The Evidence for Christianity

Many people assume that Christianity asks you to switch off your mind. Faith, they have been told, is believing what you know is not true, or at least believing without reasons. If you have assumed that, you may be surprised to learn that the Bible itself does not.

The God of the Bible invites inquiry: "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD" (Isaiah 1:18). The apostles appealed to public facts. Paul told a Roman governor and a Jewish king that the events he preached could be checked, "for this thing was not done in a corner" (Acts 26:26). The Jews of Berea were praised because they "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). And believers are told to be ready with reasons: "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15).

This paper is an attempt to give that answer.

What this paper does, and what it does not do

It sets out the case for Christianity one strand at a time, the way an investigator builds a case from many kinds of evidence. Part 1 asks whether there is a God at all. Part 2 looks at the man at the centre of the faith and what He claimed. Part 3 examines the resurrection, on which Christianity stands or falls. Part 4 looks at prophecy written long before the events it describes. Part 5 tests the Bible's history against archaeology and asks how its text has come down to us. Part 6 looks at the evidence of changed lives. Part 7 weighs the main objections and then puts the strands together.

Three rules govern it. Every claim is sourced. Where a scholar is quoted, the words have been checked against the source, and the source is given so you can check it too. No overclaiming. Some popular arguments for Christianity are weak, misquote their sources, or claim more than the evidence can bear; they are left out, because the truth does not need them. Where an argument has limits, the paper says so. The Bible is quoted from the King James Version, the 1611 Authorised Version, which this ministry holds to be the word of God. You can read it free in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library.

A companion paper, The Historical Jesus, reads the Roman and Jewish sources about Jesus in detail. This paper draws on it but goes further, to the question that matters most: not only whether Jesus lived, but whether He is who He said He is.

A word about me

I was raised Roman Catholic but never really connected — I went through the motions, fell asleep in the pews, and faked being sick to skip Mass. When real life hit — a lost job, a pregnant wife, constant fights — I went looking for peace anywhere I could find it. New Age, crystals, astral projection, tarot, angel numbers. None of it held. Eventually I gave up and called myself an atheist. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good.

It did the opposite. I came to faith in 2022, and my wife came to faith a month later. The whole story is at kylelauriano.com/about. I tell you this not because my experience proves anything to you, but so you know where I started. I have tried in this paper to set out what anyone can find who looks honestly.

Before we can ask whether Christianity is true, we have to ask whether there is a God at all. If there is not, then miracles are impossible and the rest of the case never gets started. This part matters because many people dismiss the resurrection not on the evidence but on the assumption that the universe is a closed system with no one outside it. If there is good reason to think a Creator exists, that assumption falls, and the historical evidence can be heard on its merits.

The Bible says that the creation itself points to its Maker: "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). And: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork" (Psalm 19:1). Three signposts stand out.

The universe had a beginning

The Bible's first sentence makes a claim no ancient rival made so plainly: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). The universe is not eternal. It began, and it began because God made it.

For much of modern history, many thinkers assumed the opposite: that the universe had always existed and needed no cause. Over the twentieth century the weight of scientific opinion moved towards the view that the physical universe, and time itself, had a beginning. Philosophers have long reasoned from that fact to God. The modern form of the argument, revived by the philosopher William Lane Craig in The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), is simple:¹

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

A cause of the whole physical universe, including space and time, cannot itself be a physical thing inside space and time. It must be beyond them: timeless, immensely powerful, and, since it chose to create, personal. That is a long way from proving everything Christians believe, but it fits exactly the God of Genesis 1:1, who made "the worlds" so "that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Hebrews 11:3).

A word of care is needed. This paper does not tie the Bible to any particular scientific model, nor make any claim about the age of the earth or the universe. Scientific theories change. The point is narrower: the Bible taught that the universe had a beginning long before modern science agreed, and a beginning calls for a Beginner.

A universe set up for life

The second signpost is the remarkable fitness of the universe for life. Physicists have found that a number of the basic constants of nature, such as the strength of gravity and of the forces inside the atom, fall within narrow ranges that permit stable stars, chemistry, and life. The British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees built a whole book around six such numbers and how finely they are set.²

The most famous reaction came from the astronomer Fred Hoyle, also no believer in the God of the Bible, who had studied how carbon, the element on which life depends, is made inside stars. He found that its production depends on a very precise energy level in the carbon nucleus. Reflecting on this, he wrote: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."³

Some answer that there may be countless unseen universes, so that one with the right settings was bound to turn up. That is a possible view, but notice what it requires: an enormous, unobservable machinery invented to avoid the simpler conclusion. The Christian is not embarrassed by the fine-tuning. It is what one would expect if "all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist" (Colossians 1:16-17).

The moral law within

The third signpost is closer to home. Every human being knows that some things are really wrong: torturing a child for fun, betraying a friend for money, cowardice when someone needs you. We argue about many moral questions, but the very fact that we argue shows we believe there is a right answer to find. We do not merely dislike cruelty, the way we dislike a flavour. We condemn it.

C. S. Lewis, who had been an atheist before he became a Christian, opened his BBC radio talks, later published as Mere Christianity, with exactly this point. The first book of Mere Christianity is called "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe". Lewis argued that people everywhere appeal to a standard of behaviour they did not invent and that they all fail to keep, and that such a law points to a Lawgiver behind the universe who cares about right conduct.⁴ Paul makes the same point: the Gentiles, who did not have the law of Moses, "shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness" (Romans 2:15).

If there is no God, our moral sense is a product of survival and custom, useful perhaps, but with no more authority than a taste. Few people can live as if that were true. When we see real evil, we do not say "I happen to dislike that". We say "That is wrong", and we mean it. The best explanation of that conviction is that it is true: there is a moral law because there is a moral Lawgiver.

What these signposts can and cannot show

These arguments do not prove the gospel. They point to a Creator who is powerful, intelligent and good, but they do not tell us His name, or whether He has spoken, or how a guilty person can be put right with Him. For that we need something more than nature. We need history: we need to know whether God has acted and spoken in the world. That is exactly what Christianity claims, and it is where the rest of this paper goes.

Every religion has a founder or a teacher. Christianity is different in one decisive way: it does not merely follow the teaching of Jesus, it worships Him. This part matters because the whole case turns on who He is. If He was a good teacher and nothing more, Christianity is a mistake. If He was who He said He was, everything changes.

He really lived

The first point can be made briefly, because the companion paper makes it at length. Jesus of Nazareth is one of the best-attested figures of the ancient world outside the ranks of rulers. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around AD 116, records that "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus".⁵ The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 90s, mentions "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James".⁶ The Roman governor Pliny, around AD 111, reports Christians who sang "a form of prayer to Christ, as to a divinity".⁷ And the letters of Paul, written in the 50s, show us a man who knew Jesus' brother and His leading disciple personally (Galatians 1:18-19).

The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, who rejects the Christian faith, has written that denying Jesus' existence is to deny "what virtually every sane historian on the planet -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you -- has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence. ... Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed."⁸ That much is not in serious dispute.

What He claimed

The harder question is what kind of man He was. Here the Gospels give us not only His teaching but His claims about Himself, and they are startling.

He claimed to forgive sins, not sins against Himself, but sins against God. When He told a paralysed man "Son, thy sins be forgiven thee", the scribes understood exactly what He meant: "Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?" (Mark 2:5-7).

He claimed to have existed before Abraham, using the very name by which God revealed Himself to Moses: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." His hearers picked up stones to kill Him (John 8:58-59). When He said "I and my Father are one", they did the same, and gave the reason: "for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God" (John 10:30-33).

And at His trial, when the high priest put Him under oath, He gave the answer that sent Him to the cross:

"Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death." (Mark 14:61-64)

These claims are not scattered in one late Gospel. They run through all four, and they explain the one fact about Jesus that no historian doubts: that the authorities of His own nation handed Him over to be crucified.

Not merely a good teacher

Many people today would like to keep Jesus as a wise moral teacher and leave the rest aside. C. S. Lewis saw why that option is not open:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice."⁹

Lewis' argument is sometimes criticised for leaving out a fourth option: that Jesus never said these things, and that the claims were put in His mouth by later followers. That is a fair question, and it is answered by evidence, not by assertion. The earliest sources we have, the letters of Paul written within about twenty to thirty years of the crucifixion, already worship Jesus as Lord. Paul quotes what many scholars think is an early Christian hymn, which says that at His name "every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:10-11). Within eighty years, a Roman governor found ordinary Christians singing to Christ "as to a divinity". The worship of Jesus was not a slow legend. It was there at the beginning, among Jews who had been taught all their lives that worshipping any man was idolatry.

So we are back at Lewis' choice. A man who claimed what Jesus claimed was either deceived, or a deceiver, or telling the truth. How could anyone decide? Jesus Himself pointed to one test above all: He said He would be killed and rise again. "And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again" (Mark 8:31). If that happened, the question is settled.

Christianity is the only major religion that stakes everything on a single, checkable event. Paul said so with startling frankness: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God" (1 Corinthians 15:14-15). If you want to disprove Christianity, this is where to aim. And if it holds here, it holds.

This part matters most of all. It sets out what the earliest sources say, the facts that a wide range of scholars accept, and the explanations that have been offered for them.

How historians approach the question

A historian cannot put the resurrection in a laboratory. What he can do is what he does with any past event: gather the evidence, establish the facts that are well attested, and ask which explanation accounts for them best.

The New Testament scholar Gary Habermas has spent decades cataloguing what scholars of every persuasion, from conservative to sceptical, write about the end of Jesus' life. From this he built what he calls the "minimal facts" approach. To count as a minimal fact, he explains, an event "had to be established by more than adequate scholarly evidence, and usually by several critically-ascertained, independent lines of argumentation. Additionally, the vast majority of contemporary scholars in relevant fields had to acknowledge the historicity of the occurrence."¹⁰ In The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Habermas and Michael Licona set out four such facts, and a fifth that is widely though not as universally granted.¹¹

The value of this method is that it does not ask the skeptic to accept the Bible as inspired first. It starts from what is granted by people who do not share the Christian conclusion, and asks what best explains it.

Fact 1: Jesus died by crucifixion

The death of Jesus on a Roman cross is among the most certain facts of ancient history. It is reported by all four Gospels, by Paul, by Tacitus, by Josephus, and by the satirist Lucian, who mocked the Christians for worshipping "the crucified sage".¹² The sceptical scholar John Dominic Crossan wrote that "That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be".¹³

Roman soldiers were professional executioners. John's Gospel records that, to make sure, "one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water" (John 19:34), and Mark that Pilate checked with the centurion before he released the body (Mark 15:44-45). The theory that Jesus merely fainted on the cross and revived in the tomb has few defenders among scholars today. A half-dead man, scourged and pierced, limping out of a tomb, would not have convinced anyone that he had conquered death.

Fact 2: His disciples sincerely believed He rose and appeared to them

This is the heart of the matter. The earliest evidence is the creed Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15, which he says he "received" and then "delivered":

"For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)

Scholars widely agree that the core of this formula was already fixed before Paul wrote it down in the mid-50s, and that Paul most likely received it within a few years of the crucifixion, perhaps on the fifteen-day visit to Peter he describes in Galatians 1:18. Even critics who deny the resurrection date it very early: the German scholar Gerd Lüdemann, who argued that the appearances were visions, dated the tradition to within about two years of the crucifixion.¹⁴

The disciples did not merely say this; they lived and died by it. Peter and the apostles told the council that had condemned Jesus, "We ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree" (Acts 5:29-30). Clement, the leader of the church in Rome, writing near the end of the first century, remembered that Peter "endured not one or two, but numerous labours; and when he had at length suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him", and that Paul too "suffered martyrdom".¹⁵

Martyrdom does not prove that a belief is true. People die for false beliefs all the time. But it does prove that the believer is sincere. The disciples were in a unique position: they were not dying for something they had been told by others, but for something they said they had seen. Men do not suffer and die for a claim they know they made up. Even Bart Ehrman, who does not believe Jesus rose, accepts as historical that some of His followers came to believe soon after His death that He had been raised.¹⁶ Almost no scholar thinks the disciples were lying. The question is what they saw.

Fact 3: The persecutor Paul was converted

Paul's conversion is a fact in its own right. Paul himself tells us, in letters no one disputes, that he had been the church's enemy: "beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it" (Galatians 1:13). The churches of Judaea, he says, knew him only by reputation: "That he which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed" (Galatians 1:23).

What turned him? Not the persuasion of Christians, whom he despised, but, as he says, an appearance of the risen Jesus: "And last of all he was seen of me also" (1 Corinthians 15:8). Paul gave up status, safety and the respect of his own people, and spent the rest of his life in beatings, prisons and shipwrecks for the sake of the man he had once called a blasphemer. That requires an explanation.

Fact 4: The skeptic James was converted

During Jesus' ministry, His own brothers did not believe in Him: "For neither did his brethren believe in him" (John 7:5). Yet after the crucifixion James appears as a leader of the Jerusalem church (Galatians 2:9), and Josephus records that he was stoned on the orders of the high priest around AD 62. The creed gives the reason: "After that, he was seen of James" (1 Corinthians 15:7). It is one thing to convince a disciple who wanted his master back. It is another to convince a brother who had thought him deluded.

Fact 5: The tomb was empty

The fifth fact, the empty tomb, is not granted as universally as the first four. Habermas and Licona add it as a fifth fact that is widely, though not universally, accepted, and the reasons for it are strong.¹⁷

First, the resurrection was preached in Jerusalem, the very city where Jesus was buried, within weeks of His death. Peter told a Jerusalem crowd, "This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:32). If the body had still been in the tomb, the authorities had every reason to produce it and end the movement on the spot. They did not.

Second, the earliest Jewish answer to the Christians admitted that the tomb was empty. Matthew records the story that was told against them: "Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept", and he adds that "this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day" (Matthew 28:13-15). You do not need to explain how a body went missing unless it was missing.

Third, the Gospels say that the first witnesses of the empty tomb were women. In the first-century Jewish world, the testimony of women was widely discounted. Josephus, summarising the law as it was taught in his day, writes: "But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex".¹⁸ Even the disciples at first dismissed the women's report: "their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not" (Luke 24:11). If the early church had been inventing an empty-tomb story to persuade people, women would have been the last witnesses they would have chosen. The likeliest reason the Gospels name them is that it happened that way.

A note on the text. Mark's Gospel in the King James Bible ends with the appearances of the risen Christ, beginning: "Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils" (Mark 16:9). Many modern editions mark verses 9 to 20 as doubtful, following a few early manuscripts. In this paper the 1611 stands. You can see this place, and every other place where the King James and modern Greek texts differ, at kylelauriano.com/library/changes. Nothing in the argument of this part depends on the question, since the appearances are attested in all four Gospels and in Paul.

The explanations

So we have a set of facts that a wide range of scholars accept: Jesus died; His followers, very soon after, sincerely claimed He had appeared to them, alive; a persecutor and a skeptic were converted by what they said were appearances; and His tomb was found empty. Every explanation must account for all of them. Here are the main alternatives.

The disciples stole the body. This was the first explanation offered, and it fails on the sincerity of the disciples. People who had stolen the body would know the resurrection was a lie, yet these men suffered and died proclaiming it. It also does nothing to explain the conversions of Paul and James.

Jesus did not really die. As we saw, Roman executioners knew their work, and a battered survivor would have inspired pity, not worship. This theory is now rarely defended by scholars.

The women went to the wrong tomb. Then the authorities could simply have gone to the right one. And the theory explains only the empty tomb, not the appearances.

The appearances were hallucinations or visions. This is the most common explanation among sceptical scholars today. But hallucinations are private experiences, like dreams; groups of people do not normally share the same one. The creed speaks of appearances to the Twelve, to "above five hundred brethren at once", and to "all the apostles". Hallucinations also do not move a stone or empty a tomb. And they do not easily explain Paul, an enemy who was not grieving for Jesus or longing to see Him. The disciples themselves insisted that what they saw was not a ghost or a vision: "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (Luke 24:39).

It was a legend that grew over time. The creed of 1 Corinthians 15 closes this door. The claim of the resurrection, with named witnesses, was being recited within a few years of the events, while those witnesses were alive and could be questioned. Paul says as much of the five hundred: "the greater part remain unto this present". Legends need generations; this claim was there in the first months.

Finally, there is the explanation the disciples themselves gave: that God raised Jesus from the dead. The British scholar N. T. Wright, after a massive study of ancient beliefs about death and resurrection, concluded: "Historical investigation, I propose, brings us to the point where we must say that the tomb previously housing a thoroughly dead Jesus was empty, and that his followers saw and met someone they were convinced was this same Jesus, bodily alive though in a new, transformed fashion."¹⁹ Wright adds that history alone cannot compel the further step of faith. But he argues that no other explanation accounts for the evidence as well.

The honest bottom line

The resurrection cannot be proved the way a theorem is proved. No event in history can. But the evidence is of the kind historians use every day, it is early, it comes from multiple independent sources, and it includes the testimony of hostile witnesses and embarrassing details. Most of the alternative explanations are ruled out by facts that their own defenders accept. The one that remains is the one the first witnesses gave. Whether you accept it depends, in the end, on whether you are willing to believe that God can act in the world. If Part 1 is right, there is no reason to rule it out.

The God of the Bible stakes His claim to be God on His ability to say what will happen before it happens: "I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9-10). He even gives Israel a test for false prophets: "When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken" (Deuteronomy 18:22). This part matters because fulfilled prophecy, if it is real, is evidence that only God could give.

Jesus and the prophets

Jesus Himself pointed to the Hebrew Scriptures as testimony to Him: "Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me" (John 5:39). After His resurrection, Luke says, "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27).

The skeptic will rightly ask two questions. Were these prophecies really written before Jesus? And did He simply arrange to fulfil them? Both deserve an answer.

Isaiah 53 and the Great Isaiah Scroll

The most remarkable passage is in Isaiah, the prophet of the eighth century before Christ. It describes a servant of the LORD who suffers and dies for the sins of others:

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53:3-6)

The chapter goes on: He is led "as a lamb to the slaughter" and is silent (verse 7); He is "cut off out of the land of the living" for the transgression of God's people (verse 8); He makes "his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death" (verse 9); and yet after His soul is made "an offering for sin", "he shall prolong his days" and "see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied" (verses 10-11). He is "numbered with the transgressors" and bears "the sin of many" (verse 12).

It is hard to read this without thinking of a man rejected by His people, silent before His judges, crucified between two thieves (Mark 15:27-28), buried in a rich man's new tomb (Matthew 27:57-60), and alive again after His death.

Could the passage have been written after Jesus, or edited to fit Him? Here archaeology gives a clear answer. In 1947, Bedouin shepherds found the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave at Qumran. Among them was a complete scroll of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters, now kept in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. The museum dates it to about 125 BC, and notes that it is "some one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the scrolls' discovery".²⁰ Isaiah 53 was on parchment, in Jewish hands, more than a century before Jesus was born. Whatever it is, it is not a Christian invention.

Prophecies He could not arrange

Some prophecies a determined man might try to fulfil. He could choose to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, as Zechariah foretold: "behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass" (Zechariah 9:9; compare Matthew 21:4-5). But many are beyond anyone's control. No one chooses his own birthplace, yet Micah, in the eighth century before Christ, named the town from which Israel's eternal ruler would come: "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting" (Micah 5:2; compare Matthew 2:1). No one arranges the manner of his execution, or that soldiers will gamble for his clothes: "They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture" (Psalm 22:18; compare John 19:23-24). And no one arranges his own burial in a rich man's tomb, or his own return from death.

Prophecy and the nations

Biblical prophecy is not only about the Messiah. Isaiah names the Persian king who would let the Jews go home and rebuild Jerusalem, calling him "my shepherd": "That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid" (Isaiah 44:28). Cyrus did conquer Babylon in 539 BC, and his own inscription, the Cyrus Cylinder, found at Babylon in 1879 and now in the British Museum, records his support for the worship of the peoples he conquered; of the gods of their cities he says, "I brought back to their places".²¹ The Bible records his decree for the Jews: "he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem" (2 Chronicles 36:23).

Many modern critics hold that the chapters naming Cyrus were written during or after the exile, by a later author, precisely because they name him in advance. This paper notes that view honestly. But it is worth seeing that the argument often rests on the assumption that prediction is impossible, which is the very question at issue. The Great Isaiah Scroll contains the whole book as one scroll, and the New Testament quotes both halves of it under the one name of Isaiah. John, in a single passage, quotes Isaiah 53:1 and Isaiah 6:10 and says of both, "These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him" (John 12:38-41).

What prophecy shows, and what it does not

Prophecy must be handled with care. Some popular books stretch it, finding "fulfilments" in verses that, read in context, are not predictions at all, or multiplying probabilities in ways no mathematician would accept. This paper avoids both. It rests on a handful of clear passages, written long before the events, that describe with striking precision a suffering, dying and vindicated servant of God, and a ruler from Bethlehem whose origins are "from everlasting". The skeptic may say they are coincidences. But they are many coincidences, they point to one man, and they were on scrolls in a cave before He was born.

If the Bible were a book of myths, we would expect its history to dissolve under examination: invented kings, imaginary cities, wars that never happened. Instead, again and again, the spade has turned up the people and places it names. This part matters because a book that tells the truth about things we can check deserves a hearing about things we cannot.

The Old Testament in the ground

A few examples, among many, show the pattern. The librarian and scholar Lawrence Mykytiuk, writing for Biblical Archaeology Review, has compiled a list of more than fifty people named in the Hebrew Bible whose existence is confirmed by inscriptions from their own time or close to it.²²

Israel in Egypt's records. The Merneptah Stele, a victory inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah dated to about 1207 BC, discovered by Flinders Petrie at Thebes in 1896 and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, names "Israel" as a people in Canaan. It is the earliest known mention of Israel outside the Bible.²³

The house of David. For years some scholars doubted that King David had ever existed. In 1993 and 1994, at Tel Dan in northern Israel, the team of Avraham Biran found fragments of a ninth-century BC Aramaic victory inscription, probably set up by Hazael of Damascus, that speaks of the king of Israel and of the "house of David". It is the earliest widely accepted reference to David outside the Bible, written little more than a century after his reign.²⁴

Hezekiah and Sennacherib. The Bible records that "in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them" (2 Kings 18:13), but that he did not take Jerusalem: "By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the LORD" (Isaiah 37:34). Sennacherib's own annals, preserved on clay prisms now in the British Museum, the Oriental Institute in Chicago and the Israel Museum, boast that he captured forty-six of Hezekiah's fortified cities and shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem "like a caged bird". What they do not claim is that he took the city.²⁵ The Assyrian king and the Hebrew prophet tell the same story from opposite sides, and on the decisive point, they agree.

Hezekiah's tunnel. Scripture says Hezekiah "made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city" (2 Kings 20:20). In 1880, in a tunnel cut through the rock from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam, a Hebrew inscription was found recording how two teams of tunnellers, digging towards each other through the rock, broke through and met. It is dated to about 700 BC by its script, and is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.²⁶ Visitors to Jerusalem can still walk through the tunnel.

The New Testament world

The companion paper, The Historical Jesus, sets out the archaeology of the New Testament in more detail: the Pilate stone found at Caesarea in 1961, naming "Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea"; the ossuary inscribed "Joseph son of Caiaphas", found in Jerusalem in 1990 and probably the bone box of the high priest who tried Jesus; the heel bone of a crucified man named Yehohanan, pierced by an iron nail, found in Jerusalem in 1968; the Pool of Siloam of John 9, uncovered in 2004; and the inscription at Delphi naming Gallio as proconsul of Achaia, which fixes Paul's stay in Corinth (Acts 18:12) to about AD 51–52.²⁷

The book of Acts in particular is packed with the names of local officials, their correct titles, places, routes and customs, many of which have been confirmed by inscriptions. The classical scholar Colin Hemer devoted a whole book to testing these details against the evidence of the Hellenistic world.²⁸ A writer who gets so many small things right was either there or had sources who were.

Archaeology cannot prove the spiritual message of the Bible. It cannot dig up a miracle. But it can show whether the writers knew their world and told the truth about it. Time after time, it has shown that they did.

How the text has come down to us

A thoughtful skeptic will also ask: even if the original writers told the truth, how do we know that what we read today is what they wrote? The Bible was copied by hand for many centuries before printing.

Two things can be said. First, the text is unusually well attested. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the Hebrew text of Isaiah had been passed down with great care across a thousand years. For the New Testament, Greek manuscripts survive by the thousand, catalogued by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, along with early translations into other languages and a vast number of quotations in the church fathers.²⁹ No other book of the ancient world comes close.

Second, this ministry holds a definite position on the text, and it is right to state it plainly. We hold that God has preserved His word, as He promised: "The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever" (Psalm 12:6-7). And Jesus said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matthew 24:35). We read the King James Bible of 1611, translated from the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Received Text, as that preserved word. Most modern translations follow a different Greek text, assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a smaller group of manuscripts, and in a number of places they omit or mark as doubtful words and verses the 1611 contains. We do not ask you to take our word for which is right. Every place where they part ways is set out, side by side, at kylelauriano.com/library/changes, so you can see the differences and weigh them for yourself.

There is one more kind of evidence, and it is the kind most people meet first. It is the evidence of what the gospel does to people. This part matters because Jesus said a true thing would be known by its fruit, and because the claim of Christianity is not only that something happened in AD 30, but that the risen Christ still changes lives today.

It needs to be said honestly that changed lives, on their own, do not prove a religion true. People of many faiths, and none, turn their lives around. But changed lives are not on their own here. They come at the end of a historical case, and they are exactly what we would expect if that case is true: if Jesus is alive, we should expect to find Him still at work.

The first centuries

We have already met Pliny's Christians, men and women "of all ranks and ages" in the towns and villages of Bithynia, who bound themselves by oath "never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word", and who would die rather than curse Christ.³⁰ Their enemies noticed the change.

When a terrible plague struck Alexandria in the middle of the third century, Bishop Dionysius wrote a letter, preserved by the historian Eusebius, describing how the Christians responded:

"The most of our brethren were unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves and willingly receiving their pains."³¹

The sociologist Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity, argued that this kind of care in time of epidemic was one of the reasons the faith grew so fast in the Roman world: Christians nursed the sick when others fled, and more of the people they nursed survived.³²

A century later the emperor Julian, who had abandoned the Christian faith and was trying to revive the worship of the old gods, complained to one of his pagan high priests that the Christians were beating them at charity. "For it is disgraceful," he wrote, "that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us."³³ He meant it as a rebuke to the pagans. It stands as a testimony to the Christians.

"And such were some of you"

The New Testament is frank about the people the gospel reached. Paul lists those who "shall not inherit the kingdom of God", the sexually immoral, idolaters, thieves, drunkards, swindlers, and then he says something astonishing to the church at Corinth: "And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). The church was not a club for good people. It was a hospital for sinners who had been made new. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The first and greatest example is Paul himself, the persecutor who became the apostle: "But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Skeptics who looked

The story has repeated itself across the centuries, often in the lives of people who set out to prove Christianity false. C. S. Lewis, an Oxford scholar and a convinced atheist in his youth, came to faith in his thirties and became one of the most widely read Christian writers of the twentieth century. Lee Strobel, a legal journalist and an atheist, set out to investigate the evidence for Jesus after his wife became a Christian, and told the story in The Case for Christ.³⁴ J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case homicide detective and an atheist, applied the methods of his trade to the Gospels and became a believer, and described the process in Cold-Case Christianity.³⁵ Nabeel Qureshi, raised a devout Muslim, examined the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus and became a Christian, and told the story in Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.³⁶

The guests on my own show have told similar stories. Sy Garte told his on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #47): three generations of atheists in his family, and then, in his telling, a vision on a Pennsylvania highway. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=h-a_uZBKgDk Sy's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

And there is my own story. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good. It did the opposite. Genesis gripped me. In Matthew I read Jesus' own words and felt the weight of my own sin for the first time. Then one day I got on my knees and prayed: "Jesus, if you are real, show me — and I'll serve you." A warmth ran from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Peace I'd never known, and it didn't leave. That is my testimony. I do not offer it to you as proof, only as one more witness, and as an invitation to look for yourself.

No honest case ignores the objections. This part takes up the ones people raise most often, briefly and fairly, and then puts the strands of the case together. Each objection deserves a fuller answer than there is room for here, and several have a paper of their own at kylelauriano.com.

"If God is good, why is there so much suffering?"

This is the hardest question, and the most human. It is not first an argument; it is a cry, and the Bible itself gives voice to it in the Psalms, in Job, and in the tears of Jesus at the grave of His friend.

Three things can be said. First, the objection assumes that some things are really evil, not merely unpleasant. But as we saw in Part 1, real evil requires a real moral standard, which is hard to account for without God. Second, the Bible does not say the world is as God made it. It says the world is fallen, that sin entered through man and brought death and a curse with it (Genesis 3:17; Romans 8:22), and that God has not left it there. Third, and most important, the Christian answer to suffering is not a theory but a Person. God did not stay distant from our pain. In Christ He entered it, and suffered the worst of it on the cross, and rose to promise its end: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain" (Revelation 21:4). See the paper The Problem of Evil for more.

"Aren't all religions basically the same?"

They are not, and their own followers would be the first to say so. The religions of the world make contradictory claims about God, about the human problem, and about the way of salvation. They cannot all be true. Christianity is distinctive on two counts. It rests on a historical event, the resurrection, that can be investigated. And it teaches that salvation is not achieved by our effort, but received as a gift: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). Jesus made an exclusive claim, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6), and the apostles repeated it: "Neither is there salvation in any other" (Acts 4:12). That claim is either true or false. The resurrection is the evidence that it is true. See the paper Comparative Religions.

Steve Kang told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #49): in his own telling, he chanted eight hours a day to reach nirvana, and woke up in hell instead. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=46SP1FgXfbY Steve's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

"Hasn't science disproved God?"

Science studies the natural world, and it has done so brilliantly. Many of its pioneers, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton among them, were believers who studied nature as the orderly work of a rational Creator. Science can tell us how the universe works; it cannot tell us why there is a universe at all, or whether anything lies beyond it. As Part 1 showed, some of the most striking discoveries of modern physics, the beginning of the universe and its fitness for life, are exactly what a believer in Genesis 1:1 would expect. The conflict is not between science and God. It is between two philosophies: one that allows that God might exist and act, and one that rules Him out before the evidence is heard. See the paper Science & Faith.

"Faith means believing without evidence."

Not in the Bible. Biblical faith is trust in God based on what He has shown of Himself. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1): faith reaches beyond what we can see, but it rests on what God has done in the open. John says plainly why he wrote his Gospel: "these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name" (John 20:31). The evidence is given so that faith can follow. Faith is not the opposite of evidence; it is what you do with it.

"The Bible is full of errors and contradictions."

This claim is usually made in general and seldom in particular. When particular cases are examined, most turn out to be differences of emphasis between witnesses, the ordinary marks of independent testimony, or misunderstandings of the text. The archaeological record of Part 5 shows how often the Bible's history has been vindicated where it was once doubted. As to the text itself, as we said, this ministry holds to the King James Bible and the Received Text, and you can see for yourself every place where it differs from modern editions at kylelauriano.com/library/changes. See the paper Is the Bible Reliable?

"Christians have done terrible things."

Some have, and it should be admitted without excuse. But the evil done by people who called themselves Christians was a betrayal of Christ's teaching, not an application of it. He told His followers, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you" (Matthew 5:44). The question is not whether Christians are perfect; the Bible says they are not. The question is whether Jesus rose from the dead. Hypocrites do not make the resurrection false, any more than counterfeit money makes real money worthless.

Putting the case together

A detective rarely solves a case with one piece of evidence. He gathers many independent strands, each of which might have another explanation on its own, until together they point one way so strongly that only one explanation fits. J. Warner Wallace, the detective mentioned above, called this a cumulative case, and it is the right way to think about Christianity.³⁷

| Strand of evidence | What it shows | Where | |---|---|---| | A universe with a beginning | A cause beyond space and time | Part 1 | | Fitness of the universe for life | An intelligent designer | Part 1 | | The moral law | A moral Lawgiver | Part 1 | | Jesus' life and death, attested by Roman and Jewish writers | A real man, crucified under Pilate | Part 2 | | His claims to be the Son of God | Lord, liar or lunatic | Part 2 | | The early creed, the empty tomb, the appearances, Paul and James | The resurrection as the best explanation | Part 3 | | Isaiah 53 and Micah 5:2, dated by the Dead Sea Scrolls | Prophecy fulfilled in Jesus | Part 4 | | Merneptah, Tel Dan, Sennacherib, Pilate, Caiaphas, Gallio | The Bible tells the truth about its world | Part 5 | | Changed lives from Pliny's day to ours | The risen Christ still at work | Part 6 |

None of these strands is a mathematical proof. Together they make a case that is strong, coherent and hard to explain away. Every strand points in the same direction: there is a God, He has acted in history, and He has done so supremely in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen.

The limit of evidence

One last honest word. Evidence can remove obstacles to faith. It can show that belief is reasonable, and that unbelief has more to explain than it admits. But evidence alone does not make anyone a Christian. The Bible says that the heart is involved as well as the head: that people may resist the truth because they do not want it to be true (Romans 1:18), and that "the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not" (2 Corinthians 4:4). In the end the question is not only "Is it true?" but "Am I willing to follow it if it is?"

Jesus made a remarkable promise to anyone who would ask that second question honestly: "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself" (John 7:17).

We began with a question: can a thinking person believe that Christianity is true? The answer of this paper is yes, and more than that: the evidence calls for a verdict.

The universe had a beginning and is set up for life, and our consciences bear witness to a moral law. These point to a Creator. A real man, Jesus of Nazareth, lived and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and claimed to be the Son of God. His followers, within a few years and in the very city where He was buried, proclaimed that He had risen and had appeared to them, and nothing could make them stop: not prison, not the sword. A persecutor and a skeptic joined them. Prophets had described His sufferings and His triumph on scrolls written long before He was born. The book that tells His story has proved, again and again, to tell the truth about the world it describes. And the lives He has changed, then and now, are what we would expect if He is alive.

That is the case. It does not force anyone. But it leaves everyone with a choice.

What the evidence asks of you

If Jesus rose from the dead, then He is who He said He is, and His words are true, including the hard ones. He taught that all of us have sinned: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). He taught that sin brings death and judgment: "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23). And again: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). He warned of hell plainly: "fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). And He taught that He came to bear our sin Himself: "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

The resurrection is God's public proof that this is so: "now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31).

The response the apostles called for has not changed. Jesus Himself began His preaching with it: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel" (Mark 1:15). On the day the church began, Peter told the crowd: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2:38). And the promise is for anyone who will come: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

A next step

• Read a Gospel. Start with John, which was written "that ye might believe" (John 20:31). Read it free in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library.
• Check the sources. Every quotation in this paper has a reference. Look them up. Read the companion paper, The Historical Jesus, for the Roman and Jewish witnesses in full.
• Pray an honest prayer. You do not need to have every question answered to ask God to show you the truth. "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart" (Jeremiah 29:13).
• Ask your questions. Write to contact@kylelauriano.com. No question is too hard, and there is no pressure.

An invitation

I came to disprove God. He met me instead — and I couldn't unsee what time it is. I do not know where you are as you finish this paper: curious, unconvinced, angry, or closer than you were. Wherever it is, the risen Christ still stands at the door: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Revelation 3:20).

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)

FREE TRUTH · NO PRESSURE.