“Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy … this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”[1]

He also wrote

“Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness.” [2]

Who is Sir Willam Ramsay? According to McDowell he is one of the greatest archaeologists of all time. Here’s Wikipedia on him …

Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (15 March 1851, Glasgow –20 April 1939) was a Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament.
…
William Ramsay paid particular interest in the New Testament events, particularly the Book of Acts and Pauline Epistles. When he first went to Asia Minor, many of the cities mentioned in Acts had no known location and almost nothing was known of their detailed history or politics. The Acts of the Apostles was the only record and Ramsay fully expected his own research to prove the author of Acts hopelessly inaccurate since no man could possibly know the details of Asia Minor more than a hundred years of the event. He therefore set out to put the writer of Acts on trial. He devoted his life to unearthing the ancient cities and documents of Asia Minor. After a lifetime of study, however, he concluded: ‘Further study…showed that the book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement’ (The Bearing of Recent Discovery, p. 85). On page 89 of the same book, Ramsay accounted, ‘I set out to look for truth on the borderland where Greece and Asia meet, and found it there [in Acts]. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment…’ When Ramsay turned his attention to Paul’s letters, most of which the critics dismissed as forgeries, he concluded that all thirteen New Testament letters that claimed to have been written by Paul were really his. [3]

[1] Ramsay, Sir W. M., The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915, p. 222.
[2] Ramsay, W. M., St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1962 (originally published in 1895), p. 81
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mitchell_Ramsay

“As a matter of fact, however, it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. (Glueck, Nelson, Rivers in the Desert, New York: Grove Press, 1959, pp. 31-32.)

Glueck apparently also claimed to have found King Solomon’s mines in Faynan/Edom and got laughed at. But a recent discovery has vindicated him. Enjoy …

King Solomon’s Copper Mines?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2008) — Did the Bible’s King David and his son Solomon control the copper industry in present-day southern Jordan? Though that remains an open question, the possibility is raised once again by research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
…
For years, scholars have argued whether the Edomites were sufficiently organized by the 10th to 9th centuries BCE to seriously threaten the neighboring Israelites as a true “kingdom.” Between the World Wars, during the “Golden Age” of biblical archaeology, scholars explored, as Levy describes it, with a trowel in one hand and Bible in the other, seeking to fit their Holy Land findings into the sacred story. Based on his 1930s surveys, American archaeologist Nelson Glueck even asserted that he had found King Solomon’s mines in Faynan/Edom. By the 1980s, however, Glueck’s claim had been largely dismissed. A consensus had emerged that the Bible was heavily edited in the 5th century BCE, long after the supposed events, while British excavations of the Edomite highlands in the 1970s-80s suggested the Iron Age had not even come to Edom until the 7th century BCE.

“Now,” said Levy, director of the Levantine Archaeology Lab at UCSD and associate director of the new Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), “with data from the first large-scale stratified and systematic excavation of a site in the southern Levant to focus specifically on the role of metallurgy in Edom, we have evidence that complex societies were indeed active in 10th and 9th centuries BCE and that brings us back to the debate about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible narratives related to this period.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases…1027174545.htm

Yes, it sure does. Combine this kind of cool stuff with the ongoing demise of the Documentary Hypothesis, the Rise of the Rohl Chronology and such, and Biblical historicity advocates like me are finally starting to have fun again!

Yesterday, he highlighted and commented on an article which appeared in Haaretz (a leading Israeli daily newspaper).  From Joel’s blog …

The Messiah stories are particularly interesting to me. Iran, as I mentioned the other day, is running a new documentary TV series on Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology (End Times theology), consistent with President Ahmadinejad’s on-going call for the Muslim world to prepare for the “imminent” arrival of the Islamic Messiah, known as the Mahdi. The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

There’s a new scientific discipline out there called “Geomythology.” What is it? And how does it work? Here’s the article that alerted me to it … “Tracking Myth to Geological Reality” …

Science 4 November 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5749, pp. 762 – 764
DOI: 10.1126/science.310.5749.762

Tracking Myth to Geological Reality

Kevin Krajick*

Once dismissed, myths are winning new attention from geologists who find that they may encode valuable data about earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other stirrings of the earth
…
More and more geoscientists are willing to combine their work with such stories these days, in a budding discipline called geomythology. Volcanologist Floyd McCoy of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, says discussing myth has traditionally been “a good way to sink your own credibility”; it can put you on the list with flaky Atlantologists and other amateur zealots. But, says McCoy, “I’d be a fool to write it all off. There is a new realization that some myths have something to say.” Myths can sometimes alert researchers to previously unheeded geohazards; in other cases, where science has demonstrated the danger, legends “enrich the record” and reinforce the fact that people lie in harm’s way, says paleoseismologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Seattle, who has spearheaded many studies of seismic events in the Pacific Northwest. The trick is teasing out which myths carry kernels of truth that can be connected to hard data.

Deities of flood and fire

The movement traces in part to the 1980s, when scientists realized that the slow march of geologic time is sometimes punctuated by biblical-scale catastrophes, such as the giant meteorite that wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. After this was accepted, some (usually those with tenure) felt freer to wonder if near-universal myths of great floods and fires implied that such disasters also have punctuated human time. In the 1990s, Columbia University marine geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan argued that rising Mediterranean sea levels following the last deglaciation topped what is now the Bosporus Strait and roared into the Black Sea 7600 years ago, serving as the original inspiration for the biblical flood. Their work triggered sharp criticism and a torrent of research, resulting in growing acceptance of some sort of Black Sea flooding (Science, 22 September 2000, p. 2021). Whether the book of Genesis somehow grew from this is a further step, admits Ryan, who presented his latest findings at the International Geoscience Program in Istanbul, Turkey, in early October.
…
Myths may provide unusually precise tools in the Pacific because some are tied to royal genealogies that can be roughly dated. In Hawaii, where the genealogies go back 95 generations, archaeologist Bruce Masse of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has compiled stories of battles between the fire deity Pele and others that seem to relate to volcanic eruptions; the reigns of kings at the time of the “battles” correlate within a few decades to radiocarbon dates of burned vegetation under lava sheets. Other tales apparently record celestial events. One, said to have taken place during the reign of King Kakuhihewa, narrates a human sacrifice at dawn interrupted by giant owls who fly across the sun. When Masse lined up the number of generations with recent NASA tables that calculate times of past events, he hit a match: A rare solar eclipse took place over Hawaii precisely at sunrise on 10 April 1679.

See also my article entitled “Comet or Meteor Impact Around the Time of the Flood?“

Why am I, a Bible-believing Creationist, interested in this? Because myths are not the only records that scientists should take notice of. They should also take notice of one of the most carefully recorded and transmitted collection of records on the planet — the collection of documents we now call “The Holy Bible.” Just think what a radically positive difference it would make in our study of geology (and many other disciplines) if all scientists took these records seriously!

By the end of the decade [1970s], however, and continuing throughout the 1980s and into the present decade [1990s], one major study after another, like a series of hammer blows, has rejected the main claims of the Documentary Theory and the criteria on the basis of which they were argued. Winnet’s view, for which he expected few if any converts, is now in the driving-seat, so to speak, and those who adhere to the Documentary Theory are very much on the defensive. As a result, Pentateuchal research since the mid-1970s has become a mirror image of what it was in the years following the publication of Wellhausen’s study of the composition of the Pentateuch in the mid-1870s: whereas at that time the Documentary Theory which he had so persuasively argued was in the ascendant, commanding ever increasing support, today it is in sharp decline–some would say in a state of advanced rigor mortis–and new solutions are being argued and urged in its place. (p. 95-96)

This author still is an advocate of the DH, but the recent convulsions have caused him to modify his positions somewhat.

If you are a Questia subscriber as I am, you can read the book yourself here … http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=10126098

And one of those “new solutions” is some form of tablet theory. Not necessarily Wiseman’s … his has some problems. But some form resembling it.

First, Champollion was entirely wrong in reading name-ring 29 as Iouda-ha-malek (‘Judah the Kingdom’). As Wilhelm Max-Muller pointed out as early as 1888 (Rohl footnote 5), ring 29 should be read Yad-ha-melek which translated literally means ‘Hand of the King’ and should be understood as ‘Monument’ or ‘Stela of the King.’ In other words, it is a location in Palestine where some un-named ruler had erected a commemorative stela. More damaging still to Champollion’s hasty reading is the geographical location of this Yadhamelek;(6) its position in the list locates it in northern Israel, well outside the boundaries of Judah, and so name-ring 29 cannot possibly be translated as ‘Judah the Kingdom.’

Below is a map of Shoshenk’s campaign with Rehoboam’s fortified cities shown with letters. As you can see, name-ring 29 would most logically fall somewhere close to name-rings 30 & 31 and 27 & 28 on the map … that is, nowhere close to Rehoboam’s kingdom at all.

Finally, I Kings 11:40 tells us that Jeroboam, the king of Israel (Northern kingdom) took refuge with Shishak to escape the wrath of Solomon. If Shishak = Shoshenk (Champollion’s view), then why would Shishak invade his ally’s (Jeroboam’s) kingdom in the northern part of Israel and leave the southern kingdom untouched? This is not logical.

SUMMING IT UP
Rohl goes on to explain how this fundamental error of Champollion has caused the Third Intermediate Period (TIP) Chronology to be out by several centuries, thus causing archaeologists to look in the wrong dynasty for evidence of Israel’s activities. Again, the points Rohl makes are …

1) Champollion mistranslated name-ring 29 on Shoshenk I’s campaign list, causing him to equate Shoshenk I with the Biblical Shishak.
2) Champollion failed to notice that the location represented by name-ring 29 could not possibly have been ‘Judah the Kingdom’ because of the positively identified locations of the name-rings surrounding name-ring 29
3) No Egyptologists since Champollion (except Rohl) — including the great Kenneth Kitchen — have questioned Champollion’s assertion that Shoshenk = Shishak, thus perpetuating a several century error in Egyptological studies
4) Once we correct this error, we find all kinds of evidence for Israel’s activities as Rohl shows in this book (See my article HERE)

Why does this matter? It matters because now, with Rohl’s New Chronology, the Biblical accounts of the Israelites are confirmed as historical by the findings of archaeology. The Bible is a real history book which relates real activities of real people. It is not a “Bronze Age myth” as skeptics like to say. In fact, it is the most accurate history book in the world … which makes sense that it would be if it truly is the Message of the Creator to Mankind.

Yet there are many traditions not only of the Great Flood, long-lived patriarchs, a Golden Age before the Flood, and many other details paralleling the accounts in Genesis, there are also traditions of Sacred Writings handed down from these patriarchs. It is some of these writings that we postulate were the source material for Moses when he compiled the Pentateuch and added his own material. Many folks have asked me for evidence of these writings, so I present this now. Linked below is a scan from Volume 2 of a fascinating 3 volume set I have by George Stanley Faber, entitled The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (London, 1816).

“Respecting the Sacred Books”

I have referenced him before and his Volume 1 is available in a Google Full View Book HERE. Various forms of “Genesis Tablet Theories” are now coming to the fore and the previously reigning theory, the Documentary Hypothesis, is garnering more and more skepticism.

LINKS
My Book Review on the Wiseman Hypothesis
“Modified” Wiseman Hypothesis by Curt Sewell
Wikipedia Article on Wiseman Hypothesis which references my blog article.
See also Garrett, Duane, Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch, Baker Book House, 1991, referenced in my recent Formal Debate on Genesis.
Current ongoing debate on The Documentary Hypothesis.

SOME INTERESTING EXCERPTS FROM THE RELEVANT ARTICLES

FROM THE NATURE ARTICLE …

Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel

Sanjeev Gupta1, Jenny S. Collier1, Andy Palmer-Felgate1 & Graeme Potter2
Nature 448, 342-345 (19 July 2007)

Our study provides the first direct evidence that a megaflood event was responsible for carving the English Channel valley network. Normal fluvial processes cannot explain erosion of the Northern Palaeovalley, because before flooding no significant river was sourced from the Weald–Artois ridge to the east16 (Fig. 1). [So how can you insist that normal, fluvial processes formed the Grand Canyon? Possibly now you will change your view and admit that creationists have been right?] Tidal scour is not a viable mechanism because the superposed dendritic drainages indicate subaerial exposure of the valley floor after incision. Erosion by glaciers5, 6 is untenable, because there is no evidence that these advanced into the English Channel17. Our observations are consistent with erosion by high-magnitude flood flows, as in the Channeled Scabland, in which analogous landforms were indisputably formed by catastrophic drainage of the glacial lake Missoula1, 13 (see Supplementary Information for additional discussion). [Thanks. And it only took conventional geologists 40 years to admit Harlan Bretz was right about the Channeled Scablands. How much longer will it take for them to admit that creationists are right about all other aspects of Flood Geology? 40 more years?]

FOOTNOTE #1 TO THE NATURE ARTICLE

The Study of Superfloods

Victor R. Baker*
Science 29 March 2002:
Vol. 295. no. 5564, pp. 2379 – 2380

Large, high-energy floods are both rare and dangerous. [Rare. Yes. Like ... there's only been ONE ... ever] Evidence of their impacts in the geologic record is often subtle, but the greatest obstacles to advancing the knowledge of superfloods have come from misapplied scientific logic. [Quite an understatement!] Particularly troublesome are flawed notions of hypothesis testing, verification, and the principle of simplicity. Contrary to conventional views of scientific methodology, there has never been a general theory of superfloods that could be tested, confirmed, or falsified by observation and experiment. Instead, as in much of geology, observation has preceded theory, and understanding has emerged as previously unrecognized phenomena were discovered.

Methodological problems with the study of superfloods began early, at the inception of geology as a science. The influential 19th-century geologist Sir Charles Lyell passionately advocated a regulative principle for validating the inferences that geologists make about the past. Presuming that geologists reason by induction, Lyell thought that such a principle was necessary if geological inferences about past causative processes were to achieve the same kind of certainty as those made in experimental sciences like chemistry and physics. It was Lyell’s most capable critic, the Cambridge polymath William Whewell, who in 1832 named this principle “uniformitarianism.” Epistemological uniformitarianism holds that scientifically reliable inferences about the past must be confined to invoking only the slow-acting, low-magnitude processes currently in evidence to human observers.

This principle was applied blindly by Lyell’s intellectual descendents well into the 20th century. [Yes, it was, but alas ... many skeptics don't like me saying so] In the 1920s, Bretz’s documentation (1) of the spectacular effects of late-glacial flooding in the Channeled Scabland region in Washington state met with immense criticism from the scientific community. Not until the 1960s was it generally accepted that this flooding was caused by catastrophic failure of the immense ice-dammed Glacial Lake Missoula along the southern margin of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which covered the northwestern mountains of North America about 20,000 years ago. [Interesting how hard headed academics can be when they do not wish to believe something.]

For the whole story of how geologists laughed at Harlan Bretz about his megaflood theory of the formation of the Washington Channeled Scablands and the Palouse Canyon, click HERE. They’re not laughing anymore.

OTHER MEGAFLOODS
In the footnotes of the article referenced above, there is another interesting article referenced in the journal Science entitled “The Study of Superfloods.”(49) The author highlights the failure of Lyellian principles as evidenced by Bretz and the Channeled Scablands debate, then goes on to list many other instances of evidence which has accumulated over the last 40 years for catastrophic failures of ice-dammed lakes, which in turn explain canyon and channeled scabland features much more satisfactorily than any gradualist explanations. Examples include the southern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the Altai Mountains of the upper Ob River basin in Asia, the upper Yenesai river basin in Tuva, the Columbia basin and others.

WHY SO CONTROVERSIAL?
The author of this Science study notes that these studies are “highly controversial.” Interesting, isn’t it? Why would they be so controversial? I can think of no other reason except the strong bias against catastrophism, caused by the strong anti-historical-nature-of-Genesis bias of many 19th century academics in many fields. Perhaps geologists know where this “neo-catastrophism trail” will lead. Perhaps they realize that to admit a megaflood created the English Channel and many other features similar to it in various parts of the world means they may have to admit that a megaflood created the Grand Canyon. God forbid! If that happens, then much of what they learned about geology in school should be thrown out the window. If the Grand Canyon was formed catastrophically and mainstream geologists have been wrong about it all these years, then what about all the other things geologists have been saying? Like how 2 miles of fossil bearing sedimentary rock occurring all over the globe was supposedly laid down gradually over millions of years. Maybe they will have to admit they are wrong about that too. Which, of course, is what modern creationists like Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, authors of the landmark volume, The Genesis Flood(50), have been saying since 1961.

GLOBAL FLOOD EXPLANATION FITS THE EVIDENCE MUCH BETTER
Morris and Whitcomb have been saying things like the following for years …
1) Huge canyons like the Grand Canyon are better explained as catastrophic erosion, not gradual erosion
2) Huge thicknesses of sedimentary rock are better explained as being laid catastrophically, not gradually
3) Massive quantities of fossils buried in rock layers all over the globe, most of them being marine fossils are better explained by catastrophic burial, not gradual burial
4) Repeated uplift and downsinking of entire continents as required by uniformitarian explanations is not compatible with observed horizontal limits and tapering of formations
5) What kind of a windstorm would be required to deposit the 300 foot thick Coconino Sandstone aerially? Impossible. The Coconino is better explained as a water-laid deposit just like the rest of the layers.
6) The written and oral histories of hundreds of cultures all over the world include an account of some sort of flood containing many of the key elements of the Biblical account. This fact cannot be satisfactorily explained by numerous local inundations happening in various places.

Please refer to my recent Formal Debate at RichardDawkins.net for more detailed discussion on evidences for the Flood of Noah which includes a discussion on the civilizations of China and Egypt being founded post-Flood.(51) I continued this discussion here at IIDB and showed evidences for an astronomical date of 2170BC for the Great Pyramid, which of course would have been built after the Flood and would have required a large work force. I showed in my discussion that a large workforce would been quite possible.(52) Also, David Rohl has shown evidence that conventional dates for the founding of Egypt are likely wrong and that this event should be moved forward by as much as several hundred years.(45) This in turn lends support to the inferred dates for the Great Flood of Noah and the Dispersion at the Tower of Babel. With these things in mind, the objection that Flood skeptics raise about the civilizations of Egypt and China existing through the supposed dates of the Flood loses its force.

CONCLUSION
Does the evidence presented here for a megaflood cause for the formation of the English Channel prove the historicity of the Global Flood of Noah? No. But it shows very clearly that conventional wisdom in academia — in this case in the field of geology — can be horrendously wrong. And that they can persist in this error for over a hundred years! My post today should serve as a huge dose of humility for any arrogant geological thinking about how wrong creationists are and how silly the Genesis Flood account is and so on. As it turns out, the creationists were right about the catastrophic formation of the Palouse Canyon and will probably turn out to be right about the catastrophic formation of many other similar features all over the world, as this English Channel article so amply illustrates. And they will ultimately turn out to be right about the catastrophic formation of the sedimentary layers themselves and about the catastrophic separation of the continents –remember Antonio Snider-Pelligrini who came up with Plate Tectonics … CATASTROPHIC Plate Tectonics, that is.

NOTE: These footnotes begin at (40) because this post is an excerpt from a formal debate at IIDB. Click HERE to read the full debate.

(40) Sanjeev Gupta, Jenny S. Collier, Andy Palmer-Felgate & Graeme Potter, “Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel,” Nature 448, 342-345 (19 July 2007)
(41) Sanford, John, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, New York: Ivan Press, 2005. Dr. Sanford is a highly successful Cornell geneticist who with over 70 published scientific articles and over 25 patents. He came the conclusion from study in his own field of genetics that the Primary Axiom of Evolution — Random Mutation + Natural Selection — is wrong.
(42) See Dr. Allen MacNeill’s recent comment that the Modern Synthesis of the Theory of Evolution is dead, “Long Live the Evolving Synthesis.” http://www.uncommondescent.com/archi…#comment-69014 Dr. MacNeill is a Cornell professor who made a name for himself last summer by teaching a class about Intelligent Design. Many evolutionists were furious that he would dare to even give ID exposure at all. See his blog at http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/
(43) McDowell, Josh, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Vol 2, Here’s Life Publishers, 1975, p. 51. McDowell was a Biblical skeptic in college and set out to disprove Christianity. But oops! He became a Christian in the process because he realized that it was true after all!
(44) Garrett, Duane, Rethinking Genesis: The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch, Baker Book House, 1991. See page 13 and following for his discussion of how the Documentery Hypothesis is now dead in spite of many scholars still supporting it. They are essentially animating a corpse.
(45) Rohl, David M., Pharoahs and Kings: a Biblical Quest, Crown Publishers, 1995. See my blog for some highlights from the book. http://afdave.wordpress.com/
(46) http://afdave.wordpress.com/2007/02/01/more-useful-quotes-for-creationists/ Search the page for “Ager”.
(47) http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/2954 See also Ref. 49 below.
(48) “Making the paper: Sanjeev Gupta — How a map of the English Channel explained Britain’s island status”, Nature 448, xv (19 July 2007).
(49) Victor R. Baker, “The Study of Superfloods,” Science 29 March 2002: Vol. 295. no. 5564, pp. 2379 – 2380
(50) Morris, Henry M., Whitcomb, John C., The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961.
(51) http://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10675
(52) Great Pyramid Discussion at IIDB w/ Dean Anderson

From the back cover … “In Pharoahs and Kings, Egyptologist and ancient historian David Rohl presents a revolutionary theory that challenges the modern skeptical view of Old Testament history. Rohl demonstrates that archaeologists have been looking in the right places for evidence of the Israelites–but in completely the wrong time. Pharoahs and Kings reveals the true historical setting of the biblical epics, providing astonishing archaeological evidence for the existence of the Old Testament’s most charismatic personalities.

Highlights (Rohl’s page numbers in parentheses) …
* Champollion identified Shishak with Shoshenk I based on an incorrect reading of Name Ring 29 on Shoshenk I’s campaign city list (p. 122)
* Although this was pointed out as early as 1888 by Max-Muller, the identification of Shoshenk I with Shishak had not been challenged by Egyptologists until Rohl. (p. 122)
* Rohl makes an excellent case that the Conventional Chronology (Kitchen’s TIP chronology) is off by several hundred years (p. 11)
* Rohl points out several serious problems with dendrochronological ‘calibration’ of Carbon 14 dating which lends support to the several hundred year adjustment he proposes (App. C)
* In Rohl’s corrected New Chronology, we find much evidence for Israel’s activities (assumed to be missing by conventionalists), including …

* A Papyrus dated to the generation just prior to the birth of Moses listing slaves with Hebrew names–Menahem, Issachar, Asher, and Shiprah (one of the names of a Hebrew midwife listed in Exodus 1:15-21) (p. 276)
* Manetho wrote that that in the reign of Dudimose (the Pharoah of the Exodus under the New Chronology), ‘a blast of God smote us’ (i.e. the Egyptians) (p. 283)
* The 13th Dynasty of Egypt ended abruptly with the reign of Dudimose and we are told by Manetho that a foreign power took over the rule of Egypt. This would make sense if Dudimose’s army had just been destroyed as related in the Book of Exodus.
* The archaeology of Avaris (northern city in the land of Goshen) shows that, at approximately at this time, there was a terrible catastrophe–shallow burial pits all over Avaris into which victims had been hurriedly cast. (p. 279)
* The palace and cult statue of Joseph the Vizier of Egypt (p. 327)
* Evidence for the fallen walls and burned city of Jericho in the correct time period thus vindicating Garstang and refuting Kenyon (p. 299)

CHAMPOLLION’S BIG MISTAKE
Jean Francois Champollion has been called ‘the Father of Egyptology.’ David Rohl, in his book Pharoahs and Kings: A Biblical Quest, relates that the Conventional Chronology of Egypt, such as that presented by Professor Kenneth Kitchen is based upon certain key assumptions received from Champollion, one of which, Rohl says, has never been questioned before his time. This key assumption is that the Egyptian Pharoah, Shoshenk I whose name is found on the Egyptian monuments is one and the same as ‘Shishak,’ the Pharoah who plundered Solomon’s temple according to the Bible (II Chron. 12). (Rohl, p. 10) But where did this assumption come from? It came from Champollion when he made his first (and only) visit to Egypt. Rohl writes (p. 122) …

First, Champollion was entirely wrong in reading name-ring 29 as Iouda-ha-malek (‘Judah the Kingdom’). As Wilhelm Max-Muller pointed out as early as 1888 (Rohl footnote 5), ring 29 should be read Yad-ha-melek which translated literally means ‘Hand of the King’ and should be understood as ‘Monument’ or ‘Stela of the King.’ In other words, it is a location in Palestine where some un-named ruler had erected a commemorative stela. More damaging still to Champollion’s hasty reading is the geographical location of this Yadhamelek;(6) its position in the list locates it in northern Israel, well outside the boundaries of Judah, and so name-ring 29 cannot possibly be translated as ‘Judah the Kingdom.’

Below is a map of Shoshenk’s campaign with Rehoboam’s fortified cities shown with letters. As you can see, name-ring 29 would most logically fall somewhere close to name-rings 30 & 31 and 27 & 28 on the map … that is, nowhere close to Rehoboam’s kingdom at all.

Finally, I Kings 11:40 tells us that Jeroboam, the king of Israel (Northern kingdom) took refuge with Shishak to escape the wrath of Solomon. If Shishak = Shoshenk (Champollion’s view), then why would Shishak invade his ally’s (Jeroboam’s) kingdom in the northern part of Israel and leave the southern kingdom untouched? This is not logical.

SUMMING IT UP
Rohl goes on to explain how this fundamental error of Champollion has caused the Third Intermediate Period (TIP) Chronology to be out by several centuries, thus causing archaeologists to look in the wrong dynasty for evidence of Israel’s activities. Again, the points Rohl makes are …

1) Champollion mistranslated name-ring 29 on Shoshenk I’s campaign list, causing him to equate Shoshenk I with the Biblical Shishak.
2) Champollion failed to notice that the location represented by name-ring 29 could not possibly have been ‘Judah the Kingdom’ because of the positively identified locations of the name-rings surrounding name-ring 29
3) No Egyptologists since Champollion (except Rohl) — including the great Kenneth Kitchen — have questioned Champollion’s assertion that Shoshenk = Shishak, thus perpetuating a several century error in Egyptological studies
4) Once we correct this error, we find all kinds of evidence for Israel’s activities as Rohl shows in this book. (See above)

Why does this matter? It matters because now, with Rohl’s New Chronology, the Biblical accounts of the Israelites is confirmed as historical by the findings of archaeology. The Bible is a real history book which relates real activities of real people. It is not a “Bronze Age myth” as skeptics like to say. In fact, it is the most accurate history book in the world … which makes sense that it would be if it truly is the Message of the Creator to Mankind.

6/15/07 – NEW FORMAL DEBATE ON GENESIS. Also see the end of this article for a rebuttal of some accusations on the accompanying Formal Debate “Peanut Gallery” by a poster named Occam’s Aftershave.

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Dr. Nelson Glueck, one of the world’s foremost archaeologists of the 20th century speaks on the historicity of the Bible in his book, Rivers in the Desert …

“As a matter of fact, however, it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries. They form tesserae in the vast mosaic of the Bible’s almost incredibly correct historical memory.

The whereabouts of Solomon’s long-lost port city of Ezion-geber was for centuries an unfathomable mystery, because no one paid attention to the Biblical statement that it was located “beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom” (I Kings 9:26; 10:22). And that is exactly where we found it, in the form of the small, sanded-over mound of Tell el-Kheleifeh on the north shore of the Gulf of Aqabah, which is the eastern arm of the Red Sea. Memory of its location had been snuffed out like the flame of a gutted candle.

Assuming, however, as we did, that the Biblical statement was literally correct, it was not too difficult to rediscover it. Previous explorations had convinced us that the line of the present seashore had changed little since Biblical times, and that the land of Edom did indeed reach that far south, and also that the Nabataean=Byzantine site of Aila near Aqabah must be on or close to the site of ancient Elath. From that point on, there was little more to do than to stroll along the seashore and examine the only little tell there …

In a similar manner, our discovery of Solomon’s copper and iron mines in the Arabah rift north of Ezion-geber verified completely the sometimes questioned description of the Promised Land as being in part a land “whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper” (Deuteronomy 8:9). On the basis of that information, whose reliability we accepted as a matter of course, and acting on a “hunch” as to where to look, we were able to locate the ancient mines and furnaces and slag heaps and establish their dates by pottery finds.”

(Glueck, Nelson, Rivers in the Desert, New York: Grove Press, 1959, pp. 31-32.) Original link for image above

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SPECIAL NOTE ON MY NEW FORMAL DEBATE & OCCAM’S AFTERSHAVE
I have just begun a new Formal Debate on the historical nature of the Book of Genesis over at IIDB. My debates seem to get plenty of interest (lots of negative comments mainly) and there are already comments being made in the Peanut Gallery (almost 1800 page views as of this writing). Most of the comments are fair, but there is one individual who I will highlight here since I do not have the opportunity to refute him in the same thread.

Occam’s Aftershave.

I have never know anyone to be such a blatant liar … and I have been debating at atheist forums for over a year now. Here’s one of his latest false accusations …

He’s been caught in blatant lie after blatant lie, caught quote-mining, caught fabricating and adding his own ‘data’ to legitimate scientific papers via Photoshop, caught going back after the fact and editing his old posts to produce his own “retro-history”. And every time this dishonesty has been pointed out to him, his response has always been along the lines of “well, I’m doing God’s work and have done nothing wrong in His eyes.” It’s the Liar-For-Jesus “the ends justify the means” credo to the Nth degree.
Link here

which is all completely false. The Photoshop item he mentions was clearly labeled as my speculation, and in fact was later given support by a detailed study of over 300 “anomalous” radiometric dates of rocks. He has never once provided support for any “lies” or “quote mine” charges, and I have refuted many such charges previously HERE. Editing previous posts is common practice at RD.net especially when explanation is given why you are doing it. Also, I have never said anything even close to “well, I’m doing God’s work and have done nothing wrong in His eyes.” He cannot support this and never will. He has made up all kinds of lies about my church as well. This makes for some interesting reading. Click here. It’s amazing that a guy this educated can be as blatant as this, but the facts speak for themselves. He received a one week suspension from the Richard Dawkins forum and has received numerous additional warnings. The moderators at RD.net, as well as posters at Panda’s Thumb have expressed concern that behavior like his is hurting the “anti-religion” cause.

I have to say that I am glad that it is.

Keep up the good work, OA!