Is there ANY concrete proof of an afterlife?

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The New Testament, which contains numerous eyewitness accounts of a man who returned back from being dead.

I think most people have a blind spot when it comes to viewing the New Testament as historical evidence. They think just because there’s a Bible in every home that said Bible isn’t useful as evidence of its own veracity.

But they’re mistaken, the reason you can’t view the Bible as historical evidence is because you can’t view anything as historical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. No “concrete” evidence would suffice.

Jesus the man existed. That is historical fact. There is more historical evidence of Jesus’ existence than there is of every single other figure from Roman times save Julius Caesar himself. There is more evidence for Jesus’ existence than there is of Pompei’s, and Caesar fought a civil war against him! Numerous Roman writings confirm the existence of Jesus. There is a Wikipedia page that summarizes the historical debate if you are interested.

Jesus was born, he was baptized, he was crucified after an incident in Jerusalem. People believed he was a miracle worker. If you dispute these facts, you’re disputing what historians have formed a consensus around, the most significant event in human history, the origin story of the largest religion on Earth. We base our calendars off of Jesus’s birth.

With the question of the historical existence of Jesus out of the way, we can now get closer to being able to take the New Testament at face value. We cannot simply deny that Jesus ever was there and that ancient peoples just made it all up. So now to ratchet closer to historical accuracy we have to look carefully at the evidence to figure out what to believe.

But that’s so much bigger than one Quora question / answer. This question wonders, is there any concrete evidence of an afterlife? And once you’ve ruled out the possibility that the NT was 100% made up bullshit, you now have to determine where the line between truth and fiction lay. Those eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s ministry were all collected into a narrative. We can use that narrative itself as evidence that there was something to base the narrative off of.

For historical scholars are not limited to just picking up Bibles off of the shelf and reading them, even though that really is something they can do in order to answer certain questions. There are manuscripts, fragments of writings that we can date using radiative techniques to a fair degree of accuracy, that show how the New Testament changed over time and settled into the narrative that we can read today.

In this hunt, we can find no evidence that the sequence of events described, that Jesus was baptized, performed miracles, and came to people after death, was simply made up. Nobody at the time thought to level that charge. There’s no reason to not believe that Jesus really did do those things, and every reason to think that He did.

The New Testament is as concrete as it gets. And if the New Testament contains a high percentage of truth, one man achieving life after death is enough to think that anyone can. You’re safely and comfortably in the realm of theology, of making the determination of what the historical facts about Jesus’ birth and death mean, rather than doubting it all happened.