>
> That, BTW, is God's method. He did not leave us evidence of the Passover,
> for example. But he did command his people to tell the story every year.
>
This may not be quite correct. There is an amazing (IMO) book written
by an Egyptologist, David Rohl, called "A Test of Time." In this book,
David, although not a Christian or in any way religious (by his own
admission) argues that the Bible should be at least as dependable as any
other documents of similar antiquity, at least insofar as they describe
real people, places, historical events.
He has been working on a theory (for which he has accumulated a considerable
amount of evidence, though he is careful to stress that it is still a theory,
and has by no means yet gained widescale acceptance) that significant errors
have been made in the chronology of ancient Egypt, and that a period known
as the Third Intermediate Period has been arbitrarily extended by several
hundred years. When he corrects for this, he finds a stunning array of evidence
for the existence of many Biblical characters and events, from Solomon
right back to the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. Previously this evidence
was not found, he argues, because archaeologists have been looking in the
right places but in the wrong times. He believes he has located Joseph's
palace in Goshen, and his tomb from which the bones had been removed in
obedience to his instruction at the end of Genesis; evidence of mass graves
where people have been interred hurriedly which he interprets as the result
of the plague on the firstborn, occurring at just the time when the semitic
settlers left en masse.
OK, this is the Exodus rather than the Passover specifically, but it amounts
to the same thing. Fascinating stuff, in any case, and well worth the effort
of reading. Oh, and incidentally the reason for the error in the chronology
is because the early Egyptologists were trying to find evidence for the Bible
there (the irony is wonderful) and made some rather dubious and tenuous
associations between the archaeological evidence they were uncovering, and
the Biblical texts.