I guess I should mention that I've been to Jerusalem, and I've touched the stone that Jesus's body was laid upon after they took him down from the cross. You wouldn't think they'd just let you touch something like that...

Being there, seeing the old city, makes it seem more plausible that the mythology around which Christianity is built is maybe not mythology, not all of it. I mean, whether or not Jesus really was the son of God, or really was resurrected and sits at the right hand of the Father waiting for the time that will come to judge the living and the dead, that's clearly arguable.

But whatever you believe, it's difficult to stand there at the rock of Golgotha and say that someone just made it all up, that Jesus never existed, was never crucified. Jerusalem has been a city, an ordinary working city with generations of ordinary residents, from then to today with no interruption. It was never lost and then found, there was no single archaeologist who ever had an opportunity to falsify some artifact, to make up some lie about what the city was or where it was or who built it.

A whole city's worth of people have always lived there, and probably there are people there today who have had Jerusalemite anscestors for 2000 years. I guess it's possible that some army of the 4th century, or some cabal of men invented all of it, murdered all of their detractors, launched a campaign to snooker a whole city's worth of people.

But from an information control perspective it seems so hard to pull that off... carbon dating confirms that the city's age is at least authentic, so then you have a constant stream of foreign commerce, travellers every day for 2000 years corroborating the continuity of the city's history, integrating mention of it into the histories of other nations all over Asia and Africa. To track down all of the stories that conflict with your conspiracy and try to eliminate them after the fact, that just seems so unlikely that the simpler thing is just to take the Judeo-Christian version history more or less at face value.

Huh.