Christianity rises or falls on a claim: Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ.

That word “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name. Jesus was not born to Joseph and Mary Christ! Christ is a title. It means “Anointed One.” Same idea as “Messiah.” In the Old Testament, anointing with oil set someone apart as God’s chosen king. So when the New Testament calls Jesus “the Christ,” it is saying: He is God’s promised Savior-King.

But here’s the question: promised where?

The answer is: all over the Old Testament. A set of themes runs through the entire story like bright threads woven through one long tapestry. And those threads converge in one Person.

1) Messiah means King, and the King is promised from David

God promised that a true king would come from the line of David, a king whose kingdom would not collapse like all the others.

A key passage is 2 Samuel 7. God makes a covenant with David. He promises a descendant who will sit on a throne, and God says, “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13). The immediate context includes David’s son Solomon, but the “forever” language reaches beyond Solomon. Solomon’s kingdom did not last forever. The promise is reaching forward.

That’s why the New Testament keeps calling Jesus “Son of David” (Matt. 1:1). It is not random. It is a claim: Jesus is the heir to the Davidic promise.

The prophets pick this up too. Isaiah speaks of a coming ruler from David’s line (Isa. 11:1). Jeremiah says, “I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king” (Jer. 23:5). The Messiah is not a vague spiritual idea. He is a real king promised to come at a real time in real history.

And that raises the next question.

If this is a king, what kind of king is He?

2) The Old Testament gives the Messiah divine names and divine authority

This is where many people get surprised. The Old Testament not only promises a Davidic king. It speaks of a Messiah whose identity and authority are far bigger than a merely human ruler.

Start with Psalm 110. David writes, “The LORD says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool'” (Ps. 110:1). Notice what David is doing. He calls the Messiah “my Lord.” David is the king, yet he looks up to someone greater than himself. And this greater one is invited to sit at God’s right hand, the place of divine authority.

Jesus Himself used Psalm 110 to make a point: if the Messiah is only David’s son, why does David call Him “Lord”? (See Matt. 22:41–45.) Jesus was not playing word games. He was pressing the logic. The Messiah is David’s son, yes, but He is also David’s Lord.

Now add Daniel 7. Daniel sees “one like a son of man” coming “with the clouds of heaven” and being given “dominion” and “a kingdom” so that “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him,” and his dominion is everlasting (Dan. 7:13–14). In the Old Testament, “coming with the clouds” is not normal human imagery. It’s God imagery. And the scale is global and eternal. This Messiah is not a local political hero. His reign reaches the whole world.

Then consider Isaiah 9:6–7. Isaiah speaks of a child who will be born, a son given, who will rule on David’s throne. And the names given are staggering: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6). Whatever debates people raise about how to parse the titles, the plain meaning is weighty: this child carries divine titles.

When you put these passages together, the direction is unmistakable. The Old Testament is not only predicting a human king. It is preparing us for something deeper: God visiting His people, in and through the Messiah, with divine authority and divine saving power.

And the earliest followers of Jesus read these texts exactly this way. We can watch them do it.

In Isaiah 45, God swears an oath by His own name: “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance” (Isa. 45:23). The whole chapter is a declaration of war on idols. The LORD alone is God, and the LORD alone receives that homage. Yet when Paul writes to the Philippians, he takes that very oath and applies it to Jesus: “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10-11). Paul reaches for the most exclusive claim in Isaiah and puts Jesus at the center of it.

He does the same thing with the most famous sentence in Judaism. Every devout Jew confessed the Shema daily: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). Writing to the Corinthians, Paul affirms that confession and places Jesus inside it: “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6). One God. One Lord. The vocabulary of the Shema, with Jesus named within it. New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham calls this the inclusion of Jesus in the divine identity of the God of Israel (see his Jesus and the God of Israel), and it runs through the earliest Christian writings we possess.

Think about who wrote these sentences and who first received them. These were Jews who recited the Shema, who would sooner die than bow to a creature, writing within about thirty years of the crucifixion. The people least likely in all the world to place a man inside the identity of God are precisely the people who did it first. They did not think they were adding a second god. They believed the Old Testament had been preparing for this all along.

That leads to a third thread.

If this king is so great, why does the Old Testament also speak of His suffering?

3) The Messiah is promised as a suffering Savior who bears sin

Many people in Jesus’ day expected the Messiah to crush Rome and restore Israel politically. They expected glory first. They did not have categories for a Messiah who would suffer.

But the Old Testament does.

Isaiah 53 is one of the most striking passages in all of Scripture. It describes a figure who is rejected, despised, and familiar with suffering (Isa. 53:3). Then it explains why: “He was pierced for our transgressions… the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:5–6). He is not suffering because he made mistakes. He is suffering as a substitute, bearing guilt he did not earn. His suffering is vicarious: He was punished in our place.

Isaiah 53 is so detailed, so central, and so clearly fulfilled in Jesus that it deserves extended treatment. We will examine this passage closely in the next article. For now, the key point is this: the Messiah is promised as a suffering servant who bears sin and brings salvation through substitutionary death.

Psalm 22 follows the same pattern. It begins with the cry Jesus quoted on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1). Jesus was not merely quoting a psalm to express His anguish. Words were precious when, in crucifixion, every breath would be a terrible and severe challenge. His cry was a declaration that He was fulfilling Psalm 22, which is clearly a messianic psalm. The psalm goes on to describe events that never occurred in David’s own life. It describes mockery and public shame (Ps. 22:7–8), including the exact words hurled at Jesus on the cross: “He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him” (compare Ps. 22:8 with Matt. 27:43). It speaks of physical agony (Ps. 22:14–15), hands and feet pierced (Ps. 22:16), and soldiers dividing garments by casting lots (Ps. 22:18). These details would match the crucifixion of Jesus, a millennium in the future, with eerie precision.

Here is what matters: David wrote this psalm around 1000 BC, but these things never happened to David. Crucifixion did not exist. It would not be invented for hundreds of years, first by the Persians and Phoenicians, then perfected by Rome. Yet David describes it with precision: hands and feet pierced, garments divided by casting lots, specific mockery. David was never crucified. His hands and feet were never pierced. His enemies never cast lots for his garments. He was never mocked with those specific taunts. David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was writing prophetically about someone else, the Messiah who would come from his line. Then it turns to vindication and worldwide worship (Ps. 22:27–28).

How could David and Isaiah write so precisely about events they never witnessed and suffering they never experienced? Peter explains: the Old Testament prophets were inspired by “the Spirit of Christ” or “the Spirit of the Messiah” to foretell the Messiah’s future sufferings and subsequent glory (1 Peter 1:10-12). The same Spirit who would later indwell the Messiah was already at work in the prophets, revealing what was to come. This is not human guesswork. This is divine revelation.

Isaiah 53 develops this theme of the suffering Messiah even further, and we will examine that passage in detail in the next article.

At this point, a thoughtful person might say: “Fine, but suffering doesn’t prove He is Messiah. Lots of people suffer.”

True. Which brings us to the next thread.

4) The Messiah is not defeated by death, He is vindicated and enthroned

The Old Testament does not merely say, “He will suffer.” It also points to the Messiah’s vindication after suffering.

One important text is Psalm 16: “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption” (Ps. 16:10). In Acts 2, Peter argues that David’s words reach beyond David’s own grave, to the Messiah whom God raised up (Acts 2:24–32). The early church did not invent resurrection to give the story a happy ending. They proclaimed it as the act of God that confirmed Jesus’ identity. Paul puts it plainly: Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4).

Isaiah 53 itself hints at this. After describing death, Isaiah says, “He shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days” (Isa. 53:10). The servant dies, yet his days are prolonged. He suffers, yet “he shall see and be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11). This sounds like resurrection: vindication after death.

And then we circle back to Psalm 110, the enthronement psalm. The Messiah sits at God’s right hand until His enemies are subdued (Ps. 110:1). Peter uses that text to say something explosive: God has made Jesus “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). That means Jesus is reigning now, and He will return to bring the story to its final conclusion.

5) Even the details are not random, they fit the promised pattern

The Messiah is not only a set of big ideas. The Old Testament also includes concrete anchor points.

Micah 5:2 names Bethlehem as the birthplace of a coming ruler whose “coming forth is from of old” (Mic. 5:2). The verse ties together humility (Bethlehem is small) and greatness (his origin reaches back). Whatever someone believes about how prophecy works, it is hard to dismiss this as merely vague religious poetry.

And the “house of David” theme is not optional. The Messiah is tied to David, yet greater than David (2 Sam. 7; Ps. 110). That is exactly the tension the Gospels place before us: Jesus is born into David’s line, and yet speaks and acts with divine authority, forgiving sins, calming the sea, receiving worship, and declaring that He will judge the world.

Given this convergence of prophecies, you might expect Jesus to have announced Himself as “the Messiah” from day one. Yet He often avoided using that title publicly. Why?

6) Why Jesus avoided the title “Messiah” during His ministry, and why the church preached it loudly afterward

One of the most honest and overlooked details in the Gospels is that Jesus often avoided calling Himself “the Messiah” out loud. Not because the title was wrong, but because the word was loaded with false assumptions.

Many people expected a political strongman. Jesus knew that if He publicly led with the title, people would misunderstand the kind of kingdom He came to bring. So He often used another title, “Son of Man,” drawn from Daniel 7. This was deliberately ambiguous. The phrase could refer to an ordinary human being or prophet, but in Daniel’s vision it describes a mysterious figure who receives divine authority and an everlasting kingdom. By using this title, Jesus avoided triggering immediate political revolt. But there was something deeper at work. Jesus’ restraint with the title wasn’t evasion. It was ensuring that true recognition of His identity would come through the Father’s revelation, not human political expectations.

This becomes clear at the turning point when Peter confesses, “You are the Christ” (Matthew 16:16). Jesus responds by making clear this wasn’t the result of human reasoning or Jesus’ self-promotion. It was divine revelation: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). Immediately Jesus begins talking about suffering and death, and Peter is horrified (Matt. 16:21–22). That reaction makes sense. Peter had a “glory now” Messiah in mind. Jesus is reshaping the definition: the Messiah must suffer, atone, rise, and then reign.

After the resurrection and ascension, they finally understood. Now the title can be preached publicly with clarity. That is exactly what happens in Acts. The apostles proclaim Jesus as the Christ, seated at God’s right hand, and coming again to judge (Acts 2:34–36; 3:19–21).

Conclusion: the prophecies do not merely match Jesus, they converge on Him

If this were one prediction, you could shrug. If it were only symbolic patterns, you could dismiss it as flexible interpretation. But what we actually have is a convergence:

A promised Davidic King whose throne endures.

A Messiah who receives divine names and divine authority.

A suffering servant who bears sin as a substitute.

A vindicated ruler who lives after death and reigns at God’s right hand.

A kingdom that expands to the nations and will one day be openly established.

This is why Christians say Jesus is the Christ: not because it sounds inspiring, but because the story told in the Old Testament fits Him in a way it fits no one else.

And if Jesus is the promised Messiah, then the appropriate response is not merely, “Interesting.”

It is personal surrender.

He is not only the King Israel needed. He is the King you need. The call of Scripture is clear: repent, believe, and bow to the true King, the one who suffered for sinners, rose in victory, and will return in glory.

Prophecy is not entertainment.

It is God’s way of saying: I keep My promises. Trust My Son.

Most historians today, including those who are no friends of the Christian faith, agree on two fundamental points: Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure, and the early Christian movement grew rapidly in the decades after His death. That does not mean that every question has been answered. It does not prove His miracles or that He really did rise from the dead. But it does dispel a common idea that Jesus perhaps never existed at all. That’s not at all where the evidence leads.

So what kind of evidence do we actually have, and how should we think about it?

What do we mean by “historical”?

When we say “historical,” we mean that the person existed in a real time and place. Sources close to the events mention him, sources that can be critically examined and cross-checked, and the movement he began can be tracked in the wider world.

By that standard, even though He came from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, Jesus is a well-attested figure from antiquity. We are therefore dealing with a real person in a real setting, with real sources that can be examined and weighed.

The Gospels are not modern biographies, but they are biographies

In a YouTube video interview, Cambridge scholar Dr. Peter J. Williams makes a simple but vital point: the Gospels are not ‘fever-dream fiction,’ wild, disconnected stories with no grounding in reality. They fit the writings of the ancient world. At one level, they are ‘Gospels.’ At another level, they resemble ancient biographies, written to convey who a person was and why they mattered, not to satisfy modern expectations and all that entails.

A key feature is content. A large portion of each Gospel focuses on the events regarding Jesus’ final week leading to His death, and the claim of His resurrection. That is not accidental on the writers’ part. The Gospels recount history with theological implications. They are saying loud and clear, “These events happened, and there are ramifications for everyone in our world.”

That combination often bothers modern readers. But it should not surprise us. Ancient historians regularly wrote with a viewpoint. The question is not, “Do the authors have convictions?” They clearly do. The question is, “Are they close enough to the events described so that they know what really happened, and can their claims be tested?”

Dr. Williams also makes a helpful observation: the Gospels do not include printed dates on the title page, but they do include names. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really are the authors, that creates a basic historical constraint and timeline. People can only live so long. A tax collector who left his booth to follow Jesus cannot be writing centuries later. We are driven back into the Middle Eastern world of the first century, within the living memory of the events.

This matters for dating. Even if scholars debate the precise decade, authorship by first-century figures limits how late the Gospels can be.

A common objection lands right here, so let us face it directly. Skeptics often say the Gospels are anonymous, that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached generations later to lend the books authority. The claim sounds decisive until you measure it against how ancient books actually worked.

Ancient biographies did not normally name their authors inside the text. Simon Gathercole of Cambridge, who has studied the Gospel titles in the earliest manuscripts, observes that it is very unusual to find an author’s name embedded in the body of an ancient biography. Plutarch, the most prolific biographer of the era, wrote roughly fifty lives and never once put his own name inside any of them. Nobody calls Plutarch’s biographies anonymous, and nobody suggests his authorship was invented centuries later. Authorship traveled with the book, in its title and its circulation. The Gospels sit exactly where ancient biography sits.

And here the manuscripts get a vote. Every Gospel copy that preserves a title attributes the same Gospel to the same author. “According to Matthew” is never “according to Peter” somewhere else. There is no rival attribution anywhere in the tradition, in any language, in any region, in any century. If the four Gospels had circulated nameless for decades and been assigned authors later, we would expect what we actually find with the second-century apocryphal gospels: competing attributions in different places, and apostolic names announced loudly inside the text precisely because the claim was false. Instead, the canonical tradition is unanimous and the books themselves are quiet.

Notice, too, which names the tradition is unanimous about. Mark was not an apostle. Luke never met Jesus. A church inventing authoritative bylines does not choose a minor companion and a Gentile physician; it reaches for Peter. Useful names were available, and the church did not take them. The names stuck for the unglamorous reason that they were true.

Why embarrassing details matter: the criterion of embarrassment

One more point strengthens credibility, especially for skeptical readers. The Gospels include details that early Christians would not naturally invent to make their message “sell” better. Historians sometimes discuss this under the heading of the “criterion of embarrassment.” The idea here is not that embarrassing details automatically prove everything, but that awkward, costly, or reputation-damaging details are less likely to be deliberate propaganda. This definitely carries weight as evidence of authenticity when the historical setting is understood.

Consider three striking examples:

First, women as the first witnesses to the resurrection. All four Gospels report that women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb and the first to see the risen Christ. In first-century Jewish culture, a woman’s word carried far less weight than a man’s. Josephus states the attitude of his day without embarrassment: let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex (Antiquities 4.8.15). The picture is not uniform. Women did give testimony in some settings, and some of the harsher rabbinic material comes later than the first century. But the social reality is clear enough. If you were inventing a resurrection story to convince skeptics, you would never make women your star witnesses. Yet that’s exactly what the Gospels report, even though it would have been easier to claim that Peter or John discovered the empty tomb first. Luke even records that the men did not believe them, dismissing the report as an idle tale (Luke 24:11).

Second, the disciples’ repeated failures and misunderstandings. The Gospels do not portray the twelve disciples as heroes. Peter denies Jesus three times. The disciples argue about who is the greatest. They fall asleep in Gethsemane when Jesus asks them to pray. They flee when Jesus is arrested. Thomas doubts the resurrection even after hearing eyewitness testimony. If you were creating propaganda to establish the authority of church leaders, you would not record their cowardice, pride, and unbelief in such unflattering detail.

Third, crucifixion as the means of death. Crucifixion was not only brutal but shameful. It was reserved for slaves, rebels, and the lowest criminals. In the Roman world, a crucified messiah was a contradiction in terms. The apostle Paul himself acknowledges this: the cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Yet the early Christians did not invent a more respectable death for their Messiah. They proclaimed a crucified Lord because that is what happened, no matter how scandalous it sounded.

The fact that the Gospel writers include these details, despite their cultural liabilities, suggests they were committed to reporting what actually happened, not crafting the most persuasive story possible.

Non-Christian sources confirm key basics

We do not have to begin with Christian sources to establish that Jesus existed and was executed. Three well-known non-Christian witnesses accommodate us here.

Tacitus, a Roman historian writing about Nero’s response to rumors after the great fire of Rome, mentions Christians and explains the origin of their name. He links the movement to “Christus,” and places His execution in the reign of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate. Whatever someone concludes about the resurrection, Tacitus is not trying to help Christianity. He is a hostile witness. Yet he still treats the basic claim as public knowledge: there was a man called Christus, executed under Pontius Pilate, and His followers increased in number.

Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor in Bithynia-Pontus, writes to Emperor Trajan about how to handle the Christians of his day. He reports that they met before dawn and sang “a hymn to Christ, as to a god,” and bound themselves by oath not to engage in crime. Again, this is not from a friendly source. Pliny is describing what he sees as a troubling movement. Yet he confirms key facts for us: Christians existed early, they worshiped Christ, and their convictions shaped their behavior.

A third witness is Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian who had no reason to promote Christianity. Josephus mentions Jesus twice in his Antiquities of the Jews.

The shorter reference appears in passing when discussing the illegal execution of James: “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” (Antiquities 20.9.1). This brief, incidental remark is accepted as authentic by the overwhelming majority of scholars, including many skeptical of Christianity, precisely because it appears while discussing something else entirely. It’s exactly the kind of reference you’d expect from a Jewish historian who knew Christians existed but wasn’t promoting their faith.

The longer passage (Antiquities 18.3.3), often called the Testimonium Flavianum, calls Jesus a wise man who performed surprising deeds, attracted followers from both Jews and Gentiles, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Though Christians later added a few phrases to this paragraph, the core is accepted today by Jewish, agnostic, and Christian scholars alike as authentic first-century testimony to the historical Jesus.

Even accounting for later Christian edits in the longer passage, Josephus provides first-century Jewish confirmation that Jesus existed, had followers, and was executed under Pilate.

That picture may even understate the case. In 2025, Oxford University Press published a detailed study by T. C. Schmidt, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, arguing that the longer passage is substantially authentic just as it stands, and that Josephus was personally acquainted with men connected to the trials of Jesus and of His followers, placing the historian strikingly close to reliable information. The argument is new and is being debated, as serious new arguments always are. But however that debate settles, it is moving in the opposite direction from the old claim that the passage is a forgery from top to bottom.

These witnesses wrote remarkably early by ancient historical standards. Josephus wrote in the late first century (around AD 93-94), within about 60 years of Jesus’ death. Tacitus and Pliny wrote in the early second century (around AD 110-120), within roughly 80-90 years of Jesus’ death. For comparison, our best surviving sources for Alexander the Great were written over 400 years after his death. The gap for Jesus is tiny by comparison.

So even outside the New Testament, the trail of evidence quickly leads us to Jesus and to a movement that was convinced He mattered supremely.

Archaeology confirms the world of the Gospels

The New Testament isn’t just confirmed by texts. Archaeology keeps validating the physical details of the Gospel accounts.

In 1961, archaeologists discovered a stone inscription at Caesarea Maritima bearing the name “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea.” Before this discovery, some skeptics questioned whether Pilate even existed. The stone settled the question: Pilate was a real Roman official in the exact time and place the Gospels describe.

There is a small wrinkle here worth mentioning, because it shows how this kind of evidence actually behaves. The stone calls Pilate a prefect. Tacitus, writing decades later, calls him a procurator, which was the title in use by Tacitus’ own day. The inscription preserves the earlier and more precise term. That is what happens when a later historian describes an earlier office in the language his own readers know.

The Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem, mentioned in John 5:2, was long dismissed as fictional because no one could find it. Then archaeologists uncovered it, complete with five porticoes, exactly as John described. This kind of incidental accuracy (mentioning architectural details in passing) is characteristic of eyewitness testimony, not legend written centuries later.

Excavations at Nazareth, Capernaum, and other Gospel locations continue to confirm that these were real first-century Jewish towns, not invented settings. The Gospels describe a real world, with real geography, real rulers, and real social structures. That doesn’t automatically prove the miracles, but it does show the Gospel writers knew what they were talking about when describing Jesus’ time and place.

Archaeology has even preserved the mockery.

Earlier we saw that a crucified Messiah was a scandal, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. Sometime around AD 200, in a training school for imperial page boys on the Palatine Hill in Rome, someone scratched a crude cartoon into the wall plaster. It shows a young man raising his hand in worship toward a figure on a cross, and the figure has the head of a donkey. Beneath it, in clumsy Greek, runs the caption: “Alexamenos worships his god.”

The insult is easy to read. A page boy named Alexamenos was a Christian, and a schoolmate was ridiculing him with a standard slander of the day, the rumor that Christians worshiped a donkey, a charge common enough that Tertullian and Minucius Felix both answered it in writing. The wall section was later cut out and preserved, and you can see it today in the Palatine Museum.

But look at what the mockery concedes. For the joke to work at all, the mocker and his audience had to know three things about Christians: their God was a man, that man had been crucified, and they worshiped Him anyway. The earliest surviving depiction of Jesus is a sneer scratched by a pagan, and it independently confirms the very things the Gospels claim, a crucified man worshiped as God, at a time when saying so could still cost you. Hostile witnesses set out to confirm nothing, which is exactly why their testimony is worth so much.

“The telephone game” objection: why this is not a good analogy

We’ve addressed this objection before, but it’s worth revisiting in the context of Jesus’ historical existence. A common skeptical line goes like this: “The Jesus story was passed around for decades. That is basically the telephone game. Details get distorted.” That analogy sounds persuasive until you slow down and compare the situations.

The telephone game is designed to corrupt the message. The whole point is that one person whispers once, the next repeats once, and so on. The process is intentionally thin and uncontrolled. But Jesus’ public teaching did not happen in private whispers. He taught repeatedly, in public settings, to groups, with disciples tasked to learn. In the interview, Williams notes that disciples were students, and Jesus could have used structured repetition and memorization methods. That is historically plausible in a Jewish context where memorization was common, and where teachers repeated core material.

The early community also had “multiple lines” of access. The telephone game depends on a single chain. Early Christianity did not. You have many witnesses, many communities, and early written sources circulating among them. Even when accounts differ in details, the differences can actually function like cross-checks rather than proof of invention.

This is also where the “Jesus myth theory” should be named explicitly. Online, it is common to hear that Jesus never existed and that Christianity began as a purely mythical story. Whatever one thinks about miracles, that claim is widely rejected in mainstream scholarship, including by many skeptical scholars who do not accept Christian faith claims. Even Bart Ehrman, a skeptical New Testament scholar, explicitly argues that the proposal that Jesus was a legend/myth does not hold up to scrutiny. Jesus’ historical existence is not seriously disputed among historians who specialize in the period.

Here is where manuscript evidence matters. The New Testament is preserved in an enormous manuscript tradition. Building on the general point Williams makes about “loads of copies,” many commonly cited estimates describe over 5,800 catalogued Greek New Testament manuscripts, and when early translations in other languages (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and others) are included, the total number of witnesses exceeds 20,000.

The telephone game makes recovery impossible. Textual criticism does the opposite. It thrives on abundant copies. When you have many manuscripts across regions and centuries, you can identify patterns, compare readings, and detect where copying differs. Paradoxically, the abundance that produces variants is also what makes the original text more recoverable.

A simple illustration helps. For many ancient works, the manuscript base is comparatively thin, and sometimes concentrated in a small number of copying streams. For the New Testament, the manuscript base is gigantic by comparison and geographically widespread, which makes large-scale, coordinated “editing” across the entire tradition extraordinarily difficult to sustain without leaving clear traces.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” yes and no

That slogan gets repeated constantly. It can be helpful, but only if you define your terms.

In the interview, Williams pushes back by noting that “extraordinary” depends on your underlying worldview. If God exists, miracles are not “impossible intrusions.” They are purposeful acts consistent with God’s power and plan.

There is also a second issue: people apply the slogan selectively. Many modern claims about origins are extraordinary too: life emerging from non-life, consciousness arising from purely material processes, the universe springing from nothing. Yet people often grant these a pass because they fit a naturalistic framework. The point is not that Christianity wins by pointing to hard questions in science. The point is that everyone has “background beliefs” that shape what they consider plausible.

A more honest approach is this: worldviews shape what we consider plausible, so we should test the sources carefully rather than dismiss them out of hand.

What can we responsibly conclude?

At minimum, the evidence supports these historically grounded statements: Jesus existed as a first-century Jewish teacher. He was executed under Roman authority in Judea. His followers rapidly spread across the empire. They worshiped Christ early, even when it carried social and legal risk.

What even skeptical scholars grant

It’s worth noting that the historical consensus goes further than many people realize. Scholars who study the New Testament professionally, including those who do not believe in the resurrection, generally agree on several core facts:

Jesus died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. This is as well-attested as any fact from ancient history. Even the most skeptical historians do not dispute it.

Jesus’ disciples genuinely believed they had seen Him alive after His death. Something happened that transformed terrified, scattered followers into bold proclaimers willing to suffer and die for their message. Hallucination theories and legend theories struggle to account for the breadth, timing, and nature of these experiences.

Saul of Tarsus, who had been hunting down Christians, became convinced that he too had seen the risen Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message he had tried to destroy, and he paid for it.

The early church exploded in growth, centered on the resurrection claim, in the very city where Jesus was publicly executed. Jerusalem was the worst possible place to launch a false resurrection story, and the best possible place to test one.

These facts do not require Christian faith to acknowledge. They are granted across the scholarly spectrum because that is where the evidence points. The question is not whether these things happened. The question is how to explain them.

The empty tomb: a strong case, stated carefully

Honesty requires a distinction here, and I would rather make it myself than have someone make it for me.

The points above are granted by very nearly everyone working in the field. The empty tomb sits differently. Gary Habermas, who has catalogued the scholarly literature on the resurrection for decades, puts support at somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of critical scholars who address the question. That is a strong majority. It is short of the near-unanimity behind the points above, and I will not dress it up as more than it is. Habermas himself declines to count the empty tomb among his minimal facts for that very reason, and I am content to work with his stricter standard.

The burial itself is less disputed. Mark names Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the very council that had condemned Jesus, which is not the sort of detail a movement invents about its opponents.

Now look at what the earliest opponents did with the tomb.

Matthew records the explanation circulating in Jerusalem: the disciples stole the body while the guards slept (Matthew 28:11-15). Whatever you make of that account, notice what the accusation assumes. Nobody explains away a body that is lying in the tomb. The earliest recorded counter-argument to the resurrection is an account of how the tomb came to be empty. Nobody is saying, “Go and look. He is still there.”

That pattern holds in the later Jewish and pagan polemic against Christianity. The opponents dispute the explanation. They do not dispute the absence.

There is also no record of anyone producing the body, or even claiming to know where it was. That is an argument from silence, and I will not lean on it harder than it can bear. The stronger point is the one above. The earliest attacks on the resurrection took the empty tomb as their starting position.

Christian faith goes further, of course. It says the best explanation for the rise of Christianity is not merely that Jesus lived and died, but that He rose and reigns.

But even before you get to that claim, you have solid historical footing: Jesus is not a mythical figure invented centuries later. He is a real figure who left real footprints in the ancient world.

So what do we do with a real Jesus?

Establishing that Jesus existed is only the beginning. The more pressing question is: Who did He claim to be?

This is not a question we can avoid. Jesus was not a generic religious teacher offering timeless wisdom. He made specific, extraordinary claims about His own identity and authority. He claimed to forgive sins (Mark 2:5-7), a prerogative that belongs to God alone. He accepted worship (Matthew 14:33, John 9:38). He spoke of Himself in ways that deliberately echoed the divine name revealed to Moses (John 8:58). And He presented Himself as the fulfillment of Israel’s messianic hope.

If Jesus was merely a good moral teacher, these claims are bewildering. C.S. Lewis famously pressed this point: a man who claimed what Jesus claimed would not be merely a good teacher. He would either be deluded, deceptive, or telling the truth about who He is.

The early Christians did not merely remember a wise rabbi who died tragically. They worshiped Him as Lord, called Him the Son of God, and staked their eternal hope on His person and work. This happened within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, in a fiercely monotheistic Jewish context where worshiping a human being would have been considered blasphemy. The speed, the setting, and the cost of that devotion demand explanation.

So now we face the next question: What did Jesus actually claim about Himself? And if He truly claimed to be the promised Messiah, the divine Son sent from the Father, do His claims hold up under scrutiny?

That’s where we turn next.