The Bible: History or Fiction? The Discovery That's Shaking Foundations!...

Let's look at a few possibilities, which come courtesy of my studies at YouTube Theological University.

Original sin is not biologically inherited. Rather, it is renewed whenever someone dwells on whether other people are committing good or evil, rather than forgiving wrongs as Jesus directs.

Eden was found in a Kurdish refugee camp near Mount Ararat. Before the change in wind patterns which came with the Black Sea flooding, the site was the perfect paradise for hunter-gatherers who had to move down river to what is now Iraq, and then began the practice of farming - which we know started there. Hominids existed for millions of years, but by the time farming began, all other species had gone extinct.

The Canaanite and Sumeric pantheons are similar. The Phoenicians brought the pantheon from Tyre to where Carthage was, from which it went to Greece and then Rome. YHWH replaced Baal as the storm/war god and then YHWH and El were combined into the One God. Baal/El became Kronos and YHWH became Zeus. Those who think that Christianity is based on the Roman gods have it backwards. Hercules as a takeoff on the promised Messiah, not the other way around.

Horeb was the mountain of God, not Mt. Sainai. It was a small band who constructed pillars there and they likely fled the part of Egypt that was Canaan. The God-King of Salem was overthrown in the Bronze Age collapse, which allowed the northern kingdom to evolve. A Temple was found in the North in what is now part of Syria. Maybe this was the real thing - where those who were at Horeb constructed it.

The Bronze Age collapse pretty much maps onto the time of the Judges. Evidence suggests that there was never a unified kingdom, with Judah gaining the stragglers who were not taken by the Assyrians - never to return. 

Some Roma scholars believe that the former captives moved east rather than west and became the Roma (who were converted by St. Thomas in India). They make this link because Roma religious custom is much closer to Israelite practice than Hindu practice. Centuries later, probably to escape Islam, migrations began to Europe. The Sinti and Manouches are generally light skinned, having intermarried with Germans, Ashkenazi Jews and Franks.  Later waves are darker, including the two Calle peoples in Spain and Italy. The Kalderash are the darkest.

While David and Solomon are considered to be legendary, later kings in Israel and Judah have been identified in archeology. The question of whether God punished these nations because of their injustice to the poor, the widow and the orphan or whether these nations picked an awful place to put a country. When you locate at the spot where three continents meet, expect visitors.

Before the Exile, the Judeans still worshiped the old pantheon. There was no Torah. This was consolidated in Babylon as a way to hold the people in captivity together. When they returned in 538 BCE, Judaism was born. After 70 AD, Judaism left in the Diaspora. The entire existence of the Jewish Nation in Palestine was 607 years. Palestine became Christian with Rome - although St. Philip converted the Samaritans before then.

The Gospel of Luke says that John the Baptist was the reincarnation of Elijah. Jesus confirms this when coming down from Mt. Tabor after the Transfiguration.

James Tabor thinks that Paul wrote the Gospel of Mark. Q fleshed it out with the sayings of Jesus. Because most people were literate in the Jewish community - and we know several of the Apostles were, the fact that someone probably wrote these things down as they happened is not far fetched.

The ban on divorce had as much to do with putting your spouse away to "marry up" based on family pressure. It is ironic that Catholics would essentially interfere with gay marriages at their hospitals when Jesus said that families need to respect the marriages of their children, rather than trying to "save them" by having them renounce the relationship that led to estrangement from the family of origin.

YHWH is That which Is. In Essence, the Father is Being Itself. The Son is both Jesus and the Word by which the Universe was created. The Spirit is both Love and breath. The Spirit would have been known to Jesus as the feminine aspect of YHWH. Jesus had two mommies. 

Those who do not believe in a transcendent God still believe in Being (the Universe), the Word (Physics) and Spirit (Love and Breath). One conception is as good as the other. For the Godhead to be perfect, it must be absolutely humble, meaning that it is comfortable and happy with Itself and cannot be made unhappy by creation. 

Jesus used humor. Sadly, the condemnation of pederasty which came when he had the little children come to him has been placed in the Sermon on the Mount, where it does not belong, and is followed by the gouging of eyes and the cutting off of hands. Jesus was actually making fun of the obsession with sin. 

One of the sayings of Jesus was that he (and he and the Father are One) is gentle and humble of heart, whose yoke is easy and his burden light. When he talks of the Father being perfect, he is speaking about perfection in Love, not avoidance of evil. Again, we make up evil. When we make moral pronouncements which are not based in what makes people happy in this life, we are doing evil - taking yet another bite of the Tree of Knowledge.

If you combine the Synoptic Gospels and John and address the question of whether Jesus sinned when he drank from the vinegar and hyssop soaked sponge - which John says he did - then salvation had to have been when Jesus called out to the Father in anguish - and that this was the completion of his divine vision quest into the broken heart of man - with that quest coming to a head when he essentially told Mary that he was dead - and told John to care for his grandmother - thus abandoning the Messianic quest. The promise that Jesus would not drink until the coming of the kingdom shows that it was the heartbreak, not the death of Jesus, that brought salvation.

The first ending of Mark was probably the most accurate, with Jesus meeting the disciples in Galilee when they went fishing. Any other encounters follow that one. James and Joses (Jesus' brothers) likely did see him in traveling to Emmaus sometime after Peter and his crew (Andrew, James and John - sons of Salome and Zebedee). Pentecost is too convenient to have occurred, as the original feast celebrates the giving of the Old Law.

The existence of Hell was a product of leakage from Zoroastrianism. The Jewish afterlife was sleep in Sheol, which the Temple Priesthood/Sadducees still held to. Jesus was in the Pharisee party as a Rabbi who likely went to Yeshiva with his cousin John, so he preached Resurrection. Since he also taught that John the Baptist had been previously incarnate, there was no need to open Heaven, as it had never closed as the original sin is to not forgive.

The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man probably was a jibe at his brother in law, who he had raised from the dead, by calling him a poor beggar. The point of the story is not the existence of Hell, it was that if Moses and the Prophets were not enough to teach justice for the poor, someone rising from the dead would not have an effect. That person rising from the dead was Jesus.

Joseph of Arimathea (a relative of Mary and John the Baptist) likely took Jesus body to a tomb on his property after the end of the Sabbath at sundown on Saturday, where it rotted with the bones placed in an osury, along with those of his family, including his mother. In the 1980s, there was a collapse of that tomb and it was excavated. 

The bones are now in  storage at Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Would the fact that the bones exist (and that Jesus would not want them venerated), shake your faith or your proof?