The Man Who Walked Through Time
History, to me, feels like a vast river; deep, restless, always moving forward. Most people are carried along by its current and vanish beneath the surface without much trace. In a century from now, if God does not bring an end to this corrupt system, who will remember you and I? We are like the ancients who embedded their handprints on cave walls just to say, we were here.
But now and then, someone steps into the water and changes its course entirely. Jesus of Nazareth was one of those people. And yet, when I listened to a podcast this week, I was struck to hear that in a recent poll, many people said they didn’t believe Jesus ever existed at all.
It didn’t surprise me since the West seems to be diving into a bubble where people believe in nothing and anything in a paradoxical juxtaposition. Not stopping to ask, “Why am I here?”
Talking Points: The Historicity of the Gospel Accounts, The Simplicity of the Gospel, and Directi...
So, I went looking into it myself. Speaking for the UK, the most instructive survey I found was the Barna Group UK one. It’s about a decade old now, and I’ve heard that things may have improved since then, but the numbers still speak loudly.
- 61% said they believe Jesus was real.
- Among young adults (18–34), only 57% believed He was real.
That means around 43% of young people either don’t believe He existed or aren’t sure.
Even among those 35 and over, the number only rises to 63%.
It’s sobering to think that nearly half of young people in this country doubt the very existence of the most influential person in history.
When people question whether Jesus ever lived, they’re often surprised to learn how strong the historical evidence actually is — even outside of religious belief. Many professional historians — whether Christian, Jewish, agnostic, or atheist — accept that Jesus lived in first-century Palestine. The real debate isn’t if He existed, but who He truly was.
Evidence for Jesus doesn’t come from one place or one type of source. It’s a web of overlapping voices — some sympathetic, some hostile — all pointing toward the same figure.
- The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around AD 116, mentioned Christus, who suffered under Pontius Pilate during Tiberius’ reign.
- The Jewish historian Josephus wrote about “Jesus, who was called Christ,” and the execution of His brother James.
- Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor, described Christians singing hymns to Christ “as to a god.”
These men had no reason to invent Him — they weren’t believers. And yet, their words confirm what the Gospels tell us: a man named Jesus, executed under Rome, whose followers quickly spread across the empire.
Then there are the Christian sources themselves. Paul’s letters, written within twenty years of Jesus’ death, refer to His crucifixion and even to personal encounters with His family. The Gospels — though written with faith in mind — are full of details about geography, rulers, and Jewish customs that fit first-century Palestine with remarkable accuracy. They don’t read like legends dreamt up in ignorance, but like memories anchored in real soil.
Of all the Gospel writers, I’ve always been drawn to Luke. He wasn’t content to repeat stories — he investigated. He wrote, “I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning.” He anchors his story in time and space: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar…” (Luke 3:1). Time and again, archaeology has confirmed his understanding of places, titles, and political realities. He was a historian in the truest sense, wanting to show that what he wrote was not a myth, but an event that happened in the world we still inhabit.
When you take all this together — the outside witnesses, the early letters, the historical details — the case for Jesus’ existence becomes remarkably solid. It would be extraordinary for so many independent sources, friendly and hostile alike, to converge on someone who never lived.
And yet, there’s a deeper kind of evidence that matters just as much — even more. The evidence of experience.
Why, after 2,000 years, does His message still breathe hope into broken people? Why are Christians, in general, still marked by a quiet kind of joy even in suffering? Why does His name continue to stir hearts across every generation and language?
If you strip away all the arguments, the question remains deeply personal: What if the reason this story won’t fade is because it’s true?
Think of it this way: historians don’t doubt the existence of Socrates, even though we only know him through his students. They don’t doubt Alexander the Great, though the first biographies came four hundred years after his death. They don’t doubt Julius Caesar, even though only a few old manuscripts preserve his own words. Compared to them, Jesus’ life is better documented, closer in time, and more consistently remembered — and yet, He is the one people most fiercely doubt.
Maybe that’s because believing in Him asks something more of us. Not just to acknowledge a man who lived, but to respond to a voice that still calls.
So, yes — there’s historical evidence. But there’s also that inner knowing, the whisper that stirs when you read His words or kneel to pray. It’s not a relic of childhood faith. It’s something existential, something that reaches into the core of being human. Scripture puts it beautifully:
“…that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.”
(Acts 17:27, ESV)
That’s the invitation. The evidence can take you to the edge of the river, but faith is the step into the water — the step where history becomes encounter, and the story of Jesus becomes your own.