How the argument is made

The question is not whether scripture is true. It is whether its people can be found once the dates are allowed to move. Each book takes a person in the text, places that person on a known event, and argues that they are the same individual. The next book starts from that identification.

The starting point is a historian, not a doctrine. Josephus had already joined the Exodus to the Hyksos. The gospel books move the other way, out of the thirties and into the Revolt of the sixties. One similar name is not enough. The case is the same office, the same family, the same city, and the same part in the same war.

When a name is missing from the page where it was expected, the other record of the same events is compared, to see whether the person is there under another title. Later legend, Arthur and the Grail, is read as a memory of that person. The chain is meant to end on something that can still be visited: a citadel, a coin, a portrait. The sources named are the New Testament, the Tanakh, the Talmud, Josephus, the Roman historians, and the Syriac historians.