The reason I find the Hadrian argument persuasive is because if it is true that Hadrian not only destroyed Jerusalem even harder than Titus did in AD 70, but also exiled the lot of them (rather than put every last one of them to death, which is the only other option when you're dealing with people who can't help themselves), then it's even more important an event in history confirming the Bible.
What does it mean when the land prophesied about in the Old Testament, once called Judea, is desolate of Judeans? That's what Hadrian did. Dr. Johnston said Hadrian is the one who renamed the place Palestine. Turns out Wikipedia agrees. I'm not using Wikipedia as a primary source, I'm using it to confirm what an authentic expert on the matter claims.
That's the only reason we call it Palestine today rather than Judea. Judeans were driven out of Judea by Hadrian, because those folks could not help themselves, and he didn't want to put every last one of them, man, woman and child to the sword, because hopefully he didn't have to be so brutal. So instead he just seized all the farmland in and around Jerusalem ... and then everybody just left because it's not like you can go for very long without a steady food source, and if Rome occupied all the farmland in the area, there was no way to get steady food anymore. It was just a practical thing to all leave. So everybody left. Now Jerusalem and the surrounding area was desolate.
The temple was already leveled (the temple mount like today was desolate). And then all the Judeans left Jerusalem high and dry (it was desolate of people).
The Hadrian argument is that Hadrian's army found out that the place where Christ was crucified and buried was a shrine of sorts, and he didn't discriminate much between the Judeans who practiced Old Covenant rabbinical Judaism versus Christianity, neither of them having a temple like all the other people had temples to their deities, these Judeans did not have a temple—Christians or non-Christians, but they did have this shrine type thing going on where Jesus was crucified and buried. So he knocked down whatever was there, and built over it, to make sure that nobody came back, with temples to pagan gods.
These temples stood, and why wouldn't they, until Constantine's mother learned the (true) legend (meaning oral tradition that is accurate as opposed to a fable) that these temples were built on Christian shrine sites. It was like they were markers, X marks the spot. They were just permanent labels that they were the sites of the crucifixion and the empty tomb.
So Constantine's army knocked over these pagan temples, and dug down to recover whatever was left of the original sites before Hadrian's army demolished them. And that's the church of the Holy Sepulcher.
That's a persuasive argument. You need a defeater that can stand up to scrutiny, unlike that for example, the church is inside the city rather than outside, because it's shown that it WAS outside the city of Jerusalem in c. AD 33, it became inside the city later. That's a defeated defeater, and as far as I know, all proposed defeaters of the Hadrian argument are defeated also. Which means unless an invincible defeater exists, that we don't know about, it stands to reason that it must be true.
obv it might be false, and I and Dr. Johnston might be wrong, I just find it to be a strong argument.