Transcription
When you do take a historical approach, so look at the archaeological evidence for events or people described in the Bible, it's very hard to find corroborating evidence to support the biblical claims about the past. So, once you start saying, "Did this actually happen or not?" So, was Jonah swallowed by a big fish? Obviously, no. Was there an exodus from Egypt? No, there wasn't an exodus.
So, once you start doing that, then you have to start doubting the credibility of all the other claims that the Bible makes. One of the first things you said was Moses wasn't real. There's no evidence for him being a historical figure. Like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all of that. It's all made up. Um, but he's drawn on different sorts of religious figures that probably were around very broadly in the culture. So, he's like a bit of a magician.
How do you know, like when you say none of that was real, it was all made up? Because dating the text, you can see in terms of the Hebrew words that are used, in terms of some of the details like references to camels, there were no camels in that part of the world at that time. That kind of stuff tells you that these texts were written many centuries after the events that they're describing. The writers themselves were in their own kind of slavery and oppression, but in Babylon in the 6th century BCE, not in Egypt hundreds and hundreds of years before that. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does. It makes perfect sense.