"At least you are giving them some credit. It really wasn't that easy to fool people with "fabricated" events involving prominent cities and countries. News traveled through trade as well; one way people verified info about farther away places back then.

I just can't write about a major event involving two prominent cities being obliterated and get away with it unless there was some level of truth to it, even back then."

There are just so stories about both the recent and distant past invented all the time. Even when disproved people continue to still believe them. Religion isn't a special case; these are every where.

There are all sorts of widely believed bullshit about foreign cultures, unfamiliar occupations, and everything else. Just read snopes.

"Also, even if there is no remaining evidence (sometimes being all lost in times past), it does not mean that the event did not occur. The lack of evidence does not mean the lack of existence."

In Egypt? With all the evidence we have? Unlikely.

"but that is impossible for you to assume because you begin with the presupposition that the Biblical writers are lying about everything."

Is it fair to say that you'd agree that the authors of the Epic of Giglamesh were lying about everything?

"The ancient Egyptians don't have any incentive to leave records of this embarrassing occurrence. If anything, they would want to cover this event up so as not to be ridiculed by neighboring nations or by their posterity who would view them as weak."

You can't have it both ways: either the Ancients were smart and skeptical enough to believe in miracles based on evidence, or they were a bunch of plebs who only believed what the official history was. Not both.

"If most of those 1000 people are still alive, live in my city, and are accessible by me for interview and they affirm your claim it does add credibility to your claim. "

But they weren't. The symmetry isn't there. They were all or very, very mostly all dead at that point.

At this point, we aren't even talking about a world religion, just a particularly successful cult. How many people alive have personally met L Ron Hubbard? How many people are Scientologists? There you go.

"And for a note, it was not written a hundred years after Jesus death; more like a few decades."

There's no evidence of that.

"The CIA has whatsoever no incentive to care about Elvis sightings, whereby the Jewish leaders had every incentive in the world to care about the claim that Jesus resurrected from the dead and they did care a lot. I don't have time to go into proof that they cared but just understand that the Jewish leaders had the same level of incentive to care about this claim as Homeland Security will have if multiple people claim they sighted a well known most wanted terrorist in their city."

I think the authorities in this case refer to the Romans, who had been pretty successful with the whole religious tolerance thing. They let all sorts of insane mystery cults hold sway over small groups of followers as long as they recognized Roman law. The Romans would see a new cult, the eigth messiah in just as many years, and made sure they paid their taxes and didn't make trouble, at least as long as they couldn't be viewed as a threat.

The Jews are another matter, of course:

http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/false_prophets/dt13_01.html

The ancient Egyptians don't have any incentive to leave records of this embarrassing occurrence. If anything, they would want to cover this event up so as not to be ridiculed by neighboring nations or by their posterity who would view them as weak.

It's not just about history books and monuments. It's about every facet of life that gets effected. For example, when the black death hit Europe, we were able to see massive changes to everything.

• Economists, archeologists, and historians for example can trace the massive economic disruption of the black death. The deaths of a large percentage of the population created economic pressures, increasing the demand for workers. You then see greater economic mobility for peasants because of the demand, creating a free-er marketplace for labor. Every single written word we have regarding economic exchange from that time notes the massive inflation of wages for peasants (along with Lords grumbling that peasants were getting uppity and greedy demanding wages). But it's not just that. We can go back and look at how working conditions improved in the state of buildings from back then, as lords suddenly had to compete for peasant labor.

• Peasant wages skyrocketed, in some cases 500-1000%. And even though long distance trade went down, consumer-good trade went up since peasants could now afford more. What's more, archeologists have looked at those times and noted how there was a sharp decline in exotic goods and wealth in the elite holdings, and how there was a sharp increase in goods/tools found in peasant houses. The proof is not just in words (although it's there too), it's in the ground.

• We can look back, not just at records but at land (keep in mind, there are also extensive records too). Year after year, lords stopped trying to cultivate land and can look at a field and see how decreases in labor translated to more fallow fields. Additionally, we can look in trash piles, and note the increase in animal bones. You see, animals could be fed on lands without much labor, so as you became unable to work land for agriculture, you could increase animal production to compensate. What's more, we can also note products in the trash-piles. Dramatic shifts in clothing as wool/leather replaced plant based fabric. Additionally low-labor crops like apples, grapes, vegetables, etc replaced high labor crops like wheat.

• This is just one aspect of it. You can look at the sizes and styles of buildings during that era. You can note how the Sondergotik, and Brick Gothic, and Rectilinear architecture styles all suddenly appeared at the same time. You can note how technology development and usage changed. You can look at public works. You can look at weapons and armor in war. You can look at the mass graves from plague deaths. You can look at the bones of those who died before and after the plague and note the nutrition differences. Everything felt the ripple effects. An event like that creates massive ripple effects that can be seen in every aspect of life.

I used the Black Death as an example because it's the most dramatic and most famous shift, but similar results happen with every civilization that has dramatic events occur like wars/plagues/natural disasters. We can look at the Greco-Persian wars and see the impact to villas and peasant homes and trash piles etc. We can look at the end of the Zhou Dynasty in China and see the effects on trade and trash piles and buildings ect. But we can't look at the plagues in Egypt and the exodus of the Jews. Every piece of evidence... not just writings and monuments but every piece of evidence from trash piles, to agriculture field samples, to architecture, to graves... everything shows that the stories in the bible never occurred. There never were any plagues, there never was a massive die off of first born sons, there never were a bunch of Jews who left. It simply never happened.

It was just a fairy tale made up out of whole cloth by the bible, a complete fabrication.

NB: As a meta-note you can make quotes by using the > command. So instead of using quote marks to quote, you can quote...

like this.