Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy

Watched it twice. The first part was a little slow and preachy that are mostly fluff but later on when the real religion/history academicians talked about proto-writing the movie became very interesting. As with other historical fields of study, this movie presents its view points but at least tried to base it on what the scholars said. Ignoring the fluffy bits and being a language geek, I enjoyed it very much.

In a previous film, Tim Mahoney attempts to use fringe theories from David Rohl to shift the timeline of Egyptian history to better align with the Bible. Crazy, right? Well, in this episode of Crazy Part 2, Mahoney wants to prove that Moses wrote the first books of the Bible (alone, including his own obituary) by tracing an unknown language back to this shifted timeline.

Let's be honest, Rohl is no expert. Look him up on Wikipedia. He basically studied Egypt while in a rock band and then obtained a BA degree. He is not a "scholar" as Mahoney positions him to be. The other person in the camp is Dr. Douglas Petrovich from The Bible Seminary, and shockingly also holds this theory.

My biggest complaint of the film is that Mahoney actually has some REAL experts in the film, people with a long history of academia that disagree with him on his findings. Yet, Mahoney never asks them WHY they think he is wrong - you know, present the evidence from the opposition. Mahoney essentially comes to the conclusion that mainstream academics are just a bunch of fundamentalists that only parrot what their professors tell them. Well, how about that...

So instead of asking more relevant questions to the academics, he would rather ask them if they believe in God - setting them up as some kind of boogeyman. How is this question relevant to the investigation? Honestly?

So Google it yourself, it's an easy way to topple this house of cards which is dependent on shifting an historical timeline in order to make it work. There is a short article from National Geographic called "We may now know which Egyptian pharaoh challenged Moses" that sums up why Mahoney is wrong. Yet, he never asks the real experts for evidence against his position, he just moves forward, stacking on crackpot theories.

This is a desperate propaganda film which is attempting to build credibility to fundamentalist Christian ideology. And if Mahoney had removed all of the religious posturing and special effect sequences, we probably could have shortened this thing down to an hour.

I loved this documentary, especially the acting/images part of the film(would like to see more of it in future films) very interesting to see the different point of views of scholars & what the Bible reads. Good work. I am giving 10 stars because I can not find anything wrong with the film, very honest approach and because it makes you question what or who to believe... scholars, history, men????

Fascinating documentary specifically on whether there was even an alphabet for Moses to have written the first five books of the Bible. Or whether the Bible had to be written, as some contend, many hundreds of years later, taking imaginary campfire stories and making them into a religion to hold the people together.

This is the 2nd of the Patterns of Evidence Series, which today has 4 movies. In my august opinion, they should be viewed in order, as they build on the previous documentaries, and are incomplete explanations, when taken out of order.

I didn't know there was a proto-sinaic alphabet. It does a great job with archaeology and history to show that there was an alphabet, at the time of Moses, in which he could have written his parts of the first five books of the Bible. It goes into the development and changes of the letters and the common bias in modern archaeology against the biblical record. It even includes one archaeologist who believes what she believes because her teacher told her it was so; yikes! And then she puts forth her quaint unreasonable theory that a no account person, who had no need for letters, invented the letters, and the people, who also had no need for letters, just naturally loved them and adopted them. It shows that the quality of archaeologists range from the IQ of your smartest classmates to your dumbest classmates. It's a good documentary for the person who really does care about everything about the Bible.

This is a bad documentary. It attempts to push a specifically US-style form of fundamentalism, by trying to prove that Moses wrote the first five books of the bible.

It interviews evangelicals at southern US seminaries and pretends they have the same level of expertise as actual doctors, professors, and researchers at places like Israeli universities (who all disagree with the agenda pushed by the documentary maker).

It completely ignores the evidence and research demonstrating that the Torah was written by at least four different authors. It ignores how contradictory passages are interspersed with the different authors even using different names for god, describing contradictory events. It instead concludes that Moses was able to write the Torah because ancient Israelites invented the alphabet via divine intervention.

The documentary intentionally asks the wrong questions, so it can evade actual research and evidence. For example, it spends about half the run time trying to prove the ancient Israelis invented the alphabet. It fails at this, but apparently it felt the need to go this route because the makers thought it proves the books were written by Moses. To it's credit (and why I gave it a 2 instead of a 1), it actually shows real experts clearly stating the hypothesis is nonsense. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide them much opportunity to explain all the reasons it's nonsense.

This is not a documentary, it's US-specific religious propaganda. Only watch this if you're an anthropologist studying US culture.