Christians: Please explain the Exodus

[Aractus]

And the Entry into Canaan.

Here's the issue that I have. Most Christians agree that events in Genesis may or may not be literal, but from Exodus on they are literal. This includes the supernatural events such as the ten plagues, and Moses parting the Red Sea.

The commentary in the ESV Bible reads in part:

• "Doubts have often been cast on the historical reliability of the exodus account. It is true that no remains of the Israelites have been found in the area of Goshen in the eastern Nile delta or in the wilderness of Sinai. But in neither area would such remains be expected to survive. The mud-built huts of the Israelites have long been destroyed by repeated flooding, and, wandering through the wilderness, the people would not have left buildings or other permanent traces. It thus is unreasonable to expect such archaeological evidence. Furthermore, one should not expect to find extrabiblical texts regarding Israel’s stay and departure from Egypt, because the story is negative about Egypt. Egyptian texts are quite propagandistic and such a defeat would not mention such a defeat."

The above arguments are raised by evangelical scholars involved in the commentary for the Exodus. It is not raised by archaeologists, and in fact there is a general consensus among archaeologists that the biblical exodus did not occur, not even in a more rudimentary form. Contrast to this:

• If a great mass of fleeing Israelites had passed through the border fortifications of the pharaonic regime, a record should exist. Yet in the abundant Egyptian sources describing the time of the New Kingdom in general and the thirteenth century in particular, there is no reference to the Israelites, not even a single clue. We know of nomadic groups from Edom who entered Egypt from the desert. The Merneptah stele refers to Israel as a group of people already living in Canaan. But we have no due, not even a single word, about early Israelites in Egypt: neither in monumental inscriptions on walls of temples, nor in tomb inscriptions, nor in papyri. Israel is absent - as a possible foe of Egypt, as a friend, or as an enslaved nation. And there are simply no finds in Egypt that can be directly associated with the notion of a distinct foreign ethnic group (as opposed to a concentration of migrant workers from many places) living in a distinct area of the eastern delta, as implied by the biblical account of the children of Israel living together in the Land of Goshen (Genesis 47:27).
  
• But the possibility of a large group of people wandering in the Sinai peninsula is also contradicted by archaeology.
  
• Some archaeological traces of their generation - long wandering in the Sinai should be apparent. (...) Repeated archaeological surveys in all regions of the peninsula, including the mountainous area around the traditional site of Mount Sinai, near Saint Catherine's Monastery (see Appendix B), have yielded only negative evidence: not even a single sherd, no structure, not a single house, no trace of an ancient encampment. One may argue that a relatively small band of wandering Israelites cannot be expected to leave material remains behind. But modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads all over the world. Indeed, the archaeological record from the Sinai peninsula discloses evidence for pastoral activity in such eras as the third millennium BCE and the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods. There is simply no such evidence at the supposed time of the Exodus in the thirteenth century BCE.
  
  The conclusion - that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible - seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence at specific sites where the children of Israel were said to have camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert (Numbers 33) and where some archaeological indication - if present - would almost certainly be found.

These are quotes from a book titled The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (2001) written by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. They are archaeologists who specialise in the middle-east region and particularly in the ancient Land of Israel.

If you're a Christian you probably are not aware that such a consensus exists. Just as science disproves creationism, it also disproves the exodus.

Archaeologists have been searching for any corroborative evidence of the Exodus for 200 years. They have made breakthrough, such as proving that Israel did not visit Mt. Sinai. Biblical scholars claim that the bible therefore refers to "Biblical Mt. Sinai" a separate as yet unknown location. This argument is made in spite of the fact that a. there is no evidence whatsoever for there being another mountain called Mt. Sinai, b. almost all the other locations in the Exodus and Numbers are certainly real and locatable by their names.

So my question for xians is this: why should I disbelieve science and believe that a literal exodus is possible? One would expect that OT scholars should know better about the OT than general archaeologists, so shouldn't archaeologists know better about archaeology than OT scholars in general?