The young man was obviously excited to meet me. I knew the young man meant it as a compliment but, frankly, I was distressed by his attitude. He had fallen into the trap of thinking he couldn't defend his faith on his own. But each of us is called to be prepared to give a defense of the hope that is in us. And I'd like to offer you some ways that you can do it, using historical evidence presented by the eminent British historian, Paul Johnson.
Many modern historians consider the Bible to be a collection of ancient myths.
But Johnson argues that by the normal standards of historical analysis, the Bible is a highly dependable historical document. But now we've discovered fragments of New Testament books that can be traced to a mere 20 to 40 years after Christ's crucifixion-far too brief a span for myths and legends to take hold. In fact, if we compare the historical evidence for Jesus to the evidence for other figures who lived in ancient times, there's just no comparison. Though we don't have the original documents of the New Testament, we do have several thousand copies-some of them written only a hundred years after Jesus lived. Compare that to the Roman writer Tacitus.