Lay your beliefs on the table; your faith, your doubt, your empty materialism, your philosophy, it doesn’t change a thing. The fact remains: a man named Jesus walked the earth. The Roman empire including the Imperial tax collectors, the centurion military and the Prefect, Pontius Pilate all interacted with him personally. The Jews including the political/religious sects of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes personally interacted with him. The Samaritans, the Syrophoenicians; they all left their fingerprints in his files and documented their encounters.. Truth is, there’s more historical proof on paper of Jesus than there is on Julius Caesar himself. He crisscrossed the Mediterranean and became the most documented man in human history;
To steal his glory and diminish his influence every principality on this planet has sought to write him off and to keep his face in the shadows. When that came up empty, they rigged the church, mixing it with old pagan sins to wash away his tracks. When they still couldn’t erase him they built machines of slaughter carving a path of blood across the globe—inquisitions and genocides, conquering the world and stacking bodies by the millions all while wearing a cross on their lapels and calling their bloodbath ‘divine.’
These days the masses are spitting out every rebuke they can muster to defame Jesus; how he walked the path and what he did in his time… anything to tear his reputation to shreds, every cheap denial they can find to erase him.
How do you know he performed miracles? The paper trail’s solid—witnessed and filed away by the Roman Empire, by his disciples, by the multitudes that followed him and even by the Israelites who turned their backs on him had eyes on the job and filed the reports. His grand works were performed throughout the trail he carved across the Levant; Galilee, Samaria, Judea, known in the modern day as Israel, the Palestinian territories, and bits of southern Lebanon and Syria. Pontius Pilate himself tried every legal and moral approach he could to keep Jesus off the cross and finally washed his hands clean of Jesus’ death when the masses cried out, “CRUCIFY HIM!”
How do you know he rose from the dead? The people who personally knew him best bore witness and testimony; his mother, his disciples, those he had healed, those who received his miracles… five hundred at least trailed him for several days just to see him resurrected. Secularism wants you to believe those witnesses were seeing a ghost, but no, he ate with them He sat at their table; he was flesh and bone. Jesus personally instructed them to press their fingers into the wounds in his wrists and feet proving he wasn’t a vision; he was a man who’d been nailed to a cross, plain and simple.
Surely those people were liars? And surely anyone making this argument hasn’t given it serious thought. Think about it. Surely a man may live for a lie but no man will die for a lie, not when they could walk away with their lives. Well, they chose their death. No. No man chooses his death, not even one who commits suicide… he chooses the time of his death and nothing more.
One out of every one dies. And rather than walk away with their lives by denying that Jesus was resurrected in the flesh to walk among them, all but one of his disciples were executed:
Peter: Crucified upside down in Rome by Emperor Nero, as he felt he was unworthy to die in the same manner as Jesus.
James (Son of Zebedee): Beheaded in Jerusalem by King Herod Agrippa I.
Andrew: Crucified on an X-shaped cross in Patras, Greece.
Thomas: Speared to death in India.
Bartholomew (Nathanael): Flayed (skinned) alive and beheaded in Armenia.
Matthew: Executed with a sword in Ethiopia.
Philip: Crucified in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).
Simon the Zealot: Reportedly sawed in half in Persia.
Jude (Thaddaeus): Killed with arrows in Persia or Turkey.
James (Son of Alphaeus): Stoned to death in Jerusalem.
Matthias (Who replaced Judas): Stoned to death.
Paul: Beheaded in Rome
Judas Escariot: Hung himself after betraying Jesus to the Romans for thirty pieces of silver.
All of these men died for the truth that Jesus was the Son of God, eleven were martyred for witnessing his resurrection yet refusing to deny it. The Only Exception is John: Tradition indicates he was the only disciple to survive martyrdom, dying peacefully of old age after being exiled on the island of Patmos.
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