One of Christianity’s strongest claims about the character of God is also one of its most comforting: God does not lie. If human beings are unreliable, confused, self-interested, and capable of deception, God is supposed to represent something fundamentally different. Christians are encouraged to trust God’s promises precisely because God is understood as perfectly truthful. The idea...
Christianity makes one of the largest claims a religion can make: there is one true God, Jesus uniquely reveals that God, and reconciliation with God ultimately comes through him. For many Christians, this conclusion feels less like a hypothesis than an established fact. They may point to the Bible, the resurrection, fulfilled prophecy, personal experiences of Jesus, answered prayer, the growth...
There are at least three very different claims hidden inside the question of whether Jesus was who Christianity says he was. The first is that Jesus of Nazareth existed. The second is that his followers believed extraordinary things about him, including that he performed miracles and appeared to them after his death. The third is that those supernatural events actually happened. These claims...
One of the most familiar claims in Christianity is that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. Depending on which Christian source you encounter, you may hear that Jesus fulfilled dozens, hundreds, or even more predictions concerning the coming Messiah. For believers, these apparent fulfillments can seem like powerful evidence. If texts written centuries before Jesus accurately...
Why Historians Separate Evidence from Belief One of the most persuasive arguments for many Christians is also one of the simplest: “The Bible says it is the Word of God, therefore it is the Word of God.” For someone who already accepts the Bible’s authority, this reasoning may feel entirely satisfying. Yet outside that framework, it raises an important question. Can any book...
One of the most common arguments for the truth of Christianity is surprisingly simple: How could billions of people be wrong? The reasoning feels intuitive. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, with more than two billion adherents. The Bible has been translated into thousands of languages, printed more than any other book in history, and continues to influence cultures around the...
And Why That Still Shapes Christianity, Authority, and Control This claim sounds provocative only because we’ve been trained not to examine it. Most of what modern Christianity believes, practices, and enforces comes from Paul, not Jesus. That doesn’t make Paul a villain.But it does make him decisive. And once you see the distinction clearly, an uncomfortable historical question emerges: How did...
