The Historical Christ

[Minimalist]

In addition, while reading through earlier posts I noted the old canard that archaeology is proving the "exodus" or some such nonsense. It is not. In fact, modern archaeology, and by that I mean in the last 30 years, has more or less trashed the old testament account.

Link

That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an 'indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore.

The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium B.C. but appears to be, at most, a product of the mid-first.

It is necessary to dismiss 19th and early 20th century "archaeology" which is truth was little more than clerics masquerading as archaeologists and going to Palestine with a bible in one hand and a shovel in the other and pronouncing every rock they turned over as something that Moses pissed on. Their agenda was to "prove" the bible and, of course, they thought they did so. But modern science has relegated them to the dustbin of history and their bible along with them.