Christianity is an evidence based faith. And that’s exactly what the early ekklesia of Jesus knew. Apostle Paul said that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then His followers are the most pitied of all because they’ve placed their hope in an illusion. But He did rise from the dead, and there’s evidence of this in history.
Now if you listen to someone like Matt Dillahunty, an atheist activist, he claims there’s no evidence; he claims there’s just claims. And what he means by evidence is specifically scientific evidence. He demands the type of evidence that you can put under a microscope and say “that’s evidence.”
But that’s not the kind of evidence that exists in history. History is a different category of evidence. And the manuscripts that comprise the New Testament are historic in nature, and they contain the exact type of evidence that exists all throughout written ancient history.
So if you don’t accept the reality and the historicity of Jesus based upon this history, then you might as well throw out Alexander the Great and Tiberius Caesar and Aristotle and Plato and all of the other ancient historical figures. You might as well throw out all of ancient history because you can’t really ‘know’ anything and it’s ‘all’ mythology. Just put your head in a hole in the ground about all of it.
But if you look at it on its own face value…we know Jesus was alive at point A, and we know He was dead at point B, and we know He was alive again at point C…based on countless eyewitnesses, and based on many transformed lives, and based on Peter attesting to it, and based on James (the brother of Jesus) attesting to it, and based on all of His closest followers attesting to it, and based on a great many people giving their lives for it to say that, “yes, this really happened,” and, “yes, this is true,” then there really are significant historic reasons to believe that it did happen.
Christianity is a matter a fact. It’s not blind faith. I simply invite people to investigate the evidence. And then make up their own minds.
