Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy

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.

It's exhausting to see "reviews" when one is not even mentioning the documentary or specifying what is their objection with it exactly. Instead just ranting on bible as though they are the preeminent Rhodes scholar of this generation. Even if they are one Smart people saying stupid things are still stupid. For the genesis objection in the below comment, where is it mentioned in the Bible that Abel & cain had no sisters. Even if we assume they are in the late 20's at the setting of the story, Adam and Eve must have popped multiple kids by then. Bible says they had many children.

With the animal count on Noah's boat. It's the same thing, in one instance he is just summarising the count and in other expanding the details. This happens quite frequently in chronicles as well. A brief summary about a king is given in one chronicles book and further details are given in the other.

You can disagree with this documentary and give a 1star rating. For the love of Christ watch it first.

Firstly, I appreciate Timothy Mahoney's approach in this documentary. He mentions very clearly at the start that he is troubled by the growing consensus that Moses did not write the Torah. His conviction and passion for seeking out the truth for himself is truly inspirational. He has every right to go on a journey to discover if what he was taught as a child was untrue.

Secondly, to do with the analysis itself- i found it refreshing that he does not go into the interviews with a per-conceived idea. Instead, he is merely asking the scholars who hold strongly to the non-Moses authorship to explain their views. And he publishes their responses rather than edit it out. One can clearly see that he interviews scholars that agree and do not agree with him- and what both parties say are shown.

Thirdly, while i was expecting any American documentary on the Bible to be openly one sided, Mahoney, i felt, was approaching it from an evidential and scholarly perspective. He does not jump to conclusions without seeing what the evidence he finds is actually saying. Once the evidence is found and is examined, one is able to use their intelligence and perception to connect the dots. Mahoney does connect the dots (he calls them patterns) and he discovers something interesting.

Overall, this is definitely worth a watch. It is a well made documentary and the only bias i can see is the conviction of the film-maker who is trying to make sense of where the truth lies when it comes to something he has treasured since childhood.

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.

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.