In case you wondered …

… Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… neither Abraham nor Moses is available as a starting point for a modern historian, for the simple reason that neither of them can be proved to have existed. Indeed, for a scholar who subscribes to critical and scientific canons of evidence, it is quite certain that they did not exist, since their stories are full of things that could not possibly have happened: the voices from Heaven, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea. Instead, the secular historian must find a starting point that is well attested in non-Biblical evidence, and work forward from there. Already, in this decision, Jewish memory is separated from Jewish history; the latter must study the former, but must not rely on it.

Hard to get more parochial than this. These people couldn't have existed because the miraculous is impossible. Presumably, all mystical experiences are also impossible — unless we want to psychologize them in some intellectually fashionable manner. I'll stick with Hamlet:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.