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????

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.

This documentary provides an overwhelming amount of evidence for the Moses and many other parts of the Bible have been proven all the time, everyone has been looking at the same evidence but some people are being possessed by denial . Moreover the entire egyptian traditional timeline has been messed up by secular archaeologians and they admitted it themselves, when it is aligned correctly with the Bible and the other calendars the date and evidence match correctly. It is sad that a lot of unbelievers have been manipulated into worshiping false religions of naturalism which tell them that their existense is a random accident with no meaning and they believe that these false human made dogmas are actually true despite being proven wrong, along with many other mistakes. The Bible keeps being proven correct all the time.

As the prophets said in the past, people will be corrupted by pride, thinking that they become intelligent and try to make themselves gods but in reality they are becoming foolish, full of unreasonable hatred and despair and turn away from their Creator. The Amazon website which is mainstream has a lot more reviews and they are all overwhelingly positive but here on imdb which is less populated it has some sad people that unreasonably hate everything including themselves and give low reviews to desperately try and lie to their own hearts but in the end it is all in vain. The Word of God will always be the only truth.