Is any of it actually true

What this group of questions is

This is the thinnest section on the site, and it has exactly one page in it. Saying so first is not modesty; it is the only honest way to open a section about evidence.

The questions in this family are the ones people search for most bluntly. Who wrote the Bible. Does it contradict itself. Does it say the earth is flat. Is there any evidence outside the Bible for Jesus. They are asked in enormous numbers and they are answered, on most of the web, by two kinds of page: one that treats every difficulty as already solved, and one that treats every difficulty as fatal. Neither is worth reading, and the second is usually better written.

What an honest answer in this area looks like

It has four parts, and the first two are the ones normally skipped.

Say what the claim actually is. “The Bible is reliable” is not a claim, it is a slogan covering about nine separate ones: that the manuscripts we have are close to what was written, that what was written was written when it says, that the authors were in a position to know, that they reported honestly, that the events happened, that the interpretation offered of the events is correct, and so on. Each of those has a different evidential situation. Some are in very good shape. Some are contested. At least one — the last — is not the kind of claim historical evidence can settle at all.

Say what would count against it. A person who cannot name a piece of evidence that would trouble them is not doing history. There are things in the New Testament that are difficult: the census in Luke 2, the resolution of the resurrection accounts into a single timeline, the ending of Mark. Pretending those are non-problems does more damage to a reader’s trust than the problems themselves ever could.

Then give the evidence, with names and dates. Not “scholars agree” — which scholar, in which book, arguing what, and who disagrees. Not “historians have proven”, because historians very rarely prove anything; they argue that one reconstruction accounts for more of the data than the alternatives.

Then stop. The strongest historical case for the resurrection is not proof and does not need to be. It is a claim about which explanation of an agreed set of facts is least bad. Anyone who offers you certainty here is offering you something history does not sell.

The one page here so far

It is about a detail rather than a syllogism: every resurrection account puts women at the tomb first, and Luke records that the men dismissed the report as nonsense.

That matters because of what a first-century writer inventing a story would have done instead. Testimony from women carried significantly less weight in legal and rhetorical settings of the period — this is stated flatly by Josephus and reflected in later rabbinic material, and it is a point conceded by sceptical historians rather than one invented by apologists. If you are constructing a persuasive account, you do not begin it with the witnesses your audience is least likely to credit, and you certainly do not add that your own leaders thought it was rubbish.

That is the argument, and its limits are as important as its force. It establishes that the detail is unlikely to be invented. It does not establish that the tomb was empty, and it does not establish what happened. It removes one explanation from the table and leaves the rest of the table standing.

What is coming, and what is not

The obvious gaps here are who wrote the Bible, whether it contradicts itself, and what the non-Christian sources actually say. Those pages are not written yet. They will be, and until they are this section says so rather than padding itself out with the ones that were easy.

What will not appear here is a page arguing that the evidence compels belief. It does not, and a channel whose whole proposition is that it does not overclaim cannot make an exception for the questions where overclaiming would be most useful.