Truth of resurrection and death of the apostles (for Willowtree)

Please read Josephus's History of the Jewish People and then tell me if all persons, places, and events jibe with the same persons, places, and events as related in either the Jewish or the Christian Bibles.If all that Josephus writes about everything other than Jesus coincides in fact with the Bible, then one can begin to use Josephus as a reliable source regarding Jesus too.

Rei:Thank you for the elaboration and detail. Lately I am pressed for time, and what you supply is very important for others to understand regarding Josephus and the various texts attributed to him especially those in a style suspiciously "Hellenized" and in some respects similar to "Luke" and Saul of Tarsus' style prose.One question though, by "arabic" texts do you mean those written in Aramaic, or do you mean texts by Muslim Arabs post 625 CE? I believe most of what was written in Judea between 200 BCE and 70 CE was written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew as Aramaic was the popular language of that time and place.

Without going into the dating of all the volcanic destruction of the Minoan civilizaton and subsequent tital waves emptying the Sea of Reeds and "bloodying up" the Nile, and supplying a column of fire by night and smoke by day for the dead reckoning navigation of the desert by a wandering mass of over a million bickering, gold-laden, manna-subsistant, ex-slaves that left not one shard of pottery or a single chicken bone along the route, much less the bones of the half million souls unmercifully slaughtered at Mt. Sinai for the heretic metallugic manufactury, may I simply ask, Brian, wasn't Avaris simply the "House of Ramses" picked up and moved lock stock and barrel to Pirameses when the particular branch of the Nile on which Avaris was located silted up between the reigns of Ramses I and Ramses II?[This message has been edited by Abshalom, 12-11-2003][This message has been edited by Abshalom, 12-11-2003]

Brian,I stand busted! I think I am quoting the information from a recent Discovery Channel special wherein some very modern-day Egyptian farmers took a group of archaeologists to a site in the middle of a farm field where several broken, large-scaled statues were found several miles south of the more accepted site for Avaris. The same archaeologists also are involved in the excavation of the site at the more accepted location for the "House of Ramses" farther north in the Nile Delta and closer to the sea coast. Their current theory (the particular group of archaeologists interviewed in the TV special) is that when the Nile channel on which the southern site silted shut, the Ramses dynasty salvaged what they could and moved to the northern site and rebuilt. I have no idea of the validity of this theory at this time and can provide no further documentation.The program actually was more focused on the documented use of mud bricks for construction of the lesser buildings and storehouses in the "House of Ramses" sites because of the Biblical references to Hebrews as assigned to making mud bricks for the Pharoah Ramses. The thought behind this focus is that since the current popular scholarly opinion is that the story of Exodus was written sometime between 600 BCE and 200 BCE by scribes several centuries removed from "Moses," and the fact that the common building material of that time in Judea was stone, the writers would not have direct or even historic knowledge of mud brick construction from a distant past.[This message has been edited by Abshalom, 12-11-2003]

As Dr. Bill, Rei, and Brian have pointed out, it is most certain that any cognizant resident of Judea would have ample physical, political, and intellectual contact with both Egyptian and Babylonian cultures over extended periods of time to acquire sufficient knowledge or have at hand folklore from which to draw an accurate literary picture of cities constructed with mud bricks.The faulty "theory" that I repeated and thereby perpetuated regarding "how could Hebrew scribes centuries removed from Ramses' period know about building materials other than those commonly used in Jerusalem" is bogus and simply a result of my own couch-potato, Discovery Channel mental laziness.