Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!

[Aractus]

The first three respondants (LastPoet, Faith No More, Captain Colostomy) can be summed up in this one line:

The bible is shit for evidence, BTW.

If that's the case, you would believe that anything written in antiquity is "shit for evidence"?

But isn't it the strangest thing that all the time that Jesus was wandering around performing miracles not one person thought to write any of it down.

In fact people probably did write it down and it didn't survive, and on that no it's not unexpected at all that we don't find writings from the period in which Christ's ministry actually took place.

A guy named Yeshua (which should actually translate as Joshua by the way) lived around the time of 0-30 CE and was crucified by the Romans for blasphemy and heresy. So what? This is almost certainly true. Who cares? The following no more proves he was god or the son of god than the existence of any other crucified man/woman/child did around the same time (they liked to do that, both crucifying and killing people for heresy).

Also, the earliest of the gospel was almost certainly Mark and could have been written no earlier than 70CE because of its inclusion of the burning of the temple (which burned in 70CE), so this:

Isn't it fun when people who don't know anything try to use facts?

1. "should actually translate as Joshua" - is this your interpretation of the Greek New Testament texts?
2. What temple burned in 70 AD? The King of Babylon burned the First Temple in 586 BC, and the Second Temple didn't burn...
3. The only possible dates that the Gospel of Luke could have been originally written is 59-61AD. If it was written in 61 AD this would give enough time for him to write Acts before his death in 62 AD.

In the book of acts, Luke talks both about James and Paul repeatedly. According to Josephus, James is martyred in 62 AD. As I've already told you, early sources indicate Paul is martyred c. 64-67 AD. The book of Acts ends in the present, and never mentions either the death of Paul or James - but he does mention the death of other saints, so we would expect him to have mentioned their deaths if they had occurred. So Luke had to have written his Gospel some nine years before the prophecy comes to pass, and there is near unanimous agreement that his gospel was written after the gospels of Matthew and Mark, thus meaning all three synoptic gospels were written with the prophecy of the Siege of Jerusalem prior to 62 AD.

Matthew, Luke and John all mention Caiaphas as the High Priest who orders that Jesus is to be killed. He is mentioned repeatedly in John. His ossuary was excavated in 1990. While we're on the subject, James' was also excavated (sometime prior to 2002). And there's an abundance more archaeological evidence that corroborates the Biblical accounts.