Here’s what you should believe about America in 2026: We are a post-Christian country. Our grandparents’ faith is fading. The rising generation has moved on. The artifacts in the museums and the manuscripts under glass belong to a world that no longer speaks to ours. Then explain what just happened.
A book that claims the opposite – that the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth is stronger today than at any time in 2,000 years – has just climbed to the top of the world. New York Times Best Seller List. Not celebrity memoirs. Not a politically telling story. A book about ten discoveries – ossuaries, papyri, inscriptions, a linen cloth, coins pulled from Judean soil – that argue that the man at the center of Western civilization is exactly who the Gospels say he is.
I wrote that book. I’m not surprised it found readers. I’m surprised by the number – and by what that number tells us.
NEW BOOK ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOR JESUS ROCKETS TO TOP BESTSELLER LIST
The story America keeps being told is that faith recedes as evidence mounts. The data says otherwise. Every shovel in the ground over the past century has gone against the skeptics, not for them.
The critics said that Pontius Pilate was a fiction of pious imagination – a Roman governor invented by Christians to give gravity to their story. Then, in 1961, archaeologists turned over a limestone block engraved with his name at Caesarea Maritima. Prefect of Judea. Inscription intact. The man who is placed in the Gospels at the trial of Jesus is now set in stone by the empire that executed him.
Jeremiah Johnston is the author of the new book, ‘The Jesus Discoveries’ (Bethany House Publishers, March 10, 2026). (Bethany House Publishers)
The critics said that Nazareth did not exist in the first century. Then came the excavations, and the houses came, and the ritual baths, and there now stands a first-century home beneath the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth. The critics said that Caiaphas – the high priest who presided over the condemnation – was an invention of the Gospel.
Then, in 1990, construction workers broke into a burial chamber south of Jerusalem, and there they found an ornate limestone charnel house inscribed with his family name. The man who sent Jesus to Pilate left his bones to testify.
I have held a Roman crucifixion nail in my hand. I gave one at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January – in the one room full of people most confident that history has moved on. It had gone no further.
I could go on. The James Ossuary, with its inscription mentioning Jesus by name – the earliest archaeological reference to Jesus outside the Gospels themselves. The Magdalen Papyrus fragments in Oxford, containing portions of Matthew from the Living Memory of the Apostles. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible manuscript we had before 1947, and matched the text we already had almost letter for letter. And the Shroud of Turin – which I went to Italy to see for myself, and which bears the image of a crucified man whose wounds match the Gospel accounts, down to the Roman flagrum, the crown of thorns and the nail through the wrist.
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Each of these discoveries answers a question that the academy was sure would never be answered. Each of them sides with the Gospel writers.
The story America keeps being told is that faith recedes as evidence mounts. The data says otherwise. (iStock)
So why now? Why does a book full of inscriptions, ossuaries and manuscript remains rise up the bestseller list in a country that would have left it all behind?
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Because people noticed what the experts missed. A generation that was told to outgrow faith is wondering if faith was ever what they needed to outgrow. A nation exhausted by ideology turns to history. A culture drowning in noise grasps for stone – for the hard, silent, stubborn evidence that refuses to adapt to the spirit of the times.
I have held a Roman crucifixion nail in my hand. I kept one at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January – in the one room full of the people most confident that history has moved on. It had gone no further. The nail was still made of iron. The point was still sharp. The weight of it in my palm said what every artifact in this book says: something happened here. On Friday, April 3, 33 AD, a man died on a cross outside Jerusalem. And three days later the tomb was empty, and the movement he started has never stopped reaching the next generation, no matter how many funerals the civilized despisers plan for it.
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The bestseller list is not the story. The story is what the bestseller list points to. Americans are not done with Jesus yet. They were fed up with being told that there had to be serious people.
The evidence is in. The grave is empty. And the culture is catching up.
CLICK HERE TO JEREMIAH JOHNSTON
