Just in time for Passover, an article from the New York Times calling the whole story of the Exodus into question.

On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, EgyptÂ’s chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agencyÂ’s latest discovery.

It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the IsraelitesÂ’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

Later on, they get in a dig about the lack of evidence of Jesus being in Egypt as a child (though why an obscure Jewish family would have been noted at the time is pretty obvious).

Personally, I have some qquestions about the Exodus story as handed down to us -- but don't doubt it is historically based on some smaller scale -- sort of the "George Washington and the cherry tree" effect. And since i am not a biblical literalist, that does not trouble me at all.

But I do have a question -- will there the NY Times be running articles debunking the Koran or raising questions about Muhammad during Ramadan this year? Or do they know that the response from Jews and Christians to such articles is more sedate than those of Muslims to attempts to call their faith into question?

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