Message #39430

[Bianca]

In late 1999, a new theory was proposed by British Bible scholar Michael Sanders and an international team of researchers who, after several fraught weeks of diving in a mini-submarine, discovered what appears to be the salt-encrusted remains of ancient settlements on the seabed. Sanders told a television crew from BBC/Channel 4 who were making a documentary about the expedition:

There is a good chance that these mounds are covering up brick structures and are one of the lost cities of the plains, possibly even Sodom or Gomorrah, though I would have to examine the evidence. These Bible stories were handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation before they were written down, and there seems to be a great deal in this one.

Sanders had unearthed a map dating from 1650, which reinforced his belief that the sites of the two cities could be under the northern basin rather than on the southern edge of the Dead Sea.

He recruited Richard Slater, an American geologist and expert in deep-sea diving, to take him to the depths of the Dead Sea in the two-man Delta mini-submarine that was involved in the discovery of the sunken ocean-liner, the Lusitania.

Sanders's location for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the deep northern part of the Dead Sea, is even more at odds with history and geology than Keller's theory of the cities being at the shallow southern end.