High time

I think the time has come.
We have more clarity now regarding the discrepancy with the dating of Egyptian history Vs Biblical history.

For the last half century or more, the dates for Egyptian archaeology have NOT matched with the dates in the Bible. It is ironical that these Egyptian-archaeology dates were originally worked out with good reason by people who held a Bible in one hand and a spade on the other. But their well-intentioned dating guess went awry.

I was not aware of this problem, and the majority of Christians with me, not that this affects us terribly. But sadly in the world of secular history and archaeology, this is well known and the credibility of the Bible suffered.

Did you, for instance, know that archaeologists had found no evidence for Joseph or the Egyptian slavery or the wilderness wanderings? While Cecil B. DeMille’s amazing 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, as well as his 1923 silent movie brought home to us the grandness of the miracle of the red sea and the enormity of the exodus, we assumed that all that research meant that matters were pretty settled in the history department. But these movies were set using this non-matching timeline. The movies showed the wrong pharoah, Pharoah Rameses, falling under the Lord’s judgement.

Those who knew of the discrepancy and felt that Biblical dates had to be right, wisely put it down to the unavailability of information. When you have the Bible, you do not have to help the Bible be true. You won’t help its cause that way, and in fact, you could end up becoming a nuisance and a liability, like Ron Wyatt who took the sad path of falsifying evidence. All you need to do is to wait.

And there was nothing else for most of us to do other than to wait. But now, I think the time has come for this matter to be resolved for historians and the rest, with God using a good researcher cum film maker to break the news to the world.

Tim Mahoney, with his team and friends like Egyptologist David Rohl, was able to work out that the dates did not add up because the point at which Egyptian history was made to map with Israelite history was erroneous.
This is what happened.

The Bible neither names the pharoah during Joseph’s time nor the pharoah during the time of the Exodus. But we have the name of Pharoah Shishak during the time of King Rehoboam (2 Chronicles 12). We also have the name of a store city Rameses (Exodus 1:11), which we know to be the name of a pharoah.

The current erroneous mapping was done for two reasons:

• Pharoah Shoshenk was wrongly matched with Pharoah Shishak who invaded Judah of King Rehoboam’s time. This match was done simply because their names sound alike. In fact it is well documented that Pharoah Shoshenk avoided Judah during his campaign.
• The store city Rameses, mentioned along with Pithom in Exodus 1:11, actually referred to Avaris, which lies beneath the city of Rameses. The more modern name for the place must have been substituted later. It is understandable that early egyptologists assumed that Pharoah Rameses was the pharoah of the time.

This dating error has had far-reaching ramifications for other areas of history too. You can listen to Egyptologist David Rohl explain this and other related matters in fascinating detail here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohPpQRKHSs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C618MkFej8

Tim Mahoney found that the pattern of six major biblical events were found in the same order in secular findings, but only at completely different dates. By sliding the pattern of events on the two timelines—the more secular Egyptian dateline and the Biblical Israelite one—to coincide with each other, the needed evidence was plentiful.
This is very satisfying to believers.

Tim Mahoney used a wall to illustrate these findings.

Describing this wall, Mahoney says:
We basically created the wall so that those (posts or parts sticking out) would be every 1000 years.
On the lower part was absolute time,
then the next level was Egyptian time,
then Bible time,
and then the timeline of Canaan or ancient Israel.

It helps that Tim Mahoney is a movie maker. What a treat we have before us in these documentary movies that have been released.
Check them out at https://patternsofevidence.com/films/

The first of these films is about the Exodus and covers the dating issue outlined above.
The second is about the Moses Controversy that answers the secular historian’s argument that Moses could not have written the Torah because the language, and a written one at that, had not been developed.
The third of these films, which is in two parts, looks at the possible location for the Red Sea miracle and the wanderings of the children of Israel.

I hope Tim Mahoney will be visited by many more questions that will make him make more films.