Topic
Evidence and Reason
How historians weigh ancient sources, what philosophy contributes, and where an argument stops.
Claims
- “Constantine changed the Bible”The four Gospels were received long before Constantine, and the records of Nicaea show no vote on the Bible's contents and no removal of books.Read the answer
- “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.Read the answer
- “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.Read the answer
- “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.Read the answer
- “John did not write the Gospel of John”Disputed authorship is not the same as unreliability. John's Gospel claims eyewitness roots, circulated early, and its view of Jesus appears in earlier sources.Read the answer
- “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.Read the answer
- “Reincarnation was removed from the Bible”No manuscript or council record shows reincarnation removed from the Bible. Christians rejected it openly before Constantine, and old manuscripts read like ours.Read the answer
- “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.Read the answer
- “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.Read the answer
Reasons
- Contingency and creationScience explains one state of the world by an earlier one. It cannot say why there is anything to study, and a self-existent ground answers that better than a brute fact.
- Daniel 9 and the Messiah before the Temple's destructionDaniel 9 is difficult and its arithmetic is disputed, but its sequence is clear. An anointed one is cut off, and then the city and sanctuary are destroyed.
- Fine-tuning and ordered creationThe weak popular examples fall away. What remains is the constants and starting conditions of physics, and design is one explanation worth weighing.
- Jesus and messianic prophecyIsolated proof texts do not settle the question. A pattern of suffering and reign runs through Isaiah, Zechariah, Daniel, Micah, and the Psalms.
- Liar, lunatic, or LordJesus taught about himself as well as how to live. If he made those claims, 'only a good teacher' does not fit, and the question is whether they are false, invented, or true.
- Objective morality and GodThis argument does not claim you need God to be good. It asks what makes moral obligation binding and human worth real, and argues that God is the best explanation.
- The crucifixion of JesusPaul's early sources, the movement's beginnings in Jerusalem, hostile Roman and Jewish writers, and the embarrassment of a crucified Messiah all point to a real execution under Pilate.
- The new covenant promised in the prophetsJeremiah, not the church, coined the phrase "new covenant." He promised it to Israel and Judah, with the Torah written on the heart and sin remembered no more.
- The reliability of the New TestamentPaul's letters preserve a summary of belief from within a few years of Jesus' death, the Gospels were written within living memory, and the text can be recovered with confidence.
- The resurrection witnessesThe earliest Christian claim was public testimony from named witnesses, and any explanation of it has to cover the whole set of facts historians accept.