A New Testament scholar who spent four years consulting scientists and archaeologists across the globe says he can establish 65 facts about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, without ever opening a Bible. And readers are buying the argument in large numbers.

Dr. Jeremiah Johnston's book, "The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face with Jesus," hit No. 2 on Amazon Charts' nonfiction bestseller list last week and climbed to No. 3 on the New York Times Bestsellers List this week, Fox News Digital reported. Released in March by Baker Publishing Group, the book lays out a case that physical artifacts, from burial cloths to ancient coins, corroborate the biblical account of Christ.

Johnston, a pastor and president of the Christian Thinkers Society, told Fox News Digital that the evidence trail runs far deeper than most believers or skeptics realize.

"It turns out that we can learn 65 facts about the birth, the life, the ministry, the miracles and, of course, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus... before we ever open the Bible. And no other religious figure on planet Earth has ever been this well evidenced."

That is a bold claim. But Johnston's pitch is not aimed at the choir alone. He has taken his research to several popular podcasts recently, including the "Shawn Ryan Show," where his appearance drew more than one million views. The chart performance suggests an appetite, well beyond church pews, for material that treats the foundations of Christianity as a question of evidence rather than blind faith.

The Shroud of Turin: death cloth or resurrection cloth?

Much of Johnston's book centers on the Shroud of Turin, the ancient linen bearing the faint image of a crucified man. The shroud has been a flashpoint between believers and secular critics for decades. Johnston told Fox News Digital the physical data points to something science cannot easily explain away.

He described blood chemistry on the cloth that, he said, reflects extreme physical trauma, high levels of ferritin and creatinine, red blood cells broken down in bilirubin from sustained torment, and a wound on the left side piercing through the fifth and sixth ribs.

Then there is the image itself. Johnston pointed to its almost impossibly thin surface layer.

"The image is only 0.2 microns thin. You realize that's one-fifth of the thickness of a piece of our hair?"

Italian physicist Paolo di Lazzaro, a senior researcher at the ENEA Research Center in Rome, spent five years trying to recreate the image, Fox News Digital reported. Johnston cited di Lazzaro's work as evidence that no known medieval or modern technique can reproduce it. Johnston said di Lazzaro's research concluded it would take "a burst of 34,000 billion watts of radiant energy delivered in one-40 billionth of a second to create the image."

For Johnston, that finding reframes the entire artifact. He told Fox News Digital plainly:

"That's why I say the Shroud of Turin is not a death cloth; it is a resurrection cloth. That is the moment when Jesus' physical body came back to life."

Johnston is not the only public figure to argue that the evidence for Christ's resurrection can withstand rigorous scrutiny. A former cold-case detective and a longtime atheist have both said the evidentiary case for the Resurrection changed their minds entirely.

Challenging the 1988 carbon dating

Skeptics have long leaned on a single data point: a 1988 carbon-dating test that returned a date range of 1260, 1390 AD, suggesting the shroud was a medieval forgery. Johnston said that test has been "discredited" and that more recent analysis using wide-angle X-ray scattering, or WAXS, "confirmed a 1st century date."

He also said pollen samples taken from the cloth are native to the Jerusalem area, a geographic detail that, if accurate, would be difficult to square with a European forgery crafted centuries after Christ.

It is worth noting what the Fox News Digital report does not include: the names of the specific peer-reviewed studies Johnston says discredited the 1988 test, or the full details of the WAXS study he cites. Those gaps do not erase the argument, but they leave room for fair-minded readers to press for more. Johnston himself seemed to welcome that posture.

"We should be skeptical of anything we commit our lives to. The beautiful thing is, the deeper you go with your questions into Christianity, the more rock-solid our faith becomes."

That willingness to meet doubt head-on is part of what distinguishes Johnston's approach. He is not asking people to stop asking questions. He is saying the answers hold up.

Beyond the shroud: coins, cups, and historical traces

The book does not rest on the shroud alone. Johnston pointed to an artifact dubbed the "Jesus Cup," which Fox News Digital reported is dated to approximately 50 AD, within two decades of Christ's crucifixion. He also cited a seventh-century solidus from Emperor Justinian II that bears an image of Jesus, offering what he described as another thread in a long chain of physical evidence.

These artifacts span centuries and continents, from first-century Jerusalem to medieval Europe to modern-day Turin. An immersive exhibition on the shroud drew visitors to Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, on November 18, 2025. Weeks earlier, on April 28, a virtual "Holy Shroud" experience was inaugurated at Piazza Castello in Turin, Italy, for the Feast of the Shroud.

Public interest in archaeological connections to biblical history has been growing for years. Discoveries like a fifth-century Christian monastic site unearthed by Egyptian archaeologists continue to surface, reminding the world that Christianity left deep material footprints long before the modern era.

Johnston spent the past four years traveling the globe to build his case, consulting with scientists and archaeologists whose names and full credentials are not detailed in current reporting. That legwork produced a book that, whatever one makes of its conclusions, treats the question of Jesus' historicity as something that can be investigated, not merely believed or dismissed.

Why the bestseller surge matters

The chart performance tells its own story. In an era when faith is often treated as a private embarrassment by mainstream cultural gatekeepers, a book arguing that hard science supports the central claims of Christianity does not merely sell, it surges. No. 2 on Amazon. No. 3 on the Times list. Over a million views on a single podcast appearance.

That is not a fluke. It reflects a public hunger for something the secular establishment rarely offers: permission to take the historical foundations of Christianity seriously in the same way one might examine any other ancient claim. Johnston's argument, that 65 verifiable facts about Jesus exist outside the Bible, meets that hunger directly.

The broader trend is hard to miss. From a BBC presenter who became a Christian after examining the evidence for God to scholars who treat ancient texts and artifacts as serious data, a growing number of public voices are pushing back against the assumption that faith and reason occupy separate rooms.

Johnston framed his work not as an attack on skepticism but as an invitation to follow the evidence wherever it leads. As he put it, the resurrection was the reason the New Testament was written at all.

"Not a shred of the New Testament would have been written"

, without the resurrection, Johnston told Fox News Digital.

Interest in how ancient discoveries intersect with Scripture extends well beyond the shroud. Readers have followed stories ranging from an ancient Egyptian scroll tied to claims about biblical giants to pastors drawing connections between current events and Old Testament prophecy.

The real question

Open questions remain. Independent verification of Johnston's specific scientific claims, the WAXS dating, the pollen analysis, the energy calculations, will matter as the book draws wider attention. Serious claims deserve serious peer review, and Johnston appears to agree.

But the market has already rendered one verdict. Millions of Americans want to hear the case. They want to weigh the artifacts, examine the data, and decide for themselves whether the evidence holds.

In a culture that often tells believers to keep quiet, that impulse is worth more than any bestseller ranking.