Some time in the sixth or seventh century BC, by the archaeologist Erika Brown's dating, someone wrote a blessing from the book of Numbers on a small amulet: "The LORD bless thee, and keep thee" (Numbers 6:24). The amulets from Ketef Hinnom are among the oldest physical witnesses to any line of Scripture, and they carry a date. That is the point of starting here. The objects and documents that bear on the Bible's history each sit at a particular moment, and laid end to end they form a record anyone can check.
The record runs from those amulets to a cave above the Dead Sea in 1947, and it passes through specific points along the way. There is a stone naming Pontius Pilate, a burial style that fits one century, and a papyrus scrap from Egypt. There is a floor mosaic laid before Constantine, a fourth-century letter listing books, a printed Greek text from 1516, and a narrative a formerly enslaved man published in 1856. Taken in order, they show where the Bible's claims meet the real world and where the evidence stops.
The work here is to build that record yourself, one dated card at a time, and to learn four skills along the way: reading a find without overselling it, testing whether a text was copied faithfully, weighing the Gospels as testimony, and checking claims about the Bible's own history. Only once the line is complete will you turn to the modern objection it answers. By then you should be able to answer in your own words, with dates you can name and limits you can admit.