Why Is There No Archaeological Proof That Jesus Existed?

Where does the hard evidence lead us?

If you spend any time in online forums where Christians and atheists debate, you’ll soon encounter a claim like this: “There’s no proof Jesus ever existed.”

Some even take this to the extreme of claiming that Jesus was invented long after the fact as a way to manipulate gullible believers.

But what does the evidence say? When we look at the hard evidence that archaeologists have dug up, where does it all point?

It leads to one inescapable conclusion:

Archaeology provides abundant corroborating evidence for Jesus’ life and ministry. The archaeological and historical records confirm many of the people, cities, places, and events of Jesus’ life. I’ll summarize much of this in a bit. First, let’s focus on Jesus.

For Jesus, the best archaeological proof we have is the Bible.

Many people may object here. They may claim that we can’t use the Bible to prove the Bible.

But this question doesn’t get to make this objection. This question focuses on archaeological evidence for Jesus’ existence. The archaeological discoveries of thousands of biblical manuscripts fit the bill perfectly.

This wasn’t always the case. Back when the King James Version was first translated from the Greek (roughly 400 years ago in 1611 A.D/C.E.), the translators could access perhaps a dozen Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. None of these were particularly old; many centuries elapsed between the time of Jesus and the writing of these individual manuscripts.

In such a situation, you could imagine all sorts of changes occurring in the text. How could you prove what had happened in those centuries of silence?

But then came archaeology.

In the last 150 years, archaeologists have dug up thousands of ancient biblical manuscripts. Today we have over…

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