Claims
What you may have heard
These are things people sincerely believe about Christianity. Pick the one you have heard, and the page starts with it in your words.
Doubts about God and the Gospels
Claims that Jesus, the Gospels, or God himself don't hold up to scrutiny. About this topic
- “God is hidden”The hiddenness argument assumes love must guarantee belief now. Christianity questions that premise and points to Jesus as God's public answer.
- “Hell is unjust”The Christian doctrine of hell claims proportion, degrees, and a chosen separation from God, which is a different claim from the endless cruelty you may have heard.
- “Jesus never existed”Historians across belief, including the agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman, agree that Jesus lived and was crucified under Pilate. The open question is who he was.
- “Who created God?”The cosmological arguments do not claim that everything needs a cause. They claim that dependent things do, and ask what could end the chain.
Evil, Judgment, and Science
Claims about suffering, hell, miracles, and science. About this topic
- “Evil and suffering disprove God”Suffering is serious evidence against God, not a proof. Christianity does not explain every horror; it claims God entered suffering and will end it.
- “Miracles are impossible”Natural laws describe what nature does when left to itself. They cannot rule out a God who acts, so the real question about miracles is the evidence.
- “Science has disproved Christianity”Science has changed how Christians read some texts, but its methods cannot show that nature is all there is. Christianity's central claim is historical.
Evidence and Reason
How the evidence is weighed, and what counts as a good reason. About this topic
- “Jesus learned his teachings in India”No ancient source puts Jesus in India. The story began with an 1894 book whose cited monastery denied it, and his teaching is rooted in first-century Judaism.
- “The Bible condones slavery”The Bible regulates ancient slavery rather than banning it, but it outlaws kidnapping people to sell them and grounds human worth in a way abolitionists drew on.
- “The Canaanite conquest was genocide”The conquest texts give wrongdoing, not ethnicity, as their reason, and use the exaggerated idiom of ancient war reports. That narrows the charge but leaves hard questions.
Who Jesus Is
Claims about whether Jesus is God, an angel, or a prophet. About this topic
Jehovah's Witness Teaching
Teachings of the Watch Tower Society, read alongside the Bible. About this topic
- “Blood transfusions are forbidden”The Bible's blood commands forbid eating blood out of reverence for life; a transfusion given to save a life is a different act with the opposite purpose.
- “God's Kingdom began ruling in 1914”The 1914 date needs links the Bible does not supply, and Jesus warned against hidden comings and against fixing times the Father keeps to himself.
- “Jesus died on a stake, not a cross”The New Testament never settles the shape of the stauros, hints at a crossbeam, and puts all its weight on Jesus' death rather than on the wood.
- “Jesus is Michael the archangel”The verses used to link Jesus and Michael never identify them, and Hebrews 1 sets the Son apart from every angel, including the archangel.
- “Jesus rose as a spirit creature”Jesus showed his crucifixion wounds, ate, and said a spirit has no flesh and bones; Scripture describes his risen body as changed, not as left behind.
- “John 1:1 says "a god"”The missing article in John 1:1 marks what the Word is, not a lesser god; John separates the Word from all created things and ends with Thomas calling Jesus 'my God.'
- “Only the 144,000 are born again”Jesus makes being born again the way into God's Kingdom for anyone, and the New Testament describes one body with one hope, not two classes of Christians.
- “The Holy Spirit is not a person”The Bible's spirit teaches, speaks for itself, chooses, forbids, and can be lied to and grieved, and it is named with the Father and the Son. A force does not do those things.
- “The New World Translation restores the truth”Judged by its own standard of following the text, the New World Translation bends the verses about Jesus' identity in one direction, while much of it reads fairly.
- “The Trinity is pagan”The word and formula are later, but pagan triads were three gods, and Christians worshiped Jesus two centuries before the councils that defined the Trinity.
- “The Watch Tower organization must be trusted”Scripture commends testing every teacher by God's word, and an organization that calls itself fallible cannot make questioning its teaching a test of loyalty.
Latter-day Saint Teaching
Teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. About this topic
- “A great apostasy made restoration necessary”The New Testament warns of apostasy but promises the gospel will endure, and the apostles' message was preached without a break from the first century on.
- “Families can be together forever through temple sealing”The Bible shares the hope of reunion with those we love, grounds it in Christ by grace, and records Jesus saying resurrection life goes beyond marriage.
- “God was once a man”The Bible and the Book of Mormon both describe God as God from all eternity. The Bible promises likeness to God, not a God who was once a man.
- “Priesthood authority was restored”Hebrews says Christ holds his Melchizedek priesthood forever, without successors, and the Aaronic priesthood was set aside, so access to God rests on him.
- “The Bible lost plain and precious truths”The manuscripts show small, documented copying changes, not an early removal of doctrine, and the Bible already teaches what the Book of Mormon calls plain and precious.
- “The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ”An inward witness cannot settle whether a book is scripture. The Bible's test is whether a message matches the apostles' gospel, even when an angel brings it.
Islam and the Gospel
Claims about Jesus and the Bible often heard from Muslims. About this topic
- “Islam gives assurance through deeds and mercy”Islam grounds hope in mercy, but for ordinary believers it stops short of certainty. Christians ground assurance in what they believe God has already done in Jesus' death.
- “Jesus did not know the day or hour”Mark 13:32 is real and hard, but it targets a belief Christians reject. They teach Jesus was fully human too, and the same passage ranks the Son above the angels.
- “Jesus never claimed to be God”The earliest records show Jesus claiming God's own authority, and his followers worshiping him within decades, long before the Council of Nicaea.
- “Jesus was a Muslim”Jesus submitted wholly to God, but the earliest records show a Jewish teacher who spoke of himself and his death in ways the Qur'an later denies.
- “Jesus was not crucified”Jesus' crucifixion is recorded within years by his followers and later by hostile Roman and Jewish writers; no historical record before the Qur'an says otherwise.
- “Muhammad is the best example”Islam offers Muhammad as a pattern for all ages, which makes his example a fair question. Christians compare him with Jesus, not with modern Western values.
- “Muhammad was foretold in the Bible”Read in context, Moses' promised prophet comes from Israel, and the Advocate Jesus promised is the Holy Spirit, sent to his own disciples soon after Jesus left them.
- “The Bible is corrupted”The manuscripts differ in small ways, but the Gospel Christians held in Muhammad's day, which the Qur'an tells them to judge by, survives and can be read today.
- “The Qur'an is inimitable”The Qur'an's eloquence is real, but beauty is judged by taste and language, not truth. The Christian claim rests instead on a public event open to historical inquiry.
- “The Trinity is shirk”The Trinity is not three gods, but that is not the heart of the charge. The question is whether persons within the one God fit his oneness, and who Jesus is.
Judaism and Jesus
Claims about Jesus and the Messiah often heard from Jewish readers. About this topic
- “Jesus did not bring world peace”The peace the prophets promised has not come, and Christians do not say it has. Their claim concerns the order of events, and it turns on the resurrection.
- “The Messiah cannot die before reigning”The Tanakh and the rabbis both speak of an anointed one who suffers or is killed. The Christian claim joins suffering and reign in one person, and rests on the resurrection.
- “The New Testament misuses the Hebrew Bible”Some citations fail as predictions. Read as the pattern-reading Jewish interpreters also practiced, they make a different claim, one you can test against the Hebrew.
- “The suffering servant is Israel”Isaiah does call Israel his servant. Isaiah 53 describes an innocent individual struck for "my people," who dies and then lives, a profile that strains the national reading.
- “The Torah covenant is everlasting”"New covenant" is Jeremiah's phrase, promised to Israel and Judah with the Torah written on the heart. Christians claim Jesus fulfills it, not that God replaced Israel.
- “The Trinity and incarnation violate monotheism”Christians confess one God, not three. They claim Jesus belongs within the identity of Israel's one God, a claim argued from the Hebrew Bible, not polytheism.
- “The virgin birth mistranslates almah”Almah means a young woman, and the Jewish translation is fair. But "virgin" was a Jewish rendering before Jesus, and the doctrine rests on the Gospels, not one word.