The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 33 – Tim Mahoney

Episode 33: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show, filmmaker Tim Mahoney discusses his extensive 20-year investigation into the historical evidence supporting the biblical account of Exodus. Mahoney explains that proving biblical historicity validates Jesus’s references to Moses and establishes the foundation for all subsequent scripture. He presents compelling archaeological evidence, including the discovery of West Semitic people, distinctive Israelite-style homes, eleven principal tombs, the emergence of the phonetic alphabet, and more.

Mahoney emphasizes his investigative approach of examining multiple scholarly viewpoints rather than promoting a single theory, noting how many current academic positions against biblical historicity are based on outdated scholarship that scholars simply repeat without independent verification. He concludes by promoting his latest project, “Times of Fire,” about the seven churches of Revelation, scheduled for theatrical release.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. Share it with your friends if you’re enjoying what you’re watching. This is the show where I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how worldview changes everything.

My guest today is Tim Mahoney. He’s a filmmaker who spent over 12 years interviewing experts on the Book of Exodus in the Bible and the historical account. A lot of the historical claims in the Bible are under scrutiny and Tim shares surprising evidence that bolsters our confidence in the scriptures. It’s amazing. Please join me in welcoming Tim Mahoney to the show. Tim Mahoney, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Tim Mahoney (00:49):
Well, it’s great to be on your program, Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:51):
Well, I first heard about your work through my wife, Stephanie, and her work with The Giving Company, and she told me about this incredible series, Patterns of Evidence, and I was really excited to have a chance to interview you, so I’m glad that we get to do this. So welcome to the show.

And for everybody who’s watching, Tim Mahoney is a movie producer. Patterns of evidence is the thing you’re going to want to remember, and we’ll put all the information about what Tim is up to and some of the films that he has that you can take a look at in the show notes. But Tim, give us a little bit of insight into the whole patterns of evidence idea. And how did you get there? Because I understand that you kind of came to this through a crisis of faith when you were younger.

Tim Mahoney (01:40):
Yeah, that’s right. For a lot of your audience, I don’t know if they did or not, but I grew up in a Christian home. And I just believed what I was told. And as I went along, I mean, in other words, when the Bible stories were read about let’s say the Exodus or Moses and the Parting of the Sea, I wasn’t really having any difficulties with any of that. And so I believed in that.

It wasn’t until I got older and I wanted to make films. I had always had a desire to make films. After I saw a film in the movie theater, that was sort of the inspiration when I was 18 years old. And right about that time, I was finishing up with a two year degree and I then heard about a film school and the thought came to me, “Well, what if I could go to film school?”

(02:32):
“Well, that would be pretty exciting.” And I didn’t even know if that was a possibility, but I’d always thought about radio. I loved radio and I actually would hang out at a radio station when I was a teenager and I thought for sure I’m going into radio. But then when the whole film thing came along. So here I am wanting to be a filmmaker.

I grew up in a Christian home and somebody talked to me a little bit later on because I had gotten into advertising and marketing, but I knew it felt in my heart that I had a film to make. And that’s when this whole idea of going to Egypt and investigating the question of chariot wills on the bottom of the sea became very intriguing for me. And I’d heard about this and so I ended up bringing a film crew to Egypt and going to the very locations where the biblical events were to have happened.

(03:22):
And we talked about the crisis of faith. Well, I didn’t know it at the time. Here I was out there on this adventure and I went to this location where an Egyptologist by the name of Manford Btech, he was digging there. He had dug there for many, many years. He was an Austrian Egyptologist, world renowned.

And I went to him and I said, “So tell me, have you found evidence for the Israelites?” And I was assuming that he would say yes because he had been digging there and he would know, but he said to me in his Austrian accent, “So far not.” Wow. I don’t know, Jeff, if you’ve ever had a moment where all of a sudden you’re just confused. One time when I was a kid running for a ball and I was not looking in the right direction. I was running like this and I ran into a fence and all of a sudden I lost consciousness for a moment.

(04:17):
It felt kind of like that because I was so stunned that he hadn’t found evidence and I didn’t say anything to anyone, but it started to fester and I was in Egypt for three weeks and I went to England, but in the back of my mind, I was very troubled by that. And so I was coming to a place where I was going to have a crisis of faith.

And it happened right here in my office actually. I was working on this film on the weekends and I sat and looked at that footage and I started to, I actually was like, I said, “God, you have to help me. I don’t understand how there could be no evidence.” I mean, I started coming up with, maybe, reasons why there wouldn’t be evidence. And then I started, almost, felt like broken.

(05:11):
And at that moment, something unusual happened. I felt almost like a chill in the room. And this thought on the left hand side of me said, “Everything your family has believed about the Bible, everything your mother believes about the Bible is a lie.” Wow. And a moment of utter despair came over me. I mean, like I’ve never felt before, a hopelessness, a tragic lostness that came over me.

So I think that there, I mean, if I look back on it, I think there’s a lot of people that might have come to that place where all of a sudden they realize that, “Oh, it’s not true.” And then what? But at the same moment, right after that, another thought came to my mind from the other side and said, “Stop editing.” Very authoritative, “Get up, go to your office.” So this is my office here and I have lots of books and someone had given me a book about Egypt, written by an Egyptologist, David Roe.

(06:12):
And so I had never read it. I just said, “Thank you very much.” And I put it on my shelf. And I felt like I was supposed to come to my office and it was very clear, go to that bookcase, read that book. So I stood up, I mean, pulled the book out, I opened it up, and to my surprise was the very location that I was looking at in the edit suite was being unfolded with beautiful illustrations of the fact that Joseph and his family, his father, Jacob, and his whole family had settled there at that location.

But what I didn’t know at the time was anything about chronology. And chronology is really the layering of history when things happen. So at this location, I’m using my fingers here to show that at different levels of archeology or different time periods, and most people think the Exodus had to happen here, but this book was saying, no, all the evidence is down here in an earlier time period.

(07:08):
And that began my reversal of my crisis of faith, and I ended up going off to England and filming Egyptologist David Roe and ended up making multiple trips, probably over, I think I’ve had over several hundred trips, filming engagements, and some of them are overseas and multiple countries. I’ve been to Egypt twice, Israel multiple times, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the British Museum searching out a pattern of evidence that actually we’re not making up, it’s there. There’s an amazing pattern of evidence for the events of the Bible, but they haven’t been always accepted by mainstream scholars.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:50):
Tim, I can’t wait to dig into the evidence that you have discovered and share that with our audience a little bit, but let’s first of all, just talk a little bit about why this is so important, because I know there are archeologists working all throughout the Middle East. My wife and I were talking yesterday about a trip that we’re planning back to Israel next year, and I was excited to come back and look at what’s been discovered in the 12 or so years since I have been there.

But I think there are a lot of people saying, “Well, it doesn’t really matter if that’s all just a story, that the lessons behind it we can still learn even if it never actually happened.” Tell us why it is so important from a biblical perspective that the events described in the Book of Exodus actually occurred as history.

Tim Mahoney (08:46):
Well, I wouldn’t have known how important they were unless I had spent the last 20 years starting to sort it out. But one of the things I can let you know is that let’s just take one example, Jesus and Moses. People today say that Moses didn’t write the first books of the Bible. We don’t even know if there was a Moses or whatever. They think actually it was possibly multiple authors.

It’s called Higher Criticism, and it was very popular for the last several hundred years because they were saying that the first five books of the Bible weren’t necessarily written by Moses, but Jesus says that Moses wrote about him and because they don’t understand who Jesus is, because they don’t understand Moses. And when I talk to, let’s say scholars that are not believers in the historical credibility of the Bible, they also know about that.

(09:41):
And what ends up happening is that all of the earlier portions of scripture are the basis many times in the foundation for other parts of scripture. They all point back to this foundation of the words that were written, the promises that were given, the understandings. And what we have is from, in the Bible, we have a book of God communicating an arc of history. And what we know is that there’s a beginning of time, the origin of that actually is that there was nothing and God caused it to come into being.

And if you think, I don’t know if you know John Lennox and others such as him that are pointing to the fact that the Bible got it right thousands of years before any scientists figured it out. And so we don’t come from nothing. You can’t get something from nothing. It’s impossible. And if I held up my cell phone and said, over time, could this evolve from nothing?

(10:38):
You would think that’s crazy talk, but that’s exactly what a lot of, philosophically speaking, a lot of scientists are trying to say that something can come from nothing and it can’t. And anyway, my whole point is, is that the reason why I think this is significant and is that God is communicating that there’s an arc of history and there’s a beginning of time and there’s an end of time. And according to the scriptures, after that, there’s going to be something new that happens.

And we’re talking, I’ve been fascinated by existence and I’ve actually filmed scenes. The fact that you and I have a consciousness and that we’re invited into God’s creation to exist, I think is very, very significant. And what we’re looking at with the biblical letters, the words written in the Bible, even that, there’s a connection to the events of the Exodus and the early Israelites, because what we’re going to find out, if you watch more of my films, is that the very alphabet that is the basis of all alphabets in the world happens to come into existence at the very time and location that these people are living in Egypt.

(11:55):
There’s connections. I just had an amazing interview yesterday as we were unfolding that in our film, The Moses Controversy once again says, why is it important that this is historical? It’s that we can actually trace the connections of the amazing gift of the alphabet to the locations where the Israelites were. So why is that important? It’s because other writing systems were limited to a small group of people because they were encoded. I mean, if you didn’t know what the symbols were, you wouldn’t have any understanding. I believe that God wanted us to know who he was, and that’s the reason why the invention of a phonetic alphabet came into being.

And if you look through history and I look for patterns, you asked the question about patterns. When I look through history, I look for patterns. And what we see is at the time when God wanted to communicate who he was, the origins of the world, his plan for humanity, even like the Garden of Eden and the fall of man and the need for Savior, all of that is recorded and documented because people were able to encode it within alphabet and then have something so simple that common people would understand it.

(13:12):
And that’s a phonetic alphabet. Those letters are phonetical, the S and the W, and we can understand that. And that alphabet then became the basis of all alphabets and it spread throughout the world. And you know what book uses the alphabet more than any other? I mean, the Bible. And all of these major advancements in writing, in communication, the printing press, it all was based around events of the Bible.

And then there’s this interesting verse, I’ll read it to you so I don’t misquote anything, but I’m going to go to the book of John and it’s very interesting here. The word of God, you need an alphabet in order to have words. And so I think that God prepared us with an alphabet. And then what do we see here in John chapter one? In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

(14:19):
Just think about that. In the beginning was the word. And in order to know a word, you have to understand how to read a word. That’s why I think it’s genius. And I believe that there’s a divine gift that we have in an alphabet. And then it says, He was God in the beginning and through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. And if you think about Stephen Hawkings and he’s looking for the theory of everything, and I’ll tell you what it is.

Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. That’s the theory of everything. In him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. So we have a lot of scientists, we have a lot of archeologists, we have a lot of people that are out there that the light might be shining in there, but the darkness doesn’t comprehend it.

(15:19):
And so I think it’s a great gift for many of us to be able to have that light shining into us and be able to see, where do we come from? Is this the history of the Bible? Is there a pattern of evidence that speaks to its truth? And I can tell you, yes, absolutely there is. It’s amazing and there’s more coming. It gets stronger.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:40):
Wow. I love this. I’ve thought a lot about language. I did a lot of language studies in my doctoral program, but I hadn’t really considered the whole idea of the alphabet emerging, giving us the ability to communicate it through the written word and the significance of the written word.

So it’s really significant for everybody who’s watching or listening to understand that scripture is rooted in actual history, that this isn’t just like the Egyptian Book of the Dead or various Babylonian writings that are clearly made up stories that God intended to say, “This isn’t just another story for you. This is how things actually happened. And not only am I going to give you the evidence for that, I’m going to give you the ability to communicate about it by creating a system of language that you can use.” This is fascinating stuff.

Well, tell us, Tim, a little bit more about some of the evidence that you have discovered, because I know people are going to want to watch these films after they hear our conversation, but just give us a little bit of a taste of some of the things you have discovered that you find fascinating.

Tim Mahoney (17:00):
Right. And I want to make it clear that I am not an archeologist or an Egyptologist. I am an investigative filmmaker who specializes in finding those people who’ve discovered things or who’ve seen things in them. And what’s interesting is that a number of discoveries have been made, but it’s how they’re interpreted that makes the difference.

And so when I talked about there being evidence at one time when I went to see Manford Betech in Egypt, and I said, “Have you found evidence for the Israelites?” And he said, “So far not.” He hadn’t found any evidence at the time period when most people think that the Exis happened, which is at the time of Ramesses, the city of Rameses. And in our films, we’ll show you why it got that name in the Bible and what it might be, is that it’s much earlier. And what we’re going to see is that that’s why I think using these films, the stroke of divine genius in this is the words patterns of evidence.

(18:03):
It’s the scientific approach. So what you do is you ask yourself, “Well, where is there a pattern of evidence that shows the early Israelites?” And what Egyptologist David Roll was noticing, and he’s an agnostic, by the way, he said, “Hey, I see a pattern there underneath the city of Ramesis at an earlier time. There’s a pattern down here that matches the whole sequence of events.” And so what we find is, Jeff, is that there’s this area called Goshen, which is the Delta area in the Northeast, and they were given to this area called Goshen.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:44):
Yes. And this is where the Israelites were said to have settled when Joseph brought them, brought his family to Egypt.

Tim Mahoney (18:53):
Right. And I’m going to jump ahead just a little bit and tell you something that when I interviewed Manford Bituk the first time, he told me there wasn’t any evidence, but about a decade later, I interviewed in Jerusalem, Manfred Bitech a second time. And this time he said, “I have found something.”

And when we talk about Goshen, he found the lake Geesham and it’s a large lake that has dried up, but it’s off to the east and it looks as though, and he basically said, “We should now not discount the events of the Bible.” So he sees historical truth in that because he uncovered this lake. I said they lived in Goshen. Well, he uncovered this beautiful area. So what I had not known before, and in our films, we’ll show you what it looks like, because we recreate all of these scenes through animations.

(19:48):
And there’s a beautiful lake that the Israelites were actually, I believe, that’s where they were staying, off from on the northern side and southern side of that lake. It was surrounded by communities, and that was where they were able to have their families and their flocks, brilliant place. And so what does the archeology show us is that a group, and I had an interview just yesterday from Germany, once again, the only time in history when there’s this group of people, they’re called West Semitic type people, that came to this area and were able to be there and they multiplied greatly.

So what we see is the arrival and multiplication of the people, just as the Bible says, but very specifically they came into one area in that area of a virus that’s underneath the city of Ramesis. So one of the things that I’m showing is that sometimes cities are called one thing at one time period, but they’re called something else later, but the time period dictates the name.

(20:50):
So underneath this area of Ramesis is this older city called a virus, and that’s where you’re going to see the early Israelites show up exactly as they would. The type of homes that they were building is exactly like they would have had from where Jacob was from. It’s a special sort of an Israelite looking building and they’re not Egyptian.

And what they find is that there’s actually then one of these homes is destroyed and a palace, an Egyptian palace, is built in the center of this community. And there is a graveyard, a cemetery there, and there are 11 principal tombs. And if we remember the story, Joseph had 11 brothers, and then there’s a pyramid tomb. But the person who’s in the pyramid tomb is not an Egyptian. He is actually a Semitic type person, but he’s a ruler, and he has a throwstick across his chest, and it’s a mortuary tomb.

(21:50):
And what they find out is that the people who are buried in these other tombs are like princes, and they’re buried on their side, not like Egyptians like this. And so we do know then you have a group of people that come to this area, they multiply, they bury themselves not like Egyptians, and they have something that they’ve never seen before, which is a pyramid tomb with not an Egyptian, because pyramid tombs are only for kings and queens.

And this is the only time, I believe, in the history of Egypt that they’ve ever found a tomb that does not have an Egyptian in it, like a pyramid tomb that has that. So it’s a very special tomb. So it’s basically saying somebody very significant at this time was buried there. And we know the story of Joseph, that he rose to be second in command, and there are dates associated with this location, and the alphabet also then starts to appear at the same time.

(22:58):
So there’s some type of connection that we see. And what the alphabet is, is basically somebody took Egyptian hieroglyphics and modified them. So for example, this is like a bowl’s head you hear with its lower face here. The bull’s head eventually it’s the aleph and it actually becomes the letter A in time like this. Yes. And so somebody borrowed hieroglyphs but didn’t use them as the Egyptians would have, used them then as phonetic and they’re all consonants, I believe. There’s no vowels in there. So that’s the beginning and it happens connected to this location.

And so anyway, what they end up finding is that at this location then eventually these people become impoverished and they start to see graves that there’s more women than men. And you know the story of the culling of the children, the male children, because they’re multiplying so greatly. And then we see slaveless with names that are similar to names in the Bible that are showing up.

(24:14):
So there’s evidence for that. And then we hear about the coming of a deliverer about Moses and we know the story in the Bible. If you don’t, Moses is protected for a while, hidden from being killed because they were killing the male children. And eventually a princess of Pharaoh or Pharaoh’s daughter finds Moses and actually adopts him, kind of like a young woman finding a puppy and bringing him home.

And he gets raised in Pharaoh’s palace and he ends up becoming trained in all of the understandings of Egypt and eventually he sees what’s happening to his people and he gets angry and he kills someone, kills an Egyptian taskmaster and has to flee for his life. And then he flees to a land called Midian and there for 40 years he’s a shepherd and he ends up, God speaks to him through a burning bush and tells him to go back and deliver his people.

(25:18):
And that’s the story of the Exodus. And what we find is that when Moses came back, he was afraid. And we end up seeing in the archeology that he has been given the ability to, he asked Pharaoh to let the people go, that they could worship God. And Pharaoh continues to say, he says, “Who is this God that I should worship him?” He didn’t even know who this God was. And Moses ends up performing miraculous things such as miracles and plagues to come on Egypt. And what we find is that there is a document called Ipuro.

(26:03):
It’s called the Admissions of an Egyptian Sage and his name is Ipuro and it’s a papyrus. And I always had a hard time saying it, but anyway, he writes almost a mirroring of what happened in the plagues. The river turns to blood and the Bible says, “The river turned to blood,” and it’s like a warning to future Egyptian people. Don’t ever let this happen. And so we see archeology in the sense of a script written that matches the events of the plagues. So the film has a lot of these connections, but no one ever really connected it with that before because it’s happening earlier in time.

So what they would say, and if you go off to college and someone tells you about this, they’re going to say, “Yeah, there’s no connection. There’s no evidence for the exodus.” That’s their interpretation, but that’s, I can tell you after 20 years and all these other archeologists that are showing me, there’s all sorts of ways to connect this and the pattern is very, very strong and you’re going to see a pattern for the judgment of Egypt.

(27:06):
Then we go on to the conquest of the Promised Land, you’re going to see a pattern for that. And now I’m into the journey, the Red Sea miracle and what sea was parted and the question of miracles, do miracles happen and how do they happen? So the series of films that I’m making are focused on historical credibility, challenging it, but then saying, “Hey, is there a pattern?” And I’m telling you there’s an amazing pattern that supports the biblical narrative.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:39):
This is all so fascinating. It’s fascinating because people have been doing archeology for 150 years in that area, perhaps longer. And the story that has been told in universities, especially in biblical studies classes, is that the things that are in the Bible haven’t been demonstrated by the evidence.

And so we essentially have raised a generation of skeptics because we haven’t been looking for the patterns that you’re now able to discover and to help reveal. Is this the kind of thing that students can actually bring up and talk about in class, that their professors are dealing with evidence that’s out of date and that these new things have been coming up that demonstrate the power of scripture and telling the truth.

Tim Mahoney (28:44):
I went to an event at a college and a student came up to me. She was actually from Africa, I think, and she had converted from her religion and immigrated to America and went to a college that she believed was a Christian college. And the professor there was telling her and the class that there was really no evidence for the events of the Bible, the older events such as the Exodus, and she could put two and two together.

And she said, “Well, then why in the world did I become a Christian if this isn’t true, if this isn’t history?” And she was very distraught and she was in her dorm and one of the other students said, “Hey, you should look at patterns of evidence, the Exodus.” And she goes, “What’s that?” And at the time it was on Netflix. So she stayed up, watched it through the night, took all sorts of notes.

(29:35):
The next day she went to her professor and she said, “You are wrong.” Wow. And he goes, “What?” She says, “There is evidence for the Exodus.” He says, “What are you talking about?” “Patterns of evidence. You need to see patterns of evidence.” He goes, “What’s that?” And so he watched it and much to his credit, he ended up seeing that there was another way to interpret this. He ended up changing the test that he had, and he changed his story in a sense. He opened it up to have a dialogue.

I can tell you, I’ve spent a lot of time and traveled and talked to a lot of scholars. A lot of the answers that they have are answers that have been given to them from other people. A lot of this is standing on other people’s shoulders. There are certain periods of time when it’s unpopular.

(30:26):
It’s very unpopular right now to suggest that there’s any biblical historical credibility to certain events earlier on. Why is that? It’s because people that were, let’s say Albright and other scholars from the past, after they passed away, their students wanted to go a new direction and they started becoming very critical of the Bible, which is popular to do.

And what I’ve seen both from a philosophical and archeological and from a scientific standpoint, if you start to look at this and start to track it down, you start to see where there’s real big holes in their criticism. It’s not well thought out. I mean, saying there’s absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Exactly. And so what you start to see is that people aren’t having everything add up the way it should. They’re dropping the ball in a number of areas. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing is trying to understand that completely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:38):
That’s a key takeaway, I think, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So as new scholarship comes in, as new discoveries are made, as new approaches are put into place, you’re realizing not only that there is all kinds of incredible evidence, but you’re also realizing that disappointingly, a lot of scholars just quote previous scholars, who quote previous scholars, who quote previous scholars.

William Lane Craig was recently on this program talking about the evidence for the historical Adam, which is something that has long been denied by scholars. And so he started tracing back, where did all of this stuff come from that Adam didn’t really exist? And he realized these scholars, an initial scholar had made some kind of huge mistake and other scholars just continued to repeat his work through time. So you’ve got to be able to go back. You’ve got to be able to read and study, watch films like Patterns of Evidence, read.

(32:37):
Somebody’s going to get a book or two to put in their library in case they run into situations like this, or let’s say they’re teaching a Sunday school class about the reliability of scripture. What are a couple of resources they ought to just have in their library?

Tim Mahoney (32:51):
Well, we have a number of books on our Patterns of Evidence website that I felt that were good books to read. And one of the things I’ve tried to do is give you multiple viewpoints in our books. We have one called Patterns of Evidence: A Filmmaker’s Journey. A Filmmaker’s Journey, which is my own sort of back behind the making of the film and the evidences that we found. It goes into more detail.

And then we have Exodus: Myth or History by David Roll. And then we’ve got some on the route of the Exodus by Dr. Glenn Fritz. And then I have one called Evidence of Faith, which is, why is it important that our faith is historical? And that’s actually a book that can be used in small groups. We’ve got video and questions as a part of that. So those are some of the books that we have and we’re collecting more, but right now those are probably a good place to start when it comes to this particular subject of the Exodus.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:56):
I really encourage people to do this. You’ve got a small group or you’ve got a Sunday school class. And it’s important to go through and look at the books of the Bible and discover how their teachings apply to our lives, but it’s also really important. Maybe do this once a year or once a quarter, just take some time to look at the historical evidence and be affirmed that what we believe is actually a plausible belief system. It’s rational. There is intelligible evidence behind it. And you’ve really helped us with that, Tim.

I’m just curious about the Red Sea. I just said to my wife, Stephanie, last night, one of my bucket list items is to go scuba diving in the Red Sea. I’ve been able to scuba dive all over the world, never yet in the Red Sea. But tell us about that, because I think a lot of people do look at scripture and say, “The sea parted. Right. Yeah, that’s not really something that we can explain rationally.” Tell us some of the things that you’ve discovered in your explorations.

Tim Mahoney (34:59):
Well, the Red Sea, and sometimes as we think about it, I think it really becomes known when we think about the water that was parted when the Israelites were trapped at the Sea. And the question then in two of our films, the Red Sea miracle one and two was, “Well, where is this sea?” And then you ask the question, “Well, what is it called in Hebrew?” And in Hebrew, it’s called Yamsuf. And this location has been placed next to Egypt at times near Reedy Marshi lakes because some think that I actually have discussed this idea of an Egyptian approach to reading the Bible and a Hebrew approach.

And the Egyptian approach tends to bring the narrative of the Exodus root out of Egypt and the crossing of the sea close to Egypt, and it places it crossing a marshy lake or somewhere on that Eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, as opposed to the Gulf of Aqaba because the Hebrew approach, Yamsuf is used in the scriptures as defining the Gulf of Aquba. It’s a boundary for Israel.

(36:22):
There are different references throughout the scriptures that point to that as a geographical marker. So the question then is, did God part using natural causes, such as just what’s called wind set down theory, blowing across the shallower body of water that would kind of create like a tide pushing the water back or did God, it says that there was walls of water and the Israelites walked in between them.

And if the Lord created the universe and all the planets and earth and the sun and the moon and the stars and all, I don’t really have a problem with God parting water, but some people have. I had one Egyptologist say, “That water at the Gulf of Bakama is so deep, not even God could part it.” Wow. He’s making a joke, obviously, but so the question then is, well, what led us to that route?

(37:22):
How did we get there? Why would we think? And that’s what those two films do is it looks at what were the clues in the scriptures that would help you to understand which way did they go? And that’s been my approach to try to give you some different alternatives. And obviously, I do have ones that I think make more sense to me and I’ll share that, but I’m really looking at the different viewpoints.

And I think that that’s what’s been freeing about watching a Patterns of Evidence documentary film. First of all, we try to make them as beautiful as we can, go to places that you’ve never been. And you mentioned the Red Sea. I went to this location called Nuiba in the very beginning in 2002, which is a popular location for thinking that this might be where the Israelites were stranded. It’s on a beach.

(38:17):
It has a beach head, kind of sticks out like this. And there’s a plateau that extends from that beach all the way across the other side. And on either side of that is deep valleys. I mean, when we say deep, we’re talking like 4 or 5,000 feet deep. Wow. It’s a deep valley. It’s still a deep crossing when it comes across, but what they’re saying is that it’s something that you could potentially walk across to the other side if the water were parted.

And so I went there and it’s beautiful. You would love, I mean, I went in and swam there. I’m not a diver, but I did have snorkel and fins and it’s beautiful. The coral, it’s a wonderful place to go investigate. So I encourage you, if you ever can go to the Red Sea and go diving, please do it. You’ll really enjoy it.

(39:12):
But that’s one of the locations that we look at as a crossing site at the Red Sea. On the Gulf of Aqaba side, some people think that it happened up at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba with a wind set down idea. And we’re looking at, I think we look at six or seven different locations.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:30):
Wow. Okay. So this is really helpful because you’re not just, I’ve seen some films where they just take one theory and they explain it and they try to eliminate all evidence to the contrary to give people an impression. And that’s not what we really want from what I’m picking up from you. What we really want is to understand a lot of the different ideas about how this might have happened so that we become students of history, not just advocates of a particular theory.

Tim Mahoney (40:04):
Right. There’s a certain amount of, if you’re going to, I’m going to throw this out. If you’re going to be human and you were given the gift of life and you’re given the gift of existence, I think you need to know more. I think you need to not be distracted by the little things. I have grandkids and you know, my keys are over here. I’m just going to grab you. When you have a small child, you can take these keys and shake them and their head will follow you anywhere.

And my point is that there’s a lot of people that are looking at little keys like a toddler, and it’s just kind of, squirrel. They’re kind of going off in different directions. And I can be that way too. So I have to be careful that I don’t get distracted by different things, because I think it’s very easy now for us to be distracted by things that don’t matter at the end of the day.

(41:00):
And so I didn’t consider myself to be a scholar or anything, but I’m interested in a number of things. And I would like to encourage anyone who’s watching this not to be intimidated by this. At the end of the day, it’s going to be pretty, with all the different words that people use, sometimes that’s actually, I mean, it’s meant because they’re used to talking inside baseball about whatever they’re doing, but if you can boil it down and figure out, well, where’s the meat of this and what are they actually trying to say?

That’s where in my films I’ve tried to make visuals so that people could understand like we created a tool called the Wall of Time. So when someone’s talking about a dynasty or a middle bronze age or the middle kingdom, they’re kind of different ways of saying the same thing or 320 BC or whatever.

(41:55):
I’ll show you where that is and I’ll explain it to you. And once you understand that, you kind of decoded it, then you can start to understand the concepts. But the whole idea, I think for all of us, is to conceptually understand the world in which we live. And then you can somewhat understand that there are scholars who have a philosophical way of seeing things and they are not bringing up things that don’t fit their philosophical understanding. They’re going to ignore them or they’re going to diminish them. They’re going to leave them completely out.

And so as I started to film people and ask questions, there are questions that they don’t answer because they don’t have good answers for them. And I like a lot of these guys. I mean, I would say for most of them, and there was one time in the Moses controversy, I interviewed three scholars, and I’m in the midst of this, and I started to understand that all. When I asked them about their history, they told me that, well, I grew up, my father was a pastor, I grew up in a Christian home, but now I’m an agnostic, I don’t believe.

(43:01):
And I made the opening of the Moses controversy was these three different guys, each one of them. And there are lots of reasons why people don’t believe, but sometimes there’s reasons that people just don’t want to believe. And I think that, so I would like to encourage, I can tell you that there’s so many patterns of evidence for the historical credibility of the Bible and so many other parts of this that it’s inescapable, I believe, but you can choose not to believe.

And if you’re a person watching this and you’re like, I think sometimes you basically need to have a focus and start to say, “I need to know more. I need to become more aware of the world that I’m living in and I need to start to understand certain things.” And history for me has been fantastic because it’s telling me where we came from and that tells us where we’re going and it’s pretty serious.

(44:07):
You mentioned one thing in the Book of the Dead and I’m working on a project right now, The Seven Churches of Revelation. Now the Egyptians had a book of the Dead and I haven’t investigated it. I’ve seen it. I’ve been right up next to it. I’ve been to the different museums and looked at it. It’s a fascinating thing, but the Bible actually has a book too, and it’s whether our names are recorded in that Bible.

And I think that we don’t realize, I have a fairly strong understanding that the universe is created of laws, that there are laws in the universe, but there are physical laws, but I’m going to share with you that I think that there are spiritual laws of the universe too. And we do know that there’s a consciousness in people that’s separate.

The science shows us that it’s separate from our brain and it’s separate from our body because people who, there’s testimonies and there’s research that shows that when people die and have died, clinically they’re dead. Their consciousness leaves their body and they start to experience the surroundings and all that. If anybody’s wondering about that, it’s true. You need to research that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:17):
There’s a remarkable amount of writing, new writing and evidence on this. Yes. Yeah. For some people, it’s just crazy to think that, but once it’s really closely examined, it’s fascinating.

Tim Mahoney (45:31):
It should cause us to really understand that something’s going on here. And I’ve had, last year I had a really close friend of mine die, and I stood in front of that casket, and if you’ve ever sat or stood in front of a casket and looked at someone, they’re not there. You’ve just realized their shell is there, but they’re not there. And so where did they go? And the whole point of this time that we have is that we could actually come to know our creator.

And we have this short little window of existence for you and I, and for anyone who’s listening, there’s just little time. I mean, if you scale it on a wall of time and look at the time period that you have to live and the time you have, you don’t want to be distracted by this little jangly key that means nothing.

(46:17):
It absolutely means nothing. When you have the opportunity, potentially, if I said you could live for a billion years, well, that sounds like a lot. What if I said a billion billion or a billion, billion, billion? Well, guess what? It’s more than that. It’s eternity that you’d have eternal life with the creator of the universe. That’s an amazing gift that people are being distracted away from because of all sorts of things.

And so this new movie that I became aware of, and now I’m helping to distribute, it’s called The Seven Churches of Revelation. And it came out of France by a French filmmaker, Christoph Hanover. And he had seen my earlier film on Patterns of Evidence and was inspired by it. And he lives in Switzerland and he ended up getting people together, filmmakers and scholars there. And they went to Turkey where the seven churches in the Book of Revelation, if you don’t know what happened, the very last book of the Bible, Revelation, was written by John, we believe, and he was given a vision while he was a political prisoner on the island of Patmos.

(47:24):
And so this vision is recorded and it begins with a message to seven churches. And this message is a combination of praise. And for many of them, there’s admonitions that are serious and basically saying, “Hey, you better improve or bad things are going to happen.” And so I was intrigued by that film. We helped to shape that into the first three churches and the visit to Island of Patmos. That’s where this film is. It’s going to be in theaters October 11th and 12th as a fathom event.

And then we have a panel discussion that we filmed at the museum of the Bible that’s going to be coming out. There’s my movie poster there. So Cristoff is the investigative filmmaker. There it is right there, Times of Fire. This is like da Vinci code. I mean, it’s so beautifully shot. It’s so well done. You want to get your tickets.

(48:22):
And if you go to www.7churches.com, you can see a trailer, you can buy tickets to the theater and you can bring a group. So this is an ongoing series. This is just the first film. We already have the second one shot and that’s planning on coming out in the next year. And so, and then we’re going to be going deeper into the book of Revelation because it’s timely. And I think this film was meant to be at this time.

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:58):
I think you’re right. There’s so many things happening in our world right now. And when difficult crises occur, people begin to wonder what are the ends of days like? What happens at the end of all things? And to understand the message that God had given to those seven churches is crucial. So Times of Fire, we’ll be looking for that in theaters. I’m not sure exactly when this episode is going to be released, but it will certainly, the movie will be out by the time this episode is released, so you can check that out, time to fire.

Tim, thank you so much. This has been such an enlightening conversation spiritually. And I’m thinking of so many things in scripture. The Psalmist says, “Teach me to number my days so that I may gain a heart of wisdom.” And then the Apostle Paul said, “Make the most of every opportunity because the days are evil.” This is our opportunity every day to explore, to grow closer to the Lord and to look forward to his plan for humanity. So thank you so much for your time.

Tim Mahoney (50:04):
Well, thank you for having me. And if this program is after the theatrical release, there is a virtual cinema we’ll have worldwide. So if you have people in other parts of the world that can’t get there, they can go to that same website address, 7churches.com, and they can get on the virtual side of it. And I just want to thank you too for what you’re doing and to your listeners, I think it is time to number our days. I’ve really been very conscious of that.

And I think that in Ephesians chapter 2:10, it says we are Christ’s workmanship and he’s prepared good works for us to do before the beginning of creation. So your existence is not a coincidence. You actually have been created for something and I think that the most important thing for you to do is figure out what that is.

(50:55):
And if you’re not living a life that’s faithful, then it’s time to get serious. And I think that’s why this whole Times of Fire is about being involved with another body of being involved with a body of Christians to help us through the uncertainty that the future will hold. So thank you very much, Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (51:16):
Great word. Thanks, Tim. Thanks again to my guest, Tim Mahoney. I hope you learned a lot. I sure did. And I hope that you’re intrigued to follow up on the Patterns of Evidence series that Tim has produced. You can find out more at patternsofevidence.com. At Summit Ministries, we encourage students to ask questions, and when they learn to ask good questions and to study things out, we are confident that the time tested truths of scripture will endure. Thank you for tuning in, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview for nearly 60 years.

Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.

(52:39):
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