Devil's Advocate

In the Catholic Church, when a serious claim of a miracle is reported, someone is appointed to the role of Devil's Advocate. The job of this Lawyer for the Devil is to minutely challenge all the evidence.

Because I would like the historical dating theory in this film to be true, I have to force myself into the role of Devil's Advocate, and in that role, I found a huge unanswered question.

Please know the following: I was tired when I watched the film on Netflix and may have missed key points; I know little about archeology; but I was a film major at UCLA and, therefore, do know a little something about the power of editing.

Here is my stumbling block: it is unclear to me whether or not all the clips of established archeologists saying "wrong time period" are referring solely to problems with the Ramses theory.

I say this because it appears to me that there are two dating problems if this film's theory is correct. The first problem is the subject of the film - the stubbornness of many archeological experts who insist on taking the word "Ramses" literally and dating everything from that point.

But there is a second problem which, it seemed to me, was flung out of nowhere near the end. I'm going to summarize how I understood this problem, and I would greatly appreciate being corrected at any point that I'm wrong. As I said, I was tired when I saw the film.

Here goes: According to the film, once the false Ramses connection is severed, you're left with a pattern that fits the Exodus and almost fits Egyptian history - but it is still a couple of centuries off. This problem is seemingly solved with an explanation of how archeologists rely on artificial "dark periods" (I think that was their term) to make history fit anyway, and if we just slash two centuries out of one of these periods, all the puzzle pieces fall into place.

Well, I don't know about you, but it seems to me that arbitrarily removing part of a standard measurement in order to make one thing fit is going to cause a chain reaction with everything else in the bigger picture: i.e., all the rest of world history. That, to me, is a much bigger obstacle than stubbornness over the word "Ramses". But the film did not even mention the affect of such a decision on the rest of history. What if doing something that drastic means that the rest of history ends up completely mismatched?

What if some of those "wrong time period" quotes had nothing to do with Ramses but were referring to this "dark period" problem and how it affects history as a whole? As I mentioned, I know the power of careful editing. An editor can be a magician.

Please, please know that I am no fan of experts (see my siggy). Clearly, any dating theory that relies on artificial dark periods has much room for improvement. But the film did not even allude to how this would affect other areas of history. It spent all its time mocking the Ramses point.

I gotta say, it felt like they beat an easy point into the ground in order to distract the viewer from how little was being said about a complicated point.

Please do not hesitate to show me what I overlooked. I would like this film's theory to be true. But nothing is worse than jumping on a glittering bandwagon and not noticing that the flashing lights are firecrackers about to blow the bandwagon to smithereens.

If I didn't miss anything, I'm especially interested in comments from people with knowledge of archeological dating. After all, just because the film didn't give an explanation of what would happen universally after a dark period adjustment, it does not mean that no such explanation exists.



Logic is our best defense against The Experts.