Jesus Christ is a fact of history. All secular historians who have any merit admit that, regardless of what they believe about Him, Jesus lived! There's no way to explain that the Christian Church exists apart from the fact that Jesus Christ was here. What did the early church preach? Not only that Jesus was here, but that He walked out of the grave. How do you explain that? Somebody said, "Well, they must have made up the story. Why would hundreds of men and women die for their faith? Who do you know that would willingly and knowingly die for a lie? A man may live for a lie, but few would die for one.
There are more than 24,000 partial and complete manuscripts of the New Testament that have thus far been discovered. This is even more significant when one realizes that in all of human history, the second book in order in terms of manuscript authority, "The Illiad" by Homer, has only 643 surviving manuscripts still surviving.
We accept as historical fact that Julius Caesar fought the Gallic War even though only 10 surviving copies of his original writings exist. Only 5 manuscripts of Aristotle remain, 5 Homer has 5, Caesar Claudius‘, who reigned less than ten years after Jesus death, has only 10. We certainly don’t deny these men lived. It would seem far more reasonable to challenge the legitimacy of these individuals ever existing, since they have far less historical, written records.
Bottom line: the New Testament has an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting its reliability. Secular historians--including Josephus (before A.D. 100), the Roman Tacitus (around A.D. 120), the Roman Suetonius ( A.D. 110), and the Roman governor Pliny the Younger ( A.D. 110)--confirm the many events, people, places, and customs chronicled in the New Testament. Early church leaders such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Julius Africanus, and Clement of Rome—all writing before A.D. 250—also shed light on the New Testament's historical accuracy.
Why would nearly 100 ancient Historians include Christ in their writings if they knew he didn’t exist? Josephus, Tacitus, Gibbons, and others (all of which are highly respected) would not have written about someone that was only a myth. They wrote with certainty when speaking of Jesus. Even skeptical historians agree that the New Testament is a remarkable historical document. So we can say with authority that the Bible has stronger manuscript support than any other work of classical literature, including Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, and Tacitus, who all pale in evidential comparison.
The roughly 24,000 manuscripts of the New Testament date from as early as the 1st and 2nd century (55AD - 160AD). The manuscripts written in Coptic, Syrian and Latin agree with each other in text and context. Only slight and insignificant (grammatical) differences were found, but nearly 98% of the text’s had the same writing’s. The Old Testament is well represented too with over 900 documents representing as many as 350 separate works in multiple copies. One cave alone (4 of the Qumran) contained 520 full texts in 15,000 fragments.
Importantly, the manuscripts are what Historians call a Primary Source, considered absolutely the most reliable of all sources. Evidence continues to build with recent discoveries (2006) like the bones and remains of Caiaphas, the high priest, a written reference of King David, and a stone tablet bearing Pontius Pilate's name. The list continues to grow. The Bible is the most comprehensively documented (manuscripts), supported (archeologically), preserved (nearly 30,000 manuscripts) compilation of historical records and events ever assembled in human history. In all of human history’s ancient antiquities, none approaches the validity of the Bible. A book that says that Jesus Christ is the Messiah: That He was and still Is and always will Be. You can believe it.
