What?
The evidence we have to determine the founding fathers lived is overwhelming, compared to Jesus.
And, I was discussing evidence that certain miracles actually happened in the bible, not whether Jesus existed.
No actually that would not be true but then atheist tend to make up things to support their own view.
There are more ancient copies and fragment texts of the New Testament than any other book in antiquity and the next closest ancient manuscript is not even remotely close in terms of the sheer numbers.
In fact, there are more ancient copies of the new testament than ALL of the known copies of:
Lucretius
Pliny
Plato
Demosthenes
Herodotus
Suetonius
Thucydides
Euripides
Aristophanes
Caesar
Livy
Tacitus
Aristotle
Sophocles
Homer
COMBINED. Whats more, the time between the writing of these ancient manuscripts and and their being penned is very small. The Average for the above list is between 800-1300 years between the oldest copies we have and their original copies which of course, we do not have.
The oldest copies of the NT is less than 100 years. However recent discovers of fragments of the book of Mark suggest we may have fragments that are less than 50 years old and perhaps as early as 30-35 years from the date of the actual events being written about.
If we look at the Combined number of manuscripts for the above manuscripts of antiquity we are looking at a TOTAL of ~1010 copies. The only manuscript that has any literary accuracy (comparing various texts) shows that the Illiad by Homer is ~95% pure
We have over 5,600 ancient copies of the New Testament with a greater than 95% literary accuracy.
We have full blown copies of the entire Book of Isaiah found in the caves where the dead sea scrolls were discovered that once translated into English are nearly EXACT copies of what you find in a modern bible.
Men (and women for that matter) will DIE for a cause that they believe to be true but is not... NO ONE will die for a cause that they KNOW is NOT true. Yet all of the writers of the new testament were martyred specifically for their confession that Yeshua was the promised Messiah of Israel.
The weakest of all arguments you can possibly make is that Yeshua did not live and that/or that his life was not as described in scripture. The evidence is OVERWHELMING that he did live and that his life was so impactful that it toppled Rome itself.
In fact, when you examine the new testament story it differs in SIGNIFICANT ways from other writings during and preceding that period of time. Anyone who has studied ancient literature can immediately identify some startling differences. For starters, ever other story told in antiquity deals with people of great importance. The main character's are kings and queens. What they decidedly are NOT are commoners.
Messiah was born by a young maiden who was pledged to be married to a man of the lowest possible class in Israel's culture. It is a misnomer that Joseph was a carpenter... he was a handyman who made his living doing odd jobs. The poorest of the poor.
Yeshua's disciples? Commoners every last one of them. His ministry was not about his own glorification but to minister to the poor, the tax collector's publicans and sinners. He railed against the religious rulers in Israel.... such notions in writing WERE COMPLETELY UNHEARD OF at that time.
His ressurection was not witnessed by the ruling elite, the religious leaders or even the disciples themselves but rather, WOMEN who at that time were considered unreliable as a witness in the ancient world. Yet in reality that IS what would have happened it would have been the women who would have gone to the cemetery to finish taking care of the body for burial.
The very idea that a Jew in good standing in the temple would EVER allow a gentile in their home let alone GO to a gentile's home was unthinkable. For if he or she did such a thing they were UNCLEAN. Yet, the apostle Peter did this very thing because G-d told Peter that Messiah's redemption plan was for ALL mankind and not just the Jew.
The idea that this was "made up" is so ludicrous that no serious, honest open examination could ever come to this conclusion.
Even academics who study this period of time who DO NOT BELIEVE will immediately conceed there is so much evidence that Yeshua lived that to suggest otherwise is considered quackery by mainstream academics
