Oldest Known Fragment of the New Testament Found

Did Moses ever hold down a paying job? Why no. He didn't.

The book Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions lays out a pretty compelling case that Samson was originally a sun god, who at some point got 'neutered' into being a 'hero.' (You can find free versions of the book at gutenberg.org and on Google Books, but I don't recommend the Gutenberg version, as it lacks the illustrations. There's also a couple of podcasts which read the book that will show up on a search in iTunes.)

I guess you could consider him a tour guide later on, a half-assed one though. As it's been pointed out he never even took his group to see the pyramids. And they were right by them.

But it sounds like he was more of a volunteer than in a paid position.

Maybe he was trying to "find himself" after college, sort of like some people who volunteer for the Peace Corps.
I bet god had to send him money all the time - kids are never really out of the nest I guess.

Um, Moses was an adviser to Pharaoh. IOW, a Gubmint employee.

And one hell of a Community Organizer.

Well, at the end of the 40 years in the wilderness, Moses died at 120. That makes him 80 when he lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Well past retirement age.

120? Methusala lived for around 900 or so. I bet he outlived his retirement money!

That, or he drove the Old Testament Pension Guaranty Corporation into bankruptcy.

Technically, Moses was an adoptive member of the Egyptian royal family was he not?

Interestingly, Moses couldn't have been an adviser to Pharaoh because "pharaoh" wasn't the term for an Egyptian ruler until perhaps 800 BC, if even then. It was the Greek pronunciation of an Egyptian word "pr-aa" that meant "great house" with a roof and columns, much like our "White House". The terms for Egypts rulers were king (nesu) or lord (neb). So whoever wrote the Bible didn't even have a clue what they were talking about when it came to Egypt's government.

Maybe those terms were used in the original, but after however-many translations the editors thought "Nobody's gonna know what those words mean anymore. We gotta use something everybody'll recognize. Oh, hai! What was that catchy number The Bangles did back in the 80s?"

You've got some catching up to do:

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2689445/

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2689463/

Preemptive here...
Moses hired Germans to count them.

Hence, atonal music.

And interestingly enough, the Jews have no records of their time in Egypt until several hundred years after they were said to have left. Almost as if someone decided to give them a back story.

Of course.

Because every group wants their history to say "we were a bunch of whiny, ungrateful slaves who couldn't stay loyal long enough to walk across a small desert before rebelling"...........

Given that they found themselves in a similar situation because of the Babylonian captivity, and wanted to keep everyone in line, that's exactly what they wanted their history to say.

I'm on my phone or I'd link to it, but we have accounts which describe when the Jews "found" the manuscript that contained Exodus. The scribe who "discovered" it promptly ran out into the throne room and began the 600 year old text as if it had been written yesterday. That's really hard to do, not only because of "drift" within a language, but because you're dealing with a written language that lacked vowels or spacing between words.

Despite allegedly being Egyptian slaves for 400 years, there aren't even period loan words between Egyptian and Hebrew. If you find an American black in Alabama who still speaks Swahili, without knowing a word of English, you'll know how crazy that is.

So you agree it's a fiction.

Oh, and:

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2689445/

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2689463/

Aw jeez, and I wanted to see how long it would take for her to notice. I've been NotDaytoned before, so I get to laugh and point when others are tricked.

The banjo was brought over by slaves from Africa as were some food crops. The "pollination" of cultures goes both ways in such situations.

Okay, these aren't as detailed as I'd like, but given that Dayton's unlikely to even read them, let alone admit their validity, I'm not going to do more digging than I already have. BTW, the author quoted, was a Christian, so its not like this is bullshit made up by someone with an ax to grind against Christianity. On the authorship of Exodus.

BTW, if you scroll down that same page, you'll find this gem in the footnotes:

Some more tidbits on the matter can be found here.

I didn't think there was a concensus on who the Pharoh was during the time that Exodus is supposed to have happened. I don't think there is evey concensus on when Exodus was supposed to have happened.

My personal feeling is that the J author who wrote the core from Genesis through Kings either was from somewhere around modern Iraq, based on the woeful ignorance of Egypt (for example, the only times the Sinai hasn't been occupied by Egyptian soldiers for the last 5,000 years is the brief periods when someone else's soldiers were occupying it. There was never an undefended desert for the Jews to be wandering around in), and the extensive and detailed borrowings from stories and myths from Assyria, Persia, or Sumeria, such as the six days of creation (in the same order!), the flood, the Tower of Babel, etc.

Don't tell that to the Bible.

A Christian website claims that it was Thutmoses III.

Who's mummy is on display.

In either case, its kind of hard to be at the bottom of the Red Sea/Sea of Reeds, if your mortal remains are on display.

Oh well that narrows it down.

I'm not trying to say the Exodus story is historical fact. I'm just saying I don't trust a guy who claims to know who the Pharoh of Egypt was when it was supposed to have happened.

I thought it was supposed to be Rameses 2? Also, the pharaoh was never to be in the sea, just the soldiers. Either way, the account is exaggerated at the very least.

He's one of several that people think may have been the Pharoh

Maybe it is lost on me but why in a thread about the oldest discovered New Testament writing are we discussing events in Exodus?