Imagine trying to convince someone Jesus existed without opening a Bible.
For a growing number of Christians, that’s no longer hypothetical. It’s their actual Friday night.
Friends aren’t asking what church they attend. They’re asking whether any of it happened. Did Jesus really exist? Is there evidence outside the Bible? Can archaeology tell us anything?
Those questions landed at Jeremiah Johnston’s dinner table when his kids asked how to talk to their friends about Jesus without starting with Scripture.
“My children challenged me,” Johnston says. “They said, ‘Dad, we want to reach our friends, but you’ve got to help us with information. How can we prove the truth claims of Jesus but not use the Bible?’ Now my kids love the Bible, but their friends don’t read the Bible, so they don’t privilege the biblical text. And they asked, ‘Dad, what can we know about Jesus outside the Bible?’ That was the challenge.”
It sent him back to one of Christianity’s most underleveraged assets: its historical foundation.
For decades, conversations about faith often centered on personal experience — what God had done in someone’s life, how belief had changed them. Those conversations haven’t gone away. But they’re increasingly accompanied by a harder question: Is any of this actually true?
Johnston, author of the New York Times-bestselling book The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face with Jesus, thinks many Christians have been quietly trained to treat that question as a threat. The more evidence you need, the weaker your faith must be.
He thinks that’s backwards — and that Christianity itself never worked that way.
“What’s so great about the Christian faith is it’s an evidence-based faith,” he says. “Unlike all the other belief systems in the world, we base our faith in evidence, which is so strong. So compelling. And I find the Bible, the deeper I go, the more solid that it is.”
For Johnston, archaeology isn’t academic exercise. It’s one of the most direct tools available for understanding the world Jesus actually inhabited.
“Archaeology is Christianity’s closest cousin,” he says. “It’s literally the best friend that Christianity could have.”
That might sound like boosterism until you consider what Christianity actually claims. The faith isn’t built around abstract principles. It makes specific assertions about specific events — that a man named Jesus was crucified under a Roman governor and rose from the dead. Those claims either happened or they didn’t.
And on the basic questions, Johnston notes, secular scholarship isn’t as hostile as many Christians assume.
“The most widely accepted fact is that He existed,” he says. “Now there are still odd individuals who are mythicists who try to say that He didn’t exist. But if we can’t believe that Jesus existed, we shouldn’t believe in the Roman Empire. We shouldn’t believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C.”
The agreement goes further than existence.
“There is a general agreement among most scholars of every stripe that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate on Friday, April 3, A.D. 33,” Johnston says. “I heard Jim Charlesworth once say that it’s the best established fact of the ancient world.”
Even scholars who reject Christianity often concede that Jesus’ earliest followers genuinely believed they encountered him alive after his death. What they argue about is what that means.
For Johnston, that’s exactly where the conversation gets interesting.
“Everything rides on it,” he says. “What rises and falls on the resurrection is our entire faith.”
He argues modern readers often underestimate how central resurrection was to the earliest Christians — not as a theological footnote, but as the reason the whole movement existed.
“One-third of the Gospels focus on a singular event — what happened during that final week and specifically that Easter weekend,” Johnston says. “The fact that it happened validates everything Jesus said in His ministry. It validates the truth of His forgiveness of sins. It validates the truth that God loves us.”
Some of the discoveries that have shaped his thinking surprised him. The Shroud of Turin is one.
“I used to be so skeptical about it,” he says. “In fact, I wrote an entire book on the resurrection and never mentioned the Shroud. I went from being a skeptic of the shroud to believing in its authenticity, again based on the evidence. I’m convinced because I’m not irrational.”
Still, he’s careful about what archaeology actually does. No dig site proves the Incarnation. No artifact forces belief.
“Archaeology doesn’t prove the Bible,” Johnston says. “But it does clarify the biblical text. It helps us understand the text better when we get into the world of Jesus and the material culture. It helps us interpret text with greater precision. And it brings it to life.”
Ancient burial customs stop being abstract. The geography starts to feel like somewhere a person actually walked.
Ironically, Johnston’s sharpest critique isn’t aimed at skeptics.
“I am growing weary of Christians that say, ‘I don’t need evidence. I don’t need to learn anything. I have faith,'” he says. “You’ve got to be careful with that because that can sound very cultish to me.”
His concern is that many believers have accidentally embraced a version of faith the New Testament itself never modeled. He points to Thomas.
“Let’s not make sure that in modernity, in our current time, that we have a faith that’s more pious than the New Testament followers of Jesus. Thomas said, ‘Unless I see the scars, I’m not believing.’ And what’s amazing about that is Jesus does not shame that kind of belief. We should be critical and skeptical of the worldview that we attach our life to. What’s great about Christianity is it stands the test.”
“What I love about Christianity is it is not feelings-based, it is fact-based. Our faith is in a person, but there is content to our faith to be believed. Most Christians are unaware of the facts of the Gospel.”
It’s a moment where confidence is cheap and AI can generate a convincing counterclaim in seconds.
Johnston thinks that’s part of why interest in archaeology keeps growing.
“People want to know that there is truth they can hold on to,” he says. “And one of the things I’m hearing over and over is, ‘I didn’t know this. I didn’t know our faith had so much evidence.'”
The disciples wanted evidence. The Gospel writers documented it. The earliest Christians staked their lives on events they believed actually happened in history.
Two thousand years later, archaeologists are still finding pieces of that story.
