Dear Mr Smith,
Over the weekend I watched a few documentaries, they were, "Banned from the Bible", "Gospel of Judas" "The Bible Unearthed" these new documents have been turning up since the crucifixion of our lord Jesus Christ, even to this present day, and it's changing the way we think of the Bible as we know it, for instance the program "The Bible Unearthed" according to archeologist there is no tangible evidence that Abraham ever existed, the same is with Moses, now you would have thought that there would be evidence of Moses since the Egyptians we're methodical record keepers, but again nothing, It's not until about the tenth or ninth century BC, that they come up with the first evidence of a Biblical character who was David according to them they discovered his name on a stone stela, I know that's not spelt right, please excuse my spelling, Now then moving on to the Gospel of Judas, according to scholar s Judas was Jesus's favourite and confided in him to the point of revealing the things of the Kingdom of Heaven, they were also described as having a special relationship, according to the writings found in the Gospel of Judas, Getting back for a moment to the " Bible Unearthed" the scholars said it was impossible that around two million people leaving Egypt and then spending forty years wandering in the desert, not to be noticed since the Egyptians had watch towers all along the way from Egypt to Caanan, "which was the promised land" it also didn't make sense wanting to leave Egyptian rule and end up in a land that at that time us under Egyptian authority, in other words it was like leaping from the frying pan into the fire, Now the books that we're left out of the the Bible by the emperor Constantine, were something like thirty books, so how do we know what we we're left with is the true word of God? I would like to get my hands on these thirty books, How do e s one know what one is reading is the truth? There was another point brought up to do with the creation, "and God said let us create man in our image so God created man and woman from the dust of the ground, Then a couple of chapters later, he, God put Adam to sleep and took a rib and created the women Eve, now that meant there two women created, The first according to the scholars was the women called Lilithe, forgive my spelling of her name, again this information was found in newly discovered parchments, and it go's on to say that the first women demanded equal rights with the man Adam hence the fall out, so God give her an ultimatum, come back and be subordinate to Adam, or be banished to become an evil spirit, According to the writings she refused, Hence God had to create Eve, Now would someone please tell me how on earth can one know what is truth and what is untruth?, I'll leave it with you, Maybe sometime when you find the time y ou will reply, and help me to understand what is going on? It is all so confusing, The more one reads the less one seems to know.
May God Bless and guide you in your work.
Hope this e-mail finds you and your family keeping well.
Geoff.
Dear Geoff: You are watching, reading, listening to, meditating on, NEGATIVE statements about the Scriptures. Hence, your view is now negative, filled with doubts. I could read a small portion of such stuff if I were to read say, 16 hours a day for the rest of my life, and then what? Would I have ten thousand questions then rather than just a couple of dozen? I don't wast me time with such faith-destroying material. But they DID FIND evidence of King David, DIDN'T THEY? There were numerous cities mentioned in Scripture that critics said absolutely did not exist. Yet they are unearthing many of the same cities that the critics said never existed. Imagine how many good hours were wasted in years past by good people reading that trash only to find out in 2007 that one after the other the critics were wrong. I have work to do. POSITIVE, helpful, meaningful, life-changing work to do, and I will NOT be side-tracked by all the athiestic critics.
New discoveries like the following are turning up, little by little. Remember that Abraham dwelled in tents, not stone temples.
"In 1979 Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay found two tiny silver scrolls inside a Jerusalem tomb. They were dated to around 600 B.C., shortly before the destruction of Solomon's Temple and the Israelites' exile in Babylon. When scientists carefully unrolled the scrolls at the Israel Museum, they found a benediction from the Book of Numbers etched into their surface. The discovery made it clear that parts of the Old Testament were being copied long before some skeptics had believed they were even written."
"In 1990 Frank Yurco, an Egyptologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, used hieroglyphic clues from a monolith known as the Merneptah Stele to identify figures in a Luxor wall relief as ancient Israelites. The stele itself, dated to 1207 B.C., celebrates a military victory by the Pharaoh Merneptah. "Israel is laid waste," it reads, suggesting that the Israelites were a distinct population more than 3,000 years ago, and not just because the Bible tells us so."
In 1993 Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion and Joseph Naveh of the Hebrew University announced they had found an inscription bearing the phrases "House of David" and "King of Israel." The writing--dated to the 9th century B.C., only a century after David's reign--described a victory by a neighboring King over the Israelites. Some minimalists tried to argue that the inscription might have been misread, but most experts believe Biran and Naveh got it right. The skeptics' claim that King David never existed is now hard to defend."
"Last year [that would be the year 2000] the French scholar Andre Lemaire reported a related "House of David" discovery in Biblical Archaeology Review. His subject was the Mesha Stele (also known as the Moabite Stone), the most extensive inscription ever recovered from ancient Palestine. Found in 1868 at the ruins of biblical Dibon and later fractured, the basalt stone wound up in the Louvre, where Lemaire spent seven years studying it. His conclusion: the phrase "House of David" appears there as well. As with the Tel Dan fragment, this inscription comes from an enemy of Israel boasting of a victory--King Mesha of Moab, who figured in the Bible. Lemaire had to reconstruct a missing letter to decode the wording, but if he's right, there are now two 9th century references to David's dynasty."
Etc. We have just as much information on ancient Israel that God wants us to have at this time. The faith is not for everyone.
God be with you,
Ray
