Reviewing Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy Movie

This past week, I went to see Timothy Mahoney’s new film, Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy. Following the relative success of Mahoney’s first film on the Exodus, Mahoney has been able to raise enough funds to put out this second movie, that seeks to defend the idea that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.

On the good side, Mahoney demonstrates that there is a certain critical bias among mainstream scholars, that tends to pooh-pooh the idea, that a man named Moses really had that much do with the the transmission of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, down through history. A lot of Christians are surprisingly ignorant of the fact that doubting the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, has been pretty much the standard teaching in nearly all institutions of higher learning in the United States, for decades. So, Mahoney gets brownie points for urging Christians to engage more with critical scholarship. If you send your kid off to college, allow them to watch TV, or allow them to surf the Internet, it behooves the Christian to become aware of the challenges that confront a young person’s faith.

But the down side of the movie is that Mahoney leans heavily on the contrarian, and highly disputed theories, of Egyptologist David Rohl, to make Mahoney’s case that God essentially inspired the human alphabet system, that allowed Moses to write the Torah. The movie was basically a 2-hour slog, through a rather complicated apologetic argument, to try to defend Moses’ involvement in writing the first part of the Bible. Even Gary Bates and Lita Cosner, Young Earth Creationist apologists for Creation.com, found Mahoney’s alphabetic writing system proposal as “both unnecessary and unsupported by Scripture itself.”

Why Mahoney leans so heavily on David Rohl, the latter who admits that he is an agnostic, is beyond me. In contrast, Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, an outspoken evangelical Christian, and highly respected by many of his agnostic and atheistic peers, dismisses David Rohl’s speculation as pretty much total nonsense. Kitchen, author of the exhaustively learned On the Reliability of the Old Testament, champions the so-called “late date theory” of the Exodus, that the film maker Mahoney casually dismisses twice in the movie, as having “no evidence” to support it. Rohl makes some legitimate criticisms of “late date theory” proponents, but his alternative solution fails to convince most scholars, believer and non-believer alike. I will spare you the details and simply refer the Veracity reader to Dewayne Bryant‘s fair and balanced review of The Moses Controversy.

I do not mean to pile onto Tim Mahoney, as he seems like a really likable, sincere guy, and I do commend him for addressing the topic. I think that his experience with doubt, and his journey in trying to resolve such doubt, should be treated with respect and sensitivity. Mahoney plans to put out another movie, addressing the apologetics of the Red Sea crossing. Let us hope that this next movie will be an improvement over The Moses Controversy.

Despite its shortcomings, I am very glad and thankful Tim Mahoney has put out a thought-provoking film, that will hopefully spur thoughtful Christians to actively engage the issues behind The Moses Controversy. Nevertheless, I am concerned that an uncritical examination of Mahoney’s claims will only confuse Christians, when they actually encounter peer-reviewed scholarship on this topic, making it harder to defend the faith before an unbelieving world.