(January 8, 2016 at 12:33 pm)athrock Wrote:(December 30, 2015 at 11:54 pm)Minimalist Wrote: The film goes completely off the rails at the 18:35 mark. At that point, Mahoney evaluates all the evidence which has told him that the story is bullshit and says roughly " if it wasn't Ramesses II then who was it?" Right there he reveals that he is a believer not a scholar. He has decided that there HAD to be a pharaoh of the Exodus and if it wasn't Ramesses II then it HAD to be someone else.
No. It doesn't.
Baloney. I think you have missed Mahoney's point.
He asks, IF the Exodus really occurred, then WHY did it have to occur during the reign of Rameses?
Well, it didn't HAVE to occur then. So, what Mahoney does is to look for the six key elements of the Exodus story to see whether they (in sequence) could be documented from any other point in history. If not, then NO Exodus.
However, Mahoney DOES find these six sequential elements in Egyptian history, and they occurred during the Middle Kingdom.
So, you are simply wrong in your assertion that Mahoney ignored the evidence. Instead, Mahoney re-evaluated the evidence that he did find and realized that it fit an earlier time period.
You like him conveniently ignore any evidence which counters the proposition he wants to push. Remember, he made it perfectly clear that he could not accept the conclusions of mainstream archaeology that his fucking fairy tales were bullshit. So he trotted out some crackpot to pretend that all you have to do is move Egyptian history (only) around by some 3 centuries and he can make a case. Well, that's cherry picking horseshit and ignores the reality of what was going on in the ANE during the Middle Bronze Age.
The Egyptians came out of the Second Intermediate Period when Ahmose I drove the Hyksos, who were Canaanites if not "Israelites" out of the country and set the stage for 4 centuries of Egyptian domination of Canaan. The Hyksos were a foreign dynasty ruling Lower Egypt, they were not "slaves." The Amarna library gives us a clear picture of what was going on in Canaan during the reigns of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten and there are no fucking "Israelites" mentioned.
Much as when later xtian writers arbitrarily picked a period to stick their jesus myth the writers of the OT clumsily tried to shoe horn their story into earlier history but it simply does not work.
Be like drippy if you like. But the world has enough assholes already.
