teller familes for centuries to come exile or no exile.

The same goes for NT events, do we really believe that a man who raised people from the dead and events such as the raising of the Saints would have been forgotten even after the disporia?; and not collected by Christian propogandists

Instead silence.......
:banghead:

Clara Listensprechen

The one thing that both Abrahamic religions and paganism have in common is that celebrated leaders are all attributed with either godlike superhuman powers or were able to exact superhuman events because they found particular favor with God.

Bottom line is that people followed these leaders because they were storied to be in possession of such as the average joe shmoe next door didn't have and so you'd better watch out and pay your taxes and fight for their wars. If you were conquered, then your God wasn't as great as that of the conqueror's and so you switched sides if you weren't enslaved first.