"Hell, Yes. I Got This. Back Off, and Leave Me Alone."

I don't think most nonbelievers would decide to worship Jesus if they had more scientific evidence because I think the main barrier to God isn't academic, but a deep resistance against the idea of divine authority.

Most of the atheists I know think the God of the Bible is unethical, frustrating, and unstable. It's not just that they don't believe in God; they wouldn't want to follow a God like the one they've seen described.

However, just for kicks...

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon dated. We know they are older than the appearance of Jesus. In these scrolls are books that provide thousands of symbols and prophesies showing that Jesus would not only come to earth, but also that He would do exactly what He did.
I've read a great deal of ancient literature, including religious texts from various religions. The sort of prophesy/fulfillment I'm describing here is unique to the Bible.

These are not vague nuances that could be stretched to connect somehow to Jesus. These are correlations so tight that if they were included in a novel written by one author, any literary scholar would consider them foreshadowing (to the point that the connections would almost be too obvious).

One of these instances of foreshadowing occurs in the Old Testament book of Numbers, Chapter 21. The people of Israel had rebelled against God and so God sent snakes among them to bite them, and many of the people died. When the people were sorry, God commanded Moses to make a bronze snake and lift it up on a pole, so that anyone who looked at it would live.

This story may seem simple, crude, even harsh. I can understand ethical arguments resisting a God who would send snakes among his people as a means of judgment. If I were an atheist, that is the angle I would take with this story.

But what I cannot argue against is a vivid correlation between this early description of God's judgment/rescue and life/death of Jesus.

The theme of the lethal snake goes back to Genesis, of course. But in Numbers, we have a bizarre picture-- a sculpture of a deadly snake lifted up on a pole, a snake with the power to save anyone who was willing to simply look up at the snake to find life.

The creation of a sculpture like this is unusual for the God of the Bible. He typically avoided graven images of any sort. (Remember how He hated the golden calf?) So why is that sort of sculpture okay here?

Well, God was looking ahead hundreds of years, to when Jesus would take lethal sin into His own body and be lifted up on a pole to die, so that anybody who might look to Him for salvation would live.

Jesus became the serpent, the sin of the whole world, and then took on the punishment for sin.

That is why some of my favorite illustrations of the Numbers passage show a human face on the serpent hanging on the pole. When I look back at this old image, I realize that the sins of people who have hurt me hang there inside Jesus. The sins of my own life hang there, too. The serpentine wickedness of humanity is caught in the body of a God who was willing to send Himself to absorb all of our evil and then die for us so that we might live.

This sort of imagery/fulfillment happens thousands and thousands of times across the Old and New Testament. It would be mathematically impossible for such connections to be coincidental. As someone who studies literature every day of her life, I cannot deny that (despite the maddening mysteries of the text) there is a coherence to the Bible's deep narrative that is unique.

I don't expect this to change anybody's mind, because the greater issue most people have with Christianity isn't veracity, but resistance against a God who would dare to punish sin with death. That idea is abhorrent to most nonbelievers. "How dare He judge us!" is a more common and fundamental protest than "Does He exist?"

And if I'm honest, the former is more often my own argument against God, as well. How I fight against that sort of force!

I am fiercely independent, and I'm smart enough to feel able to choose my own ethics. It is a war for me to engage with a Being who would dare to claim authority that would trump my own. (Especially since I disagree with His ideas so often.)

This is why, if we were to have an honest conversation about God, I would want to spend more time wrestling with the idea of Divine authority than on attempting to validate the science or historicity of the Bible. The academic side of Christianity is a piece of cake. It's not hard to find enough proof to make the Bible trustworthy.

What's hard is getting to the point where an independent human is willing to admit dependency on a greater life form.

The cramp of the Christian faith isn't in intellect; it's in the same old thing that's always torn humans apart from trusting God: "Eve, you want to be like God without God? You think you can figure out goodness on your own? You want to handle decision making without worrying about someone else deciding what's right or wrong?"

"Hell, yes," she says. "I got this. I don't like Your way of doing things. Back off, and leave me alone."