I guess the basic question on Christianity is this.
To you, did Jesus rise from the grave or not?
I have said this before in a topic somewhere else but I'll type it out again. Jesus, and his followers existed that can't be refuted. Jesus' closest disciples that were with him the night he was arrested were absolutely TERRIFIED of being associated with Jesus in fear of what would happen to them. 3 days later Christ is believed to have risen, and appeared to them, and proved to them that he was in fact ALIVE! So they went out to preach until they were killed for doing so while never wavering in their proclamations that Jesus IS Lord.
People don't just go from being terrified from association to be willing to get martyred for that same association and what they saw as truth and believed.
So did Jesus rise from the grave or not?
I think he did, but, thats just me. Everyone is free to make their own choice.
Technically you're right, the existence of Jesus cannot be refuted. Nor can the existence of God or unicorns, for that matter. The problem is, as a matter of history, it cannot be confirmed either. The gospels are anonymous propaganda tracts written many decades after the events they describe. They are not eye witness testimony, but even if they were, it would change little. There is no good reason at all to think what they claim as history corresponds with reality.
Ok, to make this an easy comparison, lets take the internet completely out of the equation. Lets say I started to copy the story and history of Nebraska football through the many years it has been around. I get all of the information from the eye witness "official" records. Then all the official records get destroyed with none to be found.
2000 years later, my book is the only thing that has record and account of Nebraska football that depicts the lost information. Even though I copied it directly from the official records (original copy) etc...Does it become discredited over time too?
I'm sure you get my point.
How do we know anything longer than our lifetimes ever happened? Before the invention of the camera/ability to film and take pictures, we really can't technically know if what we hear is true because it comes from "third party accounts". But, we would argue about how these other things in history really happened, and existed...why?
Because we have FAITH, faith in the person that told us, faith in the book that we read, faith on the credibility of said things.
Again, my point is that the Bible is quickly undermined in being discredited, but do we do that on the history of Alexander the Great? (Pry a poor example but it helps make the point).
Probably. One of the things you didn't mention in this scenario would have been the key point to your analogy: the copying method. If you put in your future Husker Holy Book a references section w/ multiple citations there and within the text, and that text is then zeroxed for two thousand years, Nebraska could be swallowed in the earth and your account would likely be the authoritative ancient source, especially when compared against like relics from the time (other zeroxed social-historical commentaries w/ attending references and citations).
But if your book was a hand-written narrative––a story of sorts––about Nebraska football, and your work was passed through the ages by other copyists who work with pen and ink, your book would certainly suffer alterations and changes. We know this from extant New Testament manuscripts. Most of these changes would be small, inconsequential. Maybe the score of a game changes. Maybe a name is smudged here or there. But what if they weren't? What if a chapter went missing? Or someone "corrected" a score they didn't happen to like. "God will understand if I put that second back on the clock," the scribe thinks. Your source may not be worthless about
everything, but it is less useful than other forms of evidence.
The central problem with your analogy, though, is that the things you're comparing aren't alike. The NT isn't a compilation of scores and sports history. It's basically a story about a 1st-century superhero named Jesus. He has wacky adventures turning water into wine, soothing storms, fighting demons, arguing with a$$hole$, dying but winding up not dead. No one who ever spoke to him or knew him wrote about him. The stories don't appear until around a half-century after his death––you know, fifty years of those fond "Remember Jesus?" retellings around the campfire. There's a fair question as to whether he was even a real person and not, say, a composite sketch of a few different dudes.
There are many historical figures whose existence is in doubt for the same reasons Jesus's is. But Alexander? We have many sources that describe him and his reign. They correspond with archaeological evidence. Multiple cities were named after him. We have coins
with his face stamped on them. His existence is not a matter of faith but evidence. Although his deeds were great, they didn't bend the laws of physics. The story of his death--the Einstein of war killed by a mosquito or something about that glorious--seems about right, especially since no one claimed he went on to conquer Tibet on a winged Pegasus after he died.
If your point is that we only have blind faith to randomly select one arbitrary history out of an unknowably large sea of alternate realities, you're no better off picking yours than a Muslim, a Jew, Knapplc (who was touched by His noodly appendage), or anyone else. In this view, we might as well not do history at all.
