Bible way to Heaven

[TheRocketSurgeon]

You're citing WOOD!? For fuck's sake, man. Wood has been disproved handily, and by Christian scholars!

Come ON with that shit! http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answ...ntwood.php

And you're right, Patheos is not an atheist website. I mistook it for something else.

Christian scholars! if they did within belief then it's fine.
This site is still not against the archaeology of the bible but just correcting the dating,and I don't trust carbon dating.

---

settling the Dispute
It is clear that the question is one of chronology. When was City IV Jericho destroyed? The scholarly consensus says ca. 1550 B.C., Wood says ca. 1400 B.C. What source can we turn to to settle this dispute?
In fact, radiocarbon is such a source. In the early 1990's, when Wood first published his claims, there was only one radiocarbon measurement available for City IV. It was from a piece of charcoal dated by the British Museum to 1410 plus or minus 40 years B.C. Unfortunately, this date was later retracted by the British Museum, along with dates of several hundred other samples. The British Museum found that their radiocarbon measurement apparatus had gone out of calibration for a period of time, and thus had yielded incorrect dates during that period. The corrected date for the charcoal sample from City IV turned out to be consistent with Kenyon's ca. 1550 B.C. date for the City IV destruction.
The corrected date no longer supported Wood's proposal, but it was insufficient to falsify the proposal. Radiocarbon dates on charcoal give the date the wood grew, not the date it was burned. To be consistent with Bryant Wood's proposal, the wood which burned to produce the charcoal sample would need to have been cut from a living tree 150 years prior to the destruction. Of course, this is not impossible.
As mentioned earlier, no other radiocarbon dates from samples from City IV Jericho were available in the early 1990's. In 1995, however, results were published by Hendrik J. Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht from high-precision radiocarbon measurements made on eighteen samples from Jericho. Six of these samples were charred cereal grains from the City IV destruction. Bruins and van der Plicht did not set out to disprove Wood's thesis. Their stated purpose was to contribute "toward the establishment of an independent radiocarbon chronology of Near Eastern archaeology."
The chart below is the same as the chart shown earlier. Heavy black bars have been added showing the range of dates radiocarbon gave from the six charred grain samples from City IV Jericho.

Bruins and van der Plicht recognized the results of their work held a serious implication for Wood's theory. They devoted only one sentence to this implication:

Further, the fortified Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sultan [Jericho] was not destroyed by ca.1400 BC, as Wood (1990) suggested.

As is evident from the chart, the radiocarbon measurements strongly support the chronology advanced by Kenyon long before the radiocarbon measurements were made. This radiocarbon evidence falsifies Wood's theory. City IV was destroyed ca. 1550 B.C., not ca. 1400 B.C. City IV Jericho was not destroyed by Joshua.

Other Considerations
The chronology of Jericho is by no means the only problem associated with the traditional biblical chronology of the Exodus and Conquest. For example, even if Wood's chronology of Jericho were viable, the complete absence of fortified habitation at et-Tell (identified by almost all scholars with the biblical Ai) for 1000 years prior to the traditional biblical chronology date for its destruction by Joshua is still left to be explained. And the archaeological and historical data from Egypt must also be explained. These depict Egypt as a stable, properous nation at the very time the traditional biblical chronology date for the Exodus says Egypt should be a nation devastated by plagues.
Aardsma's Solution
Having settled the dispute over the date of City IV Jericho's destruction and having demonstrated that Wood's chronology is not valid, we are left with the problem we started with. Traditional biblical chronology conflicts with the archaeological/radiocarbon chronology of Jericho. Traditional biblical chronology places the date of the Conquest of Jericho at a time when there was no city at Jericho. In fact, as noted in the preceding paragraph, traditional biblical chronology of the Exodus and the Conquest is plagued by such problems.
Gerald E. Aardsma, Ph.D., has proposed an alternate solution, one that solves these problems and does justice to both biblical and secular scientific evidence. He has shown that the correct biblical chronology date for the Conquest is ca. 2400 B.C., not ca. 1400 B.C. By this solution, it is the ca. 2400 B.C. destruction at Jericho, shown in the charts above, which must be credited to Joshua. For further information on Dr. Aardsma's solution,

---

                               

Wow, is that a selective set of quotations from the article! 

The article points out that they're not only  using the radiocarbon dating, but that Wood's ideas fail on several levels, partly to do with the destruction of Ai.  The "solution" by Dr. Aardsma is to push the entire story back a thousand years in time, in direct defiance of the chronology presented by the Bible, in order to make the Bible stories work... except, then, you don't have Pharaoh Ramses (for whom we do have good archaeological evidence) as part of the story, do you?

Mmmm, problems, problems.