A friend of mine said Jesus never existed. How do you answer something like this?
There are still many people today who make the claim that Jesus never existed, that He was only a mythical character. Bertrand Russell puts it this way, “I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels” (Why I Am Not a Christian, p. 11, note 8). However, those who make such an accusation are certainly not historians, but are surprisingly ignorant of the facts. The New Testament contains twenty-seven separate documents which were written in the first century A.D. These writings contain the story of the life of Jesus and the beginnings of the Christian church from about 4 B.C. until the decade of the A.D. nineties. The facts were recorded by eyewitnesses, who gave firsthand testimon...