In terms of practice and form, every religion in human history has its claim to practices which are for the most part unique to that religion. You have the blood sacrifices of Old Testament Judaism, the warrior monks of Buddhism, the strict textualism of the Sunni Muslims, and the Hindu promotion of deep love of the divine. I say for the most part because these unique practices are actually found in one single religion. Christianity, Orthodox and Catholics believe in the transfiguration of bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ. This is openly referred to as a sacrifice by those believers and is understood as a kind of continuation of the Old Testament sacrifices. The warrior monk of Shaolin has a Christian counterpart in the crusader knight who was not only a soldier, but also required to live under monastic rules as part of his military service. Christianity also has its strict textualists in the sola scriptura denominations and all forms of Christianity in their own ways, promote the idea of a life devoted to God and to serving him. From saints to martyrs to mystics, from incense to swords to prayer beads to altars, it seems like all of the world's religions can see something within Christianity. It could be that Christianity is the most mirrored religion of all. It's almost as if Christianity was specially designed to sate the innate hunger for the divine which everyone has, no matter where you are from. This is a universal aspect of the human condition and one that only Christianity can answer. As if the founder of the Christian religion himself had a working understanding of mankind's shared psychological makeup and made a religion in response to all those spiritual needs. And if you think about the one aspect that is unique to Christianity which is not mirrored by any other faith in history, the this unique claim of Christianity is not that it was founded by a mere prophet or simply a great man. Christianity is the only religion which claims to be founded not by a man, nor by a God or gods, but by God himself. God in person, in the flesh, here on this earth. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The most unique aspect of Christianity isn't its claims to a connection with God or or the divine, but to a personal connection to God. It's what distinguishes it from every other religion out there. The revelation of Christianity isn't a book of scriptures or a collection of sayings. The revelation of Christianity is the human person of Christ in his mercy and love for us. And interestingly enough, those other religions, despite their status as competitors within the world of religion, all acknowledge that Christ did in fact exist. This is particularly true for those faiths which are closest to Christianity in terms of historical origin and location. Neither pagan Romans, Jews, nor Muslims deny the existence of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. And that is pretty stunning. It's the west that has the biggest issue dealing with the historical reality of Jesus, because it's here where the atheist agenda is strongest and people advocate for the mythicist position that Jesus Christ is just a fairy story and that such a man never really existed. They start from the assumption that our best and most reliable source, the books of the New Testament, aren't acceptable as proof. So they force us to debate with that handicap from the outset. And being obliging Christians, we accepted the challenge. Before we get to the extra biblical proofs, we need to talk about why the biblical proofs have every right to be considered reliable. The text Evidence for the veracity of certain New Testament events is exceptionally rich. Thousands of handwritten manuscripts, early translations into other languages, and quotations in the writings of early Christian authors testify to the truth that Jesus Christ really existed on earth. Furthermore, these sources allow us to reconstruct the New Testament and understand its transmission over time. Sure, a leather bound King James version of the Bible wasn't written the day after Christ's resurrection, but the Gospel books we have today didn't just pop up out of nowhere. They were sourced from contemporary accounts that were valued and curated through the early days of Christianity. Evidence of Christ's existence, death and resurrection, and belief in the same can be dated earlier than 200 A.D. in some cases. When you consider the fact that documentation providing the existence of Alexander the Great can only be dated 400 years after his death, the evidence for Christ is far more reliably historical. According to Houston Christian University, There are over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament which have been grouped by their writing material and script, with the papyri from the 2nd century A.D. being the oldest. In addition, analysis of the New Testament provide evidence that the Gospels are based on eyewitness accounts. As ancient accounts of historical events go, the Gospels appear to be remarkably close in time to the events they describe. The Book of Mark, for instance, is believed to have been written just 40 to 50 years after the death of Jesus. In this way, the Gospel narratives themselves are evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Proof for the historical Jesus is found in early extra biblical sources as well, most notably in the writings of the historians Josephus and Tacitus. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who lived between the years 37 and 100 AD is considered to be the most important historian for events in 1st century Judea. Josephus was a Jewish general in the First Roman Jewish War which took place from 66 to 73 AD and he later defected to become a Roman general in the conflict. In his year 93 AD work of history, the Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus writes about Jesus in two places. The first and most famous mention has come to be known as the Testimonium Flavienum, or testimony of Flavius. Josephus writes, now there was about this time Jesus a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ, and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold. These and 10,000 other wonderful things concerning him and the tribe of Christians so named from him, are not extinct at this day. While scholars agree that certain elements were added to the testimonium, there is a general consensus that Josephus Jesus is authentic. Secular academic Bart Ehrman in his work Did Jesus Exist? Notes that one or more Christian scribes touched up the passage a bit, but that does not diminish the text status as proof of the existence of the historical Jesus. Citing the existence of the 10th century Arabic translation of Josephus Antiquities, the scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy Shlomo Pines, asserts the testimony of Josephus is authentic evidence that Jesus really did exist. The Arabic version describes Jesus as a wise and virtuous man who was crucified by Pilate. The text states that the disciples reported his resurrection and believed he was the Messiah. This version differs by omitting Christian traditions, additions such as the phrase if indeed one ought to call him a man, and a direct statement that Jesus was the Christ. The testimonium is important because in it Josephus, a non believer, confirms Jesus existence as a virtuous man with many followers who was crucified by Pontius Pilate. He also confirms that the followers of Christ believed from the start that he was resurrected and that they thought he was the Messiah. Josephus also illustrates the ongoing hostility of the Jewish religious establishment towards the followers of Jesus. The Roman historian Tacitus is another extra biblical source. Tacitus lived from 56 to 120 AD and he served as both a consul and proconsul. A consul was a chief magistrate of the Roman Republic, a high ranking official with vast civil and military powers, including commanding armies and presiding over the Senate. A proconsul was a former consul who was assigned to govern a Roman province wielding supreme authority. Tacitus is considered to be one of Rome's greatest historians and prose stylists, and he is known for his masterworks, the Histories. As a renowned writer, orator and historian, Tacitus is a reliable source on the historicity of Jesus. He was not only a powerful politician and a well respected writer, but he was also a harsh critic of Christians. So Tacitus had no reason to fabricate stories about the existence of Jesus. His mentions of Christ therefore offer credible proof that Jesus really did exist. Tacitus wrote about Jesus in Book 15, chapter 44. There, Tacitus described how Emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64. A report that the fire had been ordered caused Nero to cast about for a scapegoat. According to Tacitus, once he fails in his attempts to deflect, Nero finally settled on blaming the Christians. Tacitus explains quote but all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor and the propitiations of the gods did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations. Called Christians by the populace, Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilates. And a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pled guilty. Then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city as of hatred against mankind. So Nero basically framed the Christians as the cause of the fire in order to avoid blame. In the process, however, a savage hatred took hold and the Christians weren't even given the dignity of Norman formal executions. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt to serve as a nightly illumination. When daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion for them, for it was not as it seemed for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty that they were being destroyed, he says in these experts. In these excerpts, Tacitus provides details about when Jesus was executed and by whom. Tacitus shows that Christianity spread from Judea to Rome in less than 50 years after the death of Christ. His writing also confirms that Christians were willing to die for their belief in Christ. Like Josephus, he provides non Christian proof for the existence of Jesus. Jesus Mythicists insist that the words of Josephus and Tacitus could have been altered by Christian transcribers and therefore should be ignored by but this is not a view common among even secular academics, because linguistic and textual analysis seem to indicate that the mentions of Jesus in both Josephus and Tacitus are in fact authentic. Oxford University Press has recently published a much touted study by scholar T.C. schmidt entitled Josephus and New Evidence for the one called Christ. The book provides a persuasive account of the mounting evidence that the testimonium flavium is authentic. In the case of Tacitus, his disparaging comments and derogatory remarks about Christ and Christianity, combined with the eloquence and sophistication of his Latin prose, both stand in opposition to the weak objections made by the Jesus mythicists. Those were the traditional sources that Christians have relied on to verify the existence of Jesus of Nazareth. But new discoveries are happening all the time in the field of archaeology that not only fail to challenge Bible truths, but actually verify them. You've probably heard about the now famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in 1947, a collection of third century writings which included nearly the entire Old Testament, which helped to verify the historicity of the texts. They also verified the curation techniques used by Christians and Jews to preserve their own copies of those same texts across different locations, cultures and languages. More recently, as detailed in the Dragon's Prophecy movie, which is opening on Monday, archaeologists have discovered the actual biblical City of David and are busy excavating it in Israel today. This is another discovery that astounds biblical researchers and historians. A whole city thought lost to the sands of time was actually not lost, just sort of lost under literal sand. Only this century, around the year 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority discovered a mosaic made around 230 A.D. the mosaic reads, the God loving Exceptus has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial. Now known as the Megiddo Mosaic, it stands as one of the earliest explicit references to the Christian belief that Christ is God incarnate and not just a good man or a wise prophet. Interestingly, some of Christianity's earliest critics have also left extra biblical proof that Christians have always worshiped Christ as God. The Alexamenos graffito dates to around 200 AD and depicts a crude drawing of a man lifting his arms up to a crucified man with the head of a donkey. The inscription reads, alexamenos worships his God. Not only did the drawing preserve a truth of the Christian faith, its mocking tone underscores the reality of the early church that it was heavily persecuted and worship was generally done underground. One of the key moments in that persecution was in 70 AD when the Roman Emperor Hadrian suppressed the second Jewish revolt and to punish Jews and Christians alike, constructed a temple dedicated to either Venus or Jupiter atop the very site venerated by early Christians as the place of Christ's tomb. Due to that act of official oppression, the place where Christ was entombed has been securely marked for centuries by a giant pagan temple due to Emperor Hadrian. Naturally, the tomb today remains as it was in the days of Christ, empty. The site is now the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was dedicated in 335 A.D. another interesting tidbit of proof for both the existence and the resurrection of Christ Christ is the fact that we have Jesus's photograph. No, not an actual photograph. Cameras did not exist back then, but the scientific process that they work by has always existed. There are few explanations for how the image on the legendary Shroud of Turin came to be. The main issue is that the Shroud appears to have been formed not by merely touching the skin of the man. It wrapped areas of the body which wouldn't have been in contact with the Shroud. Shroud such as the hollow of the eyes, actually stand out in great detail. Also, the image wasn't painted onto the fabric, it was burned in. Burned in such a way as to partially show some of the bodily internals, like an X ray. The best explanation for the image is that it was created by A flash of intense ultraviolet light radiation. And given that this light burned both from the front, front and back of the image onto the cloth, it seems the light came from within the body itself. It's possible that during the act of resurrection, Christ's body created that light and burned the image into the Shroud. This is consistent with the biblical account of the miracle of the transfiguration depicted in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The books describe Christ as suddenly radiating a bright red white light that actually made his face and clothes glow. This is exactly how cameras leave images onto surfaces like glass or film. The Shroud not only is proof of the historical occurrence of the miracle of the resurrection, it also is archaeological evidence verifying the biblical account of the miracle of the transfiguration. It seems that in addition to rising from the dead, Christian Christ also left us something miraculous to remember him by, and in the process took the first selfie. So when it comes to the validity of the scriptures, the validity of the Bible, the existence of Christ down to his empty burial place, as well as the existence and beliefs of early Christians, it really seems that we are spoiled for choice when it comes to proof, be they biblical or extra biblical non Christian sources that verify this. And we haven't even begun to talk about the other proofs of the divine origin of Christianity, which include its various fruits.
