Shaking my head over reliance on fictional deities

To The Daily Sun,

John Demakowski’s use of ancients that are fictional Bible characters in a story of their relationship with a fictional deity to talk of history made me shake my head. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Aaron, Jacob, Joshua; all of those people were invented around the sixth and seventh centuries BCE. There are some things writers can’t hide as any historical linguist will attest.

Take the Moses stories. There is no evidence of any time in Egypt when the Jewish people were slaves under the yoke of the pharaoh. Israeli archeologists — not — trying to fit their finds into a preconceived notion will also tell you there is no evidence of any Exodus of thousands of Jews escaping Egypt and trekking in the desert for decades. We find million-year-old remains of humanity’s predecessors and we find 150,000-year-old settlements of early humans but we don’t find any evidence of any Exodus or grand conquest. Where are the bodies? Where are the campfires? Where is the trash? If they were there, we’d find their remains. Forty years of rubbish doesn’t just evaporate. It is all a grand myth; an epic tale that people mistake for fact.

This holds true even for the Jesus of the Bible. There is not one primary historical document to support this particular Jesus’ existence in Roman history. Christians attempt to counter this by using the writings of Josephus’ and Tacitus’ but both of these historians were born after the alleged events of the New Testament. Even the Gospels were written decades after the alleged events.

Mr. Demakowski should definitely read Jared Diamond’s fascinating Pulitzer Prize-winning “Guns, Germs, and Steel” if he can steer himself away from his dark tales with its “needy” Dark Lord. I would also recommend to that he also read “The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts” by Israeli archaeologist Israel Finklestein and historian Neil Asher Silberman.

James Veverka

Tilton