Watch this short YouTube clip https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xSDia5aecFg historical evidence for Jesus from the non-Christian Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, written around 91 AD. The video quotes and paraphrases passages from Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews (read it here - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0146:book=18:whiston%20chapter=3:whiston%20section=3 ) emphasizing that Jesus was a real historical figure who performed miracles, was called the Christ, was crucified, and that reports of his resurrection led to the rise of Christians. The narrator stresses that Josephus was not a Christian (pro-Roman and aligned with Jewish authorities), making it an independent historical witness.
One comment on the video even explicitly says: "The quote is From Josephus (Joseph Ben Matthias), Jewish Historian." (Joseph ben Matthias is Josephus' original name.)
From Wesley Huff paraphrasing what he said or more concisely from Huff's YouTube discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsBvzmdxQY
From Wesley Huff paraphrasing what he said or more concisely from Huff's YouTube discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsBvzmdxQY
A common objection to the Bible’s reliability is: “It’s been translated so many times—how can we trust it?” This mixes up two separate issues: translation and transmission.
Translation simply means moving the text from the original Greek into another language, like English. Transmission is about how accurately the text was copied by hand over the centuries.
The encouraging reality is that we have thousands of ancient handwritten copies. When the King James Bible was produced in 1611, its translators used only a few late medieval manuscripts (the oldest dating to around the 10th century). Today we have more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, some from as early as the 2nd century. Modern discoveries have actually brought us much closer to the original writings.
People sometimes worry about the roughly 400,000 small differences (called textual variants - or known as small differences in the manuscripts) found across these copies. Most are tiny—spelling mistakes or word-order changes that don’t affect the meaning at all. The differences that could matter amount to less than 1% of the text, and none of them changes any central Christian teaching.
Having so many overlapping copies is a huge advantage. It’s not like the telephone game, where a message gets garbled along a single chain. It’s more like a giant jigsaw puzzle: the more pieces you have, the easier it is to spot the ones that don’t fit and see the true picture clearly.
Translation simply means moving the text from the original Greek into another language, like English. Transmission is about how accurately the text was copied by hand over the centuries.
The encouraging reality is that we have thousands of ancient handwritten copies. When the King James Bible was produced in 1611, its translators used only a few late medieval manuscripts (the oldest dating to around the 10th century). Today we have more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, some from as early as the 2nd century. Modern discoveries have actually brought us much closer to the original writings.
People sometimes worry about the roughly 400,000 small differences (called textual variants - or known as small differences in the manuscripts) found across these copies. Most are tiny—spelling mistakes or word-order changes that don’t affect the meaning at all. The differences that could matter amount to less than 1% of the text, and none of them changes any central Christian teaching.
Having so many overlapping copies is a huge advantage. It’s not like the telephone game, where a message gets garbled along a single chain. It’s more like a giant jigsaw puzzle: the more pieces you have, the easier it is to spot the ones that don’t fit and see the true picture clearly.
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