How to Evaluate Religious Truth Claims

Every religion tells you something it says is true. Some of its claims are about God, some about how to live, and many are about history: that a prophet received a book, that a people sailed to a new continent, that a crucified man was seen alive after his death. Across religions, many such claims cannot all be true. Anyone who takes religion seriously, believer or skeptic, eventually faces a practical question. How do you weigh these claims without being either gullible or dismissive?

The question matters for Christians in a particular way, because the New Testament does not ask to be exempt from scrutiny. Paul tells the Thessalonians, "Test all things; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21, NKJV), and the Book of Acts praises the Jews of Berea because they "searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so" (Acts 17:11). Peter asks believers to be ready to give "a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15). A faith that speaks like this has invited the questions this article asks.

What follows is a method anyone can use, whatever they currently believe. We apply it to Christianity first, and as strictly as to anyone else, because a method that only finds fault with other people's religion is not a method at all. Where the evidence cannot settle a question, we say so.

In brief

Religious truth claims come in different kinds, and each kind is tested differently. Historical claims, such as the resurrection of Jesus, the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon or the perfect preservation of the Qur’an, can be examined with the ordinary tools of history: early and independent sources, attention to details an author would not invent, and fit with archaeology and known facts. Those tools give probabilities, not certainties, and they have real limits. Beyond history, a worldview can be tested for internal coherence, for how much of reality it explains and for how well it fits our moral and existential experience. Claims of miracles deserve close scrutiny, but David Hume's famous argument against believing testimony to miracles has been sharply criticized, including by the non-Christian philosopher John Earman. Personal spiritual experience can be real and important, yet it cannot settle public historical questions when sincere people report experiences that point in opposite directions. Fairness means using one standard for every faith, including our own. The Orthodox Christian tradition adds that knowing God also involves purification of the heart and prayer, so evidence and the life of faith work together rather than one replacing the other.

Thesis: Religious claims can and should be weighed by one fair set of tests, and Christianity, which stakes itself on a public historical event, asks to be tested that way, while the Church also teaches that the full knowledge of God is received by a heart being healed.

First, sort the claims

Much confusion comes from treating different kinds of religious claims as if they were the same. Four groups are worth separating.

• Historical claims concern events in space and time, such as a crucifixion in Jerusalem or a migration across an ocean.
• Textual claims concern documents: who wrote them, when, and whether they have been altered.
• Doctrinal claims concern God and the nature of reality. No excavation can confirm them directly; they are weighed by coherence, by explanatory power and by their link to the historical claims that support them.
• Experiential claims concern what a person has encountered, such as a sense of God's presence. They matter to the person but are the hardest to share.

Christianity places unusual weight on the first group. Paul writes that "if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty," and adds, "your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!" (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17, NKJV). If the resurrection did not happen, he says, the apostles "are found false witnesses of God" (15:15). The faith can therefore, in principle, be wrong in a way that historical evidence could expose. We count that a strength, and it is why we give the evidence careful attention in The Historical Case for the Resurrection.

It also means being honest about what history cannot reach. No historian can verify that Christ is, as the Creed says, "of one essence with the Father," or that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. Those are matters of revelation received in the Church. What history can test is whether the events on which the Church's confession rests are credible.

The historian's tools, and their limits

Early and independent sources

A historian first asks how close a source stands to the events and whether it depends on other sources. Earlier is usually better, because legend has less time to grow, and two accounts that did not copy each other give two lines of evidence instead of one. In 1 Corinthians, Paul passes on a tradition he says he "received" and "delivered" (15:3), listing appearances of the risen Christ to Cephas, to the Twelve, to "over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present," to James, to all the apostles and finally to Paul himself (15:5-8). Scholars disagree about exactly how early that tradition is. In a 2006 debate, William Lane Craig said that most scholars date it to within five years of the crucifixion. Bart Ehrman objected that Paul "was writing 25 years later," and Craig answered that the point concerns the older tradition Paul quotes, not the date of his letter.¹ Even on the date of the letter itself, Paul wrote while, as he points out, many who claimed to have seen the risen Christ were still alive (15:6). Ehrman holds that the Gospels were written "35 to 65 years after Jesus' death" by people who were not eyewitnesses; Christian scholars such as Richard Bauckham argue that they stand much closer to eyewitness testimony.

Embarrassment and multiple attestation

The criterion of embarrassment notes that an author is unlikely to invent something that makes his own side look bad. The report that Jesus was baptized by John (Mark 1:9), which could suggest that John was the greater figure, is the kind of detail it highlights. Multiple attestation notes that an event reported in several independent sources, or in different kinds of material, is more likely to be historical than one reported once.

These tools are useful, but they are not machines. A 2012 collection of essays edited by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne argued that the traditional "criteria of authenticity" in Jesus research should be abandoned or substantially reworked.² The fair conclusion is modest: such criteria raise or lower probabilities, but they cannot by themselves prove a saying authentic or show that a passage is invented.

Testing our own house: the census of Quirinius

A fair method has to be willing to find a problem in its own Scriptures. Luke dates Jesus' birth to a registration that "first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria" (Luke 2:2), and both Luke and Matthew place the birth in the days of King Herod (Luke 1:5; Matthew 2:1). Josephus, however, describes Quirinius coming to Syria "to take an account of their substance" after Herod's son Archelaus was removed, and dates the end of that assessment to "the thirty-seventh year of Caesar's victory over Antony at Actium," around AD 6, roughly a decade after Herod's death.³ A 2018 article in the evangelical journal Tyndale Bulletin opens by acknowledging that Luke's link between the birth and Quirinius' census "is widely regarded as problematic," then surveys proposed solutions and offers its own.⁴ {{debated: Whether Luke's census can be reconciled with Josephus' date for Quirinius remains open; harmonizations have been proposed, but none commands general agreement.}}

The difficulty does not touch the crucifixion or the resurrection, and a mistaken date in a birth narrative would not by itself make the rest of Luke unreliable. But it should not be hidden. We discuss how to handle such difficulties in Does the Bible Contradict Itself?

Internal coherence

A second test asks whether a set of beliefs hangs together. If a religion's central teachings contradict one another, at least one must be false. Critics often aim this test at the Trinity: how can God be one and three?

The fair answer distinguishes a mystery from a contradiction. A contradiction asserts that something is and is not the case in the same respect. A mystery exceeds our understanding without asserting nonsense. The Church does not confess one God and three Gods, or one Person and three Persons. It confesses one divine essence in three Persons, with the Father as the one source of the Son and the Spirit. A critic may still find this unconvincing, but the debate is about whether the distinction holds, not a simple case of self-contradiction. Other faiths deserve the same courtesy of being judged on their own terms.

Fit with known facts: archaeology and anachronism

A third test asks whether a text fits what we know about the world it describes. Details of geography, names, customs and technology are hard to fake across many pages, and an anachronism (something placed in a period where it does not belong) is a warning sign. Here are three brief examples, held to the same standard.

The Gospels

The Gospels mention many real places, rulers and customs of first-century Palestine. A more specific argument comes from Richard Bauckham, who argued in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that the popularity of personal names in the Gospels and Acts closely matches name frequencies among Palestinian Jews of the period, a pattern writers far from the setting would struggle to reproduce.⁵ In 2023 Kamil Gregor and Brian Blais tested this statistically and concluded that Bauckham's thesis "offers no advantage" over a model of anonymous community transmission. Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson replied in 2024 that the critique rests on "improper testing and questionable data selection."⁶ {{debated: Whether the pattern of personal names in the Gospels and Acts is positive evidence of eyewitness tradition is now actively disputed.}}

The Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon presents itself as an ancient record of peoples who migrated from the Near East to the Americas. That is a historical claim, and Latter-day Saint scholars have rightly treated it as one. In 1973 the Yale anthropologist Michael Coe, writing as "a sympathetic and interested outsider" in an independent journal of Latter-day Saint thought, noted that the book mentions the horse, the chariot, wheat, barley and metallurgy, and concluded that its picture of the ancient Americas "has little to do with the early Indian cultures as we know them."⁷ Latter-day Saint scholars have answered particular items (John Sorenson, for example, suggested that "horse" might have named a native animal such as a deer) and have proposed various settings for the book's events. The Church takes no official position on its geography beyond saying the events occurred in the Americas. The Church's essay on DNA research argues that the book "does not claim that the peoples it describes were either the predominant or the exclusive inhabitants of the lands they occupied," and concludes that "DNA studies cannot be used decisively to either affirm or reject the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon."⁸

A Latter-day Saint may fairly reply that absence of evidence is weaker than positive counter-evidence, and that archaeology of the ancient Americas is far from complete. That is true. But a record of large civilizations with cities, wars and metalwork leads us to expect some trace, and the longer that trace fails to appear, the more its absence weighs. We apply the same reasoning to biblical history, which is why our ratings mark some biblical events as debated.

The Qur’an

Many Muslims understand the promise "Indeed, it is We who sent down the message [i.e., the Qur’ān], and indeed, We will be its guardian" (Qur’an 15:9, Saheeh International) to mean that the text has been preserved without change. The evidence is mixed. Radiocarbon analysis of two leaves held at the University of Birmingham dated the parchment "to the period between AD 568 and 645 with 95.4% accuracy."⁹ {{strong: Some surviving Qur’an manuscripts are written on parchment that radiocarbon dating places in or near the lifetime of Muhammad, which supports the early existence of much of the text.}} Yet the hadith collection of al-Bukhari reports that the caliph Uthman had copies made, sent one to each province, and "ordered that all the other Qur’anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt."¹⁰ Muslims commonly see this response to disputes over recitation as preservation, not alteration. {{very-strong: Islamic tradition itself records an official standardization of the Qur’an's text under the caliph Uthman.}} And the lower writing of the Sana'a palimpsest is, in the words of the Oxford scholar Nicolai Sinai, "our only material witness to a non-standard recension" of the Qur’an's consonantal text: recognizably the Qur’an, yet with frequent differences.¹¹

The fair conclusion, developed in Has the Qur’an Been Perfectly Preserved?, is that the evidence supports early and substantial stability, but not the strongest popular claim that no variation ever existed. We must apply the same standard to ourselves. The New Testament also has many textual variants, and Orthodox Christians do not claim that every manuscript is letter-for-letter identical. Each tradition should be tested by what it actually claims.

Explanatory scope

A fourth test asks which explanation accounts for the most evidence with the fewest special assumptions. In the 2006 debate, Craig set out four facts he believed most scholars accept: Jesus' burial, the discovery of the empty tomb, the appearances, and the disciples' sudden belief that Jesus was risen.¹² Ehrman argued that the Gospel sources behind that list are not historically reliable and offered an alternative story about the tomb, adding candidly, "I don't believe this. I don't think it happened this way," while insisting it was still more probable than a miracle.

The exchange shows the test's limit. Explanatory scope compares hypotheses well only when both sides agree on the evidence and on what counts as a plausible cause. Where they disagree about whether God exists and might act, the dispute moves to prior probability, discussed below.

Moral and existential fit

A fifth test is less precise but still real. Does a faith make sense of conscience, love, guilt, suffering and the longing for meaning? Does its picture of God match what the best human moral insight recognizes as good? Christians have long found that the Gospel takes sin and death seriously and offers healing rather than denial. But this test should not be overstated. Every major tradition offers some account of meaning, and existential fit can make a claim worth investigating without showing that a revelation is true.

Testimony and miracles: Hume and his critics

The classic skeptical case against believing reported miracles is David Hume's essay "Of Miracles" (1748). Hume starts from a principle almost everyone accepts: "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." He then argues that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish."¹³ He adds that the miracles of rival religions cancel each other out, since "in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary."

Hume's essay has drawn heavy criticism, though it still has defenders. One of the sharpest modern critiques came from John Earman, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh, who wrote, "I contend that 'Of Miracles' is an abject failure."¹⁴ Earman is not defending Christianity; he says he finds "nothing attractive, either intellectually or emotionally, in the theological doctrines of Christianity." His main objection is that Hume largely ignored the probability theory being developed by his contemporaries Thomas Bayes and Richard Price. Using that theory, Earman shows that enough genuinely independent witnesses, each only minimally reliable, can in principle make even a very improbable event credible.¹⁵ The catch is real independence, which is hard to establish for ancient testimony. Earman also grants a point that cuts against easy apologetics: whether miracles confirm a particular form of theism "depends on the prior probabilities assigned to this and to the alternative forms of theism."¹⁶

Hume himself conceded more than is often remembered. He allowed that some violations of the usual course of nature might "admit of proof from human testimony," using the hypothetical example of eight days of worldwide darkness. His real target was narrower: he denied that a miracle could be proved "so as to be the foundation of a system of religion."¹⁷

A related argument comes from historians. Ehrman put it this way: "Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, and by definition a miracle is the least probable occurrence."¹⁸ He is right that history deals in probabilities and that a historian working only with natural causes cannot conclude that God acted. But the probability that matters is not how often such events happen in general; it is how probable the event is given all the evidence, including any reasons for thinking God exists. History can establish facts such as the burial and the disciples' experiences with varying confidence, while the step from those facts to "God raised Jesus" also depends on one's wider view of reality. We take up the philosophical side in Can Miracles Really Happen?

Probability reasoning, simply explained

Much of this comes down to a way of thinking about evidence named after Thomas Bayes. It has three parts, none needing mathematics. The prior is how plausible a claim is before we consider this particular evidence, given everything else we know. The likelihood compares how strongly we would expect this evidence if the claim were true with how strongly we would expect it if the claim were false. Combining the two gives the posterior: how plausible the claim is afterwards.

Suppose a friend says she saw a fox in her garden. The prior is fairly high, and her report makes it higher. If she says she saw a tiger, one report will not move you far, but a photograph, a zoo's announcement of an escape and police reports together would. Extraordinary claims need strong evidence, but strong evidence is possible, especially when independent lines point the same way.

Two cautions keep this honest. The numbers attached to such questions are often guesses, so the main value of this reasoning is that it forces us to state our assumptions. And the prior for a miracle depends heavily on whether God exists. Someone confident there is no God will give the resurrection a prior so low that almost no evidence could move it, which is why the arguments for God and the historical evidence belong together.

The limits of subjective spiritual witness

Many believers ground their faith less in arguments than in an experience of God. The best-known statement of this in Latter-day Saint teaching is Moroni's promise: "I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost" (Moroni 10:4). Latter-day Saint teaching does not reduce this to a passing emotion. A revelation to Oliver Cowdery says, "you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right" (Doctrine and Covenants 9:8).¹⁹

The difficulty is not that such experiences are unreal. It is that sincere people in many traditions report experiences that seem to confirm contradictory things. A Latter-day Saint may sense that the Book of Mormon is true, a Muslim that the Qur’an is the final revelation, a Christian that Jesus is Lord and God. If experience alone is the test, there is no way to decide between them, as we explore in Can a Spiritual Witness Prove the Book of Mormon Is True?

Fairness requires us to admit that this is not only a Latter-day Saint problem. The evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig teaches that "the fundamental way in which we know our faith to be true is through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit," while holding that arguments and evidence are how we show its truth to others.²⁰ Scripture does speak of the Spirit bearing witness "with our spirit that we are children of God" (Romans 8:16). It also says, "do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1). An inner witness can be precious, yet it cannot by itself settle whether Nephite cities existed or a tomb was empty. Such questions must face public evidence, as the Bereans understood; see The Berean Test.

Avoiding double standards: the outsider test

The former minister and atheist author John Loftus has built his best-known argument around double standards. His "Outsider Test for Faith" asks believers to examine their own religion with the skepticism they bring to others, summed up in the publisher's description of his book as "Do unto your own faith what you do to other faiths."²¹ His argument starts from a real observation: most people hold the religion of the culture they grew up in, which suggests that upbringing often decides what we believe.

Christians should accept the heart of this challenge, and this article has tried to: we should not excuse in the Gospels what we criticize in other scriptures. But critics have pointed out weaknesses in the stronger forms of the test. The Christian philosopher Thomas Talbott argues that a belief's cultural origin says little about whether a particular person now holds it for good reasons, just as learning in childhood that the earth is round does not make that belief irrational. He concludes that once an inconsistency in Loftus' approach is removed, the test is "relatively trivial."²² There is also the question of where the "outsider" stands. A secular naturalist is an insider to a worldview too, and a consistent test would apply the same skepticism to naturalism. Applied evenly in every direction, it becomes what this article proposes: one fair standard for everyone.

Knowing God: evidence and the purified heart

So far we have treated religious claims as an outsider would, which suits public discussion. But the Orthodox tradition adds something an honest account should include. God is not an object in the world like a buried city. He is a living Person, and persons are known through relationship.

When Nathanael doubted that anything good could come out of Nazareth, Philip did not hand him an argument. He said, "Come and see" (John 1:46). Christ gave a test that involves the will as well as the mind: "If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God" (John 7:17). Paul urges, "be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God" (Romans 12:2). The Greek word for "mind" there is nous, and "prove" translates the same verb (dokimazō) as "Test all things" in 1 Thessalonians 5:21. Testing and transformation belong together.

Orthodox spiritual writers use nous for the spiritual intellect, the faculty by which a person can perceive God directly, as distinct from step-by-step reasoning. It is darkened by sin and healed through repentance, prayer and the life of the Church, and Christ's words "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8) are read in this light. The Fathers said the same. St Gregory the Theologian taught that philosophizing about God belongs to those "who have been previously purified in soul and body, or at the very least are being purified."²³ St Athanasius closed On the Incarnation by saying that "for the searching of the Scriptures and true knowledge of them, an honourable life is needed, and a pure soul."²⁴ In the twentieth century Vladimir Lossky argued that the Eastern tradition has never sharply separated theology from the experience of God.²⁵

St Justin Martyr's conversion shows how the two fit together. Justin, a philosopher who had tried several schools, met an old man who pointed him to the Hebrew prophets and their fulfilled words, and then told him, "But pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to you; for these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and His Christ have imparted wisdom." Justin writes that "straightway a flame was kindled in my soul."²⁶ Evidence opened the door, and prayer led him through it.

Two cautions are needed. This teaching must never become an accusation that anyone who doubts is impure, and it is not the same as letting a feeling judge a historical claim. The Orthodox path of purification unfolds over a lifetime within the Church, tested by Scripture and the Fathers, and it stands alongside the public evidence rather than replacing it. As the Psalm puts it in the Church's Greek Old Testament, "Taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8; Psalm 33 in the Septuagint, Brenton).

Objections and responses

"This method is tilted toward Christianity."

A skeptic might say a Christian author will always find the tests favoring his own faith. The best answer is to show the work. This article has conceded a real difficulty in Luke's dating, noted that a popular argument from Gospel names is now disputed, granted that history alone cannot prove that God raised Jesus, and admitted that Christians also lean on inner experience. Our evidence ratings and editorial standards exist so that readers can check whether one standard has been kept.

"Faith should not depend on historians."

Some believers worry that tying faith to evidence makes it hostage to scholarly fashion. Saving faith is indeed trust in a Person, not a percentage. But Christianity was born as a historical religion, and Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15 make the resurrection a matter of fact or falsehood. The Church does not ask believers to wait for scholars, but neither does it ask anyone to believe what the evidence shows to be false.

"Hume was right; testimony can never establish a miracle."

A defender of Hume can argue that uniform experience of nature will always outweigh testimony. But strong, independent testimony can outweigh a low prior, as Hume himself conceded for some cases. The real disagreement is about priors and whether there is a God who might act, which Hume's essay does not settle.

"Muslims mean something different by preservation."

A Muslim reader may answer that preservation refers above all to the recited Qur’an, and that the tradition itself speaks of variation in recitation. Al-Bukhari reports Muhammad saying, "This Qur’an has been revealed to be recited in seven different ways, so recite of it whichever (way) is easier for you."²⁷ That is a narrower claim than the popular one that every copy has always been identical, and a claim stated in that form should be evaluated in that form.

What we can say confidently

• Historical, textual, doctrinal and experiential claims call for different tests.
• Christianity stakes itself on a historical event, the resurrection, and its earliest writings invite testing (1 Corinthians 15:14-17; 1 Thessalonians 5:21).
• The historian's criteria are useful, but they yield probabilities, not proofs.
• Hume's argument against believing testimony to miracles has been seriously criticized, including by the non-Christian philosopher John Earman.
• Personal spiritual experience cannot by itself settle public historical questions, for Christians as for others.
• Early manuscripts support the early existence of much of the Qur’an's text, and Islamic tradition itself records an official standardization under Uthman.
• A fair method uses one set of standards for every faith, including one's own.

What remains disputed

• Exactly how early the resurrection tradition in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 should be dated, and how close the Gospels stand to eyewitnesses.
• Whether Luke's census under Quirinius can be reconciled with Josephus.
• Whether the pattern of names in the Gospels and Acts is real evidence of eyewitness tradition.
• How much weight the lack of archaeological confirmation should carry against the Book of Mormon, and how Latter-day Saint proposals about its setting should be judged.
• What "preservation" of the Qur’an should mean, and how the Sana'a palimpsest fits the history of its text.
• How to assign prior probabilities to miracles, which depends on wider questions about God that history alone cannot decide.

Conclusion

The Orthodox Church has never been afraid of questions. In the words of the Creed, it confesses that the Son of God, "begotten of the Father before all ages," was "crucified for us under Pontius Pilate," and that "the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures" (in the translation of the Orthodox Church in America). Those words tie the faith to a time, a place and a public event. That is why Christians can welcome fair testing, applied to themselves as strictly as to others, and can say plainly where the evidence is strong, where it is mixed and where it cannot reach.

Yet the Church also knows that God is not finally found at the end of an argument. He is the One who seeks us first. Evidence can show that the Christian claim is reasonable and worth taking seriously. The rest is Philip's invitation to Nathanael: to come and see, to pray and repent, to receive the sacraments and stand in the Liturgy among the faithful, and to let Christ, who trampled down death by death, heal the eye of the heart so that it can see Him. Evidence and the life of faith are not rivals. They are two ways the same truth reaches the whole person.

Notes

1. William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman, "Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?" debate transcript, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 28, 2006. Craig (opening statement): Paul "cites an extremely early source for Jesus' burial which most scholars date to within five years of Jesus' crucifixion." Ehrman (first rebuttal): "Paul wasn't writing five years after the burial; he was writing 25 years later." Craig (second rebuttal): Paul "is quoting an ancient Christian tradition which he himself received." Ehrman (opening statement): the Gospels "were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus' death." For Bauckham, see note 5. ↩
2. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, eds., Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2012). The volume examines multiple attestation, embarrassment, dissimilarity, coherence and other criteria. ↩
3. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.1.1 and 18.2.1, trans. William Whiston. For Herod's death "in around 4 BC" and the census date of AD 6, see the article in note 4. ↩
4. David J. Armitage, "Detaching the Census: An Alternative Reading of Luke 2:1-7," Tyndale Bulletin 69, no. 1 (2018): 75-95, at 75, doi:10.53751/001c.27652. Armitage surveys proposals for an earlier census or an earlier governorship of Quirinius before offering his own reading. ↩
5. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006; 2nd ed. 2017). ↩
6. Kamil Gregor and Brian S. Blais, "Is Name Popularity a Good Test of Historicity? A Statistical Evaluation of Richard Bauckham's Onomastic Argument," Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 21, no. 3 (2023): 171-202, doi:10.1163/17455197-bja10023; Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson, "Why Name Popularity is a Good Test of Historicity: A Goodness-of-Fit Test Analysis on Names in the Gospels and Acts," Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 22, no. 2 (2024): 184-214, doi:10.1163/17455197-bja10035. The quoted words are from its abstract. ↩
7. Michael D. Coe, "Mormons and Archaeology: An Outside View," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 2 (1973): 40-48, at 42 and 46. For a Latter-day Saint reply on one item, see John L. Sorenson, "Once More: The Horse," in John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1992), 98-100. ↩
8. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies," Gospel Topics Essays, churchofjesuschrist.org. The statement on geography is in the essay's footnotes. The essay also notes that the 2006 introduction to the Book of Mormon replaced the earlier wording "principal ancestors" with "among the ancestors of the American Indians." ↩
9. University of Birmingham, "Birmingham Qur’an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world," news release, July 22, 2015. The test was carried out at a University of Oxford laboratory. Radiocarbon dating dates the parchment, not the moment of writing. ↩
10. Sahih al-Bukhari 4987 (Book 66, Hadith 9), trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, sunnah.com. ↩
11. Nicolai Sinai, "When Did the Consonantal Skeleton of the Quran Reach Closure? Part I," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 77, no. 2 (2014): 273-292, doi:10.1017/S0041977X1400010X. Sinai is summarizing the edition of the palimpsest's lower text by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi (Der Islam 87, 2012). His article argues that the evidence he examines is compatible with the conventional early dating of the Qur’an's text. ↩
12. Craig and Ehrman, debate transcript (note 1). ↩
13. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first published 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding; text of the 1777 edition), section X, "Of Miracles," paras. 87 and 91, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Project Gutenberg ebook 9662). The "whatever is different is contrary" passage is para. 95. ↩
14. John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), opening section of Part I, "Hume on Miracles." The statement about Christian doctrine is from the Preface. ↩
15. Earman, Hume's Abject Failure, 54-56, building on the analysis of multiple witnesses by Charles Babbage and others. ↩
16. Earman, Hume's Abject Failure, 66. ↩
17. Hume, Enquiry, section X, para. 99. ↩
18. Craig and Ehrman, debate transcript (note 1), Ehrman's opening statement. ↩
19. Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:3-5; Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-9, churchofjesuschrist.org. ↩
20. William Lane Craig, "Excursus on Natural Theology (Part 2): The Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit," Defenders Podcast, Series 3, August 26, 2015, transcript, reasonablefaith.org. Craig adds that evidence and arguments "might be used to support the believer's faith or to confirm the believer's faith," but "they are not properly the basis of that faith." ↩
21. John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013); the quoted line is from the publisher's description of the book. ↩
22. Thomas Talbott, "The Outsider Test for Faith: How Serious a Challenge Is It?" essay posted on the author's Willamette University faculty page. Talbott responds to Loftus' chapter "The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited," in John W. Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010). ↩
23. St Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian), Oration 27 (First Theological Oration), 3, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7, as revised for New Advent. ↩
24. St Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 57, trans. Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 4, as revised for New Advent. ↩
25. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (James Clarke & Co.; French original 1944). Summarized, not quoted; the publisher's description speaks of "doctrine and experience mutually conditioning each other." ↩
26. St Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 2 and 7-8, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, as revised for New Advent. ↩
27. Sahih al-Bukhari 4992, trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, sunnah.com (chapter heading: "The Qur’an was revealed to be recited in seven different ways"). ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Holy Scripture. New Testament quoted from The Holy Bible, New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982); the Psalm quoted from Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1851), public domain text via eBible.org.
• The Symbol of Faith (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). Translation of the Orthodox Church in America, oca.org.
• Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first published 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding). Text of the 1777 edition, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894. Project Gutenberg ebook 9662.
• Josephus, Flavius. Antiquities of the Jews. Translated by William Whiston. Project Gutenberg ebook 2848.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation of the Word. Translated by Archibald Robertson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 4. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1892. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 27. Translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. James Clarke & Co., 1991 edition (English translation first published 1957). ISBN 978-0-227-67919-7. French original: Essai sur la théologie mystique de l'Église d'Orient, 1944.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Armitage, David J. "Detaching the Census: An Alternative Reading of Luke 2:1-7." Tyndale Bulletin 69, no. 1 (2018): 75-95. doi:10.53751/001c.27652.
• Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006; 2nd ed. 2017.
• Coe, Michael D. "Mormons and Archaeology: An Outside View." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 2 (1973): 40-48.
• Craig, William Lane. "Excursus on Natural Theology (Part 2): The Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit." Defenders Podcast, Series 3, August 26, 2015. Transcript at reasonablefaith.org.
• Earman, John. Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Gregor, Kamil, and Brian S. Blais. "Is Name Popularity a Good Test of Historicity? A Statistical Evaluation of Richard Bauckham's Onomastic Argument." Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 21, no. 3 (2023): 171-202. doi:10.1163/17455197-bja10023.
• Keith, Chris, and Anthony Le Donne, eds. Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2012.
• Sinai, Nicolai. "When Did the Consonantal Skeleton of the Quran Reach Closure? Part I." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 77, no. 2 (2014): 273-292. doi:10.1017/S0041977X1400010X.
• Talbott, Thomas. "The Outsider Test for Faith: How Serious a Challenge Is It?" Essay, Willamette University faculty page, n.d.
• University of Birmingham. "Birmingham Qur’an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world." News release, July 22, 2015.
• van de Weghe, Luuk, and Jason Wilson. "Why Name Popularity is a Good Test of Historicity: A Goodness-of-Fit Test Analysis on Names in the Gospels and Acts." Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 22, no. 2 (2024): 184-214. doi:10.1163/17455197-bja10035.

Sources from the traditions discussed (Latter-day Saint, Islamic, skeptical)

• The Book of Mormon (Moroni 10) and Doctrine and Covenants (section 9). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies." Gospel Topics Essays. churchofjesuschrist.org.
• Sorenson, John L. "Once More: The Horse." In Reexploring the Book of Mormon, edited by John W. Welch, 98-100. Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1992.
• The Qur’an. Saheeh International translation. quran.com.
• al-Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismail. Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 4987 and 4992. Translated by Muhammad Muhsin Khan. sunnah.com.
• Loftus, John W. The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013.
• Craig, William Lane, and Bart D. Ehrman. "Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?" Debate transcript. College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 28, 2006.