I've always maintained that when you set aside theories, speculation, opinion and personal editorials from so called "experts", you find that true science and true faith support each other. It's painful for many when they find that geology, archaeology and forensics back up Biblical historical claims. If people would read the lines and quit trying to read between the lines, they'd find that what was true thousands of years ago is still true now.
Not an entirely accurate statement. We have to consider the type and quality of evidence. While historical scholars are generally in agreement that a man named Yeshua most likely lived in Galilee in the first century, their ”proofs” are principally based on inter-corroborative written accounts and circumstantial evidence. Outside of possibly Paul of Tarsus, few, if any accounts were known to be direct eyewitnesses. Not a word that Jesus spoke was recorded on-site by anyone who heard him speak. None. Like most men who lived in his world, there exists not a crumb of physical evidence of Jesus’ life. Zip. This is likely because Jesus never wrote anything, never signed or built anything, had no offspring, owned nothing, held no office nor appeared before any known audience of scribes. He lived within a small radius of a rather unimportant corner of a largely illiterate society, dominated by another, Pagan culture intent on bringing locals to heel. Whatever physical evidence there may have been would likely have been lost by the time Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
Conversely, we know Julius Caesar existed by a plethora of still existant physical evidence, including copious texts. Coins were struck and busts carved with his image during his lifetime; his signature and personal writings and decrees are still held in collections. Roman records detail every manner of Caesar's doings, in contemporaneous accounts of his life, by numerous sources.
There is a current theory that it may have been more necessary to “produce“ evidence of any kind for Jesus than for Caesar (or for any other figure of antiquity) due to the nature of the extraordinary claims about him, his relative obscurity while alive, and the lack of direct evidence left after his death. Thus a greater collection effort than for a prominent figure like Caesar, for whom there was less doubt or mystery.
This post was edited by Don Barzini at December 21, 2018 9:44 PM MST
my2cents 