Quote Originally Posted by denuseri View Post
There is a long standing schism between the narrow minded fuddy duddies in the field who simply can't stomach anything in the Bible as being construed as right and a much more open minded group who has often found a root of truth in most myths and legends of the ancient world.
There is usually a root of truth in all myths and legends. Story tellers take a normal but unusual occurrence and start adding bells and whistles until you have the makings of a rollicking tale of wonder. The problems start when people start accepting the story as true rather than just a story.

Yes, there were several groups of people who left Egypt at times, for various reasons. They weren't slaves, and they weren't Hebrews, although they may have been the group which eventually became the Hebrews. Most assuredly there weren't millions of them and they didn't spend 40 years in one of the most desolate wastelands on the planet. Kernels of truth, inflated like popcorn to fuel the myth. But people aren't worshiping the truth, they worship the myth!

It's the same with the Ark stories. There are similar stories all over the world, because people tended to build their cities near water, which sometimes flooded, sometimes catastrophically. That doesn't mean there was a world-wide flood that wiped out all but a handful of people. And it doesn't make all those fools spending their money searching Mount Ararat "open minded". They are far more concerned with proving the myth than with finding the truth behind the myth.

Certainly there are historical people and places in the Bible. Most good authors will include such things in their fictions. They add a certain degree of believability to the tales. But just because someone has located a place that, with a lot of imagination, just might resemble the Biblical description of Eden, doesn't mean that the human race was started there by two people who suddenly realized they had no clothes. Just because a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate actually ruled in Judea in the first century doesn't mean that he condemned an itinerant rabbi to crucifixion and that rabbi was miraculously raised from the dead according to prophecy. Especially when those telling the tale have to distort the truth so immensely to try to fit those prophecies, even though the prophecies weren't intended as prophecy!

So yes, use the Bible as a starting point to find the bits of truth behind the myths. Don't use it as proof that the myth is truth.