The Biblical Moses is primarily based on the figure of conquistador Fernando Cortés

KD: This was posted by @emperornorton as a comment. Figured it was interesting enough to be a stand alone article.

I claim, in contravention of orthodox history and theology that:

• 1) the stories related in the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) were written in the early 16th century and relate events centered on the explusion of Jews from Spain and the Conquest of Mexico.
• 2) the Biblical Moses is primarily based on the figure of conquistador Fernando Cortés.
• 3) all the events described in the Bible took place, if they took place, in the Americas (with the exception of Spain).
• 4) the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press provided the opportunity and means of injecting the aforesaid texts (and others) into the standard Bible canon.

Before I adduce positive evidence for these claims, I remind you that the traditional view, placing these events in the area of the Middle East and thereabouts, rests merely on the correspondence of like geographic placenames, and (I guess) the perceived implausibility of faking something like that. The other forms of evidence for the traditional view, the kind that you'd expect to be all over the place, are conspicuously absent.

Most strikingly, the ground in the "Holy Land," per its conventional location, hasn't yielded any archaeological evidence for the many events, battles, landforms, cities, structures, or persons described in the Old Testament scriptures. And it's not for lack of anybody of trying to find them. Researchers have spent centuries looking for something to scientifically legitimate the Biblical narrative in Palestine. The true believers in these efforts are willing to tolerate a standard of evidence that is minimal indeed but even they can't do better than submit their constrained conjectures apologetically.

You'll see a lot of statements like these, taken from Finegan's The Archaeological Background of the Hebrew-Christian Religion, which is typical of the genre:
Apologetes like Finegan, undeterred, manage to count these problems as a special form of proof. The sacking of Jerusalem, he says in this line, "is reflected only too clearly in the archeological realm by the paucity of important materials." And as for the Conquest of Caanan, he notes that "Joshua evidently did a thorough job of destruction." Tautologies like these and the occasional excavated well that might have been the one Joseph drew water from is about all there is connecting the Bible to the "Bible lands."

Unless, that is, you count the fake antiquities. I don't. The only way the Dead Sea scrolls could look any more fake was if they were found stuffed in a Bud Light bottle. Even the Pyramids of Giza appear to be modern creations, constructed during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Most of the famous Egyptian relics were allegedly found at the same time and must likewise come under suspicion.


In America we don't have this problem. The evidence is right in front of our faces. Even the geographic place-markers for the scriptural events are still around. Just look at any map. I'll only post a few examples of buildings in California that seem to predate the official occupation of the country. I think everyone is familiar with these things, so I won't belabor the point. Individually these don't point infallibly toward Mosaic conquest, but if you examine these along with the names of counties, cities, mountains, lakes, and so forth in the area a very compelling pattern emerges. We will see that the constellation of exotic place names strewn across the American Southwest is not derived from the collective whim of pioneers inspired variously by nostalgia or perceived similitude--no, there's a plot and a purpose.



As a correlate to my claimed identification of Moses as Cortés, I suggest that the traditional Biblical terms on the left hand-side refer in fact to the corresponding cognate-terms on the right:

Some of these suppositions allow us to authenticate Biblical entities that would otherwise remain mysterious. For instance, the existence of the Moabite tribe, as examined on the traditional table of evidence, seems doubtful. Some of the other identifications redound upon existing claims, but I think the stronger case can be made for the alternatives I suggested.

Now, in identifying Moses as Cortés, it is not necessary that there be one historical individual with the same name and same resumé as the personage of Fernando Cortés as we know him. At the very time the conquistadors were marching across Mexico, Spain herself was rocked by the revolutionary comunero (communist) uprising, which group identified its governmental pretensions by the name of "Cortés" as well. It is hard (unless you're an historian I guess) not to infer a conspiratorial link between the two events, the conquest abroad and the revolution at home. But whether one was named for the other or both in reference to a concept significant to the cause it is not necessary to determine for my purposes. By "Cortés," I mean only the person who led the Mexican Conquest.


There are several obvious similarities between Moses and Cortés. Moses assumed his position of influence among the Egyptians by means of infiltration. Cortés likewise made use of intrigue to attain his leadership position for the conquest. Furthermore, his curious habit of attributing judgments to "the Christians," suggests substantial versimilitude along religious lines as well. Moses is said to have written five books. Cortés wrote five letters. They were both pursued across water. They both suppressed attempts at mutiny. They both carried a staff, etc.


Further, many of the details of the Mosaic narrative are consistent only with a setting in the Americas. The fig trees scattered about the hills of Palestine were planted in the last two hundred years--after being imported from California. Israel's apocalypic red heiffer that's been in the news lately also came from California. And how many bears are there in Palestine?


Another possible clue is provided by the unusual variation historians have imposed on Cortés' first name. All contemporary accounts referred to him as "Fernando," with the occasional "Ferdinand" or "Ferdinandus" thrown in. But nowadays it's always "Hernán." Why? I suggest that the variant form is intended to signify Moses' brother "Aaron" (the Spanish h is silent).


A convincing point of coincidence is found in the naming of the Gulf of California, or Sea of Cortez. This body of water was historically known as the "Red Sea," or "Vermillion Sea" (vermillion is a scarlet red) under which names it appears on the old maps. It may be objected that this is a somewhat generic descriptive term. But there are good reasons to regard this circumstance as significant.


First, there is not any other body of water, besides the familiar one located along the Sinai Peninsula, that is named the "Red Sea." Second, Eusabius Kino (real last name Kuhn) a Jesuit rector of Sonora, Mexico who upon reconfirming the continuity of California with the North American landmass in 1702 (most people thought California was an island at the time) declared that his discovery gave confirmation to the Exodus of Moses as recorded in the Bible. If he didn't equate Moses with Cortés then that would be a ridiculous thing to say, right?


California was depicted as an island by virtually all maps published from the late 16th century to the middle of the 18th century. However the earliest maps of America--those published around the time of the Mexican conquest--depict California along the Western edge of the continent much as it appears on maps today. We're expected to believe that the centuries-long California island was just a cartographic blunder that went viral. Supposedly no one bothered to sail up the Gulf of California for a span of over a hundred years yet somehow still managed to name and draw a bunch of new islands that popped up there.


I think California did become an island in the 16th century, shortly after Cortés and his allies marched there across the desert. The subsequent flooding of the land east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains--the area known as the "Great Basin"--would be the event described in the Bible as the destruction of Pharoah's pursuing army.

According to the Jesuits the strongests earthquakes recorded in America, up to that point, occurred at the end of the 17th century. This was shortly before Eusabius Kino rediscovered a path by land from Mexico to California, and one of these may have been the event that made that possible. This, or a subsequent earthquake may have also been responsible for creating the San Francisco Bay. It is remarkable that none of the sailing expeditions or even explorers on land seem to have been aware of the largest harbor on the West Coast of the continent until 1769. The professional explanation for this is fog.


The Indians have a tradition that the Bay was created--i.e. opened up to the Sea--during an earthquake that occurred somewhere in this time frame. There was simply a large inland lake there before, they say. Indeed, much of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys were also covered by lakes until around the time of the Civil War. All of this leads me to suspect that it was an earthquake that separated California from the mainland, either by subsidence of the desert lands to the east of California, by rising of sea levels, or even by the destruction of a dam on the Colorado river.

Now the most obvious grounds for rebuttal to my claims is the alleged priority of the Old Testament scriptures. As often happens, however, the evidence for this "obvious truth" crumbles under inspection. Mainstream authorities invariably claim very great antiquity for the Pentateuch but the oldest possible extant edition, as far as I can tell, is from 1537 or so. And I couldn't find the text to that edition online. The Wycliffe Bible, which predates the conquest, is supposed to contain the Old Testament, but every edition I have managed to track down has included only the New. If my theory is correct, the claimed Wycliffe Old Testament is the sort of lie that testifies strongly for my thesis. It also looks to me like the Old Testament was originally written in a language other than Hebrew, but I'm not sure.


The allegedly ancient scrolls, parchments, and fragments of the Torah that are said to exist are vouchsafed merely on the authority of the various familiar institutions whose character, based on their track record, does not entitle them to our trust. They must be accepted on faith alone.

Legitimate documents, in my experience, tend to be embedded in a clearly discernible web of referential interconnectedness; this quality is almost impossible to impose ex post facto, and seems to me to be absent in the ancient scriptures. For instance, the year-long Disputation (a kind of compulsory religious symposium) between Christian and Jewish clergy in 15th-century Spain concerned itself, on the Jewish side, with the Talmud alone. As far as I can tell, the records disclose no reference to the books attributed to Moses at all. How could this be?


Along with the old texts we have the supposedly ancient works of art depicting these same events to contend with. I will just say that the circumstances attending an investigation into these claims are much the same as related above.

Finally, I mentioned above the possibility that the destruction of a dam could have produced a deluge consistent with the Biblical narrative of the Egyptians' drowning in the Red Sea. It may be worth noting that the U.S. fifty dollar bill is said to depict the Hoover Dam (bursting?) and that 2021 is the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Mexico.


Thanks for reading!