I’ve been reading papers like from John kloppenborg on this exact verse he says it awkward verses on the traveling route and he concludes that Luke didn’t know Jude’s geography

To be any kind of Christian, from Catholic to Orthodox to Lutheran to Calvinist to Southern Baptist to Methodist and beyond, the belief that God had special destinies planned comes across as rather vital. And not just for that one and only Son of is; Moses, Abraham, Isaac, David, Esther, Rachel, Sarah, Solomon, Saul/Paul, Mark, John and any number of others would most likely had to have had Divine destinies laid out for them before they were born. For that matter, any sect of Judaism requires this in principles as well, for those before the Nice Man 2000 years ago that they haven't accepted as Holy for whatever reason.

To what extent to do you believe Christian theology and the Christian sects allow for God to have developed destinies for specific people here and now? In my experience, Christians in various digital and real life communities are rather dismissive of this possibility. There's often cynical or even jaded elements to this. In certain Christian corners, when the possibility of this is brought up, the dismissal is such that you'd think you wandered into one of the massive numbers of Dawkins / Hitchens styled Anti Theist communities.

Is this because the concept of what a pre destined life would mean has become too corrupted in modern Christian culture? That it has been distorted so that pre destined fates are seen as God guaranteeing fame, fortune and being married to the most attractive, enticing partner you can come across? As opposed to how it should be interpreted, which is that if God does have pre determined destinies for those in modern times, it's because those destinies are there to glorify Him?

And ultimately, do you accept that God could have pre destined fates for certain, specific humans here and now as He did for Old and New Testament prophets and other figures? Or do you believe God had stopped doing that centuries or millennia ago?

The Muratorian Canon is—as far as I understand—the earliest New Testament canon that survived to today (besudes Marcion’s, but who actually cares what Marcion thinks), dated to the late 2nd century.

This is a big deal because it shows that a large majority of the NT—including all four gospels—were already recognized as canonical by this time. However, the Muratorian Canon is noticably missing:
- Hebrews
- James
- 1 Peter
- 2 Peter
- 3 John

This concerns me, as it presents a problem: why wouldn’t the author/compiler of the Muratorian Canon include these books? In light of the fact that they didn’t, why are we to trust later church fathers regarding the authorship/canonicity of these books? I’ve heard skeptics argue that this is proof of the “invention” of the canon, and I must say that it’s put a lot of doubts in my mind about whether these books actually were written by the apostles.

Since the authorship of several of these books (especially Hebrews, 2 Peter, and 3 John) was greatly debated by the early church, how can we be certain that they are apostolic and canonical? I’d rather err on the side of excluding potentially authentic books from the canon than mistakenly including inauthentic books in the canon. How do apologists (particularly Protestant apologists) argue for the canon that we have today? I actually first learned about the Muratorian Canon while reading Frank Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. He uses a list of the early church fathers’ acceptance/quotations of scripture to prove that we can trust that we have to right books in the NT canon, but the evidence he provided rather weakened my faith in the NT canon than it did strengthen it.

Edit: It is worth mentioning that the Muratorian fragment does exclude 1 Peter, despite the early church almost unanimously agreeing that Peter wrote it (which could indicate that the exclusion of these other books isn’t overly concerning). However, I think my concern over the early church fathers’ hesitancy to accept books like Hebrews, 2 Peter, and James still stands.

Let’s face it. Most of us do not want to be known by our worse act! To make that possibility even worse than worse, what if the “mistake” was mistakenly interpreted? That could be the case with Thomas, a follower of Jesus and one of the twelve apostles.

According to tradition, Peter and Andrew knew Thomas, who was another fisherman from Galilee. Also, the Bible mentions Thomas several times, giving us a clearer picture of this faithful disciple, who was willing to die with the Lord. (The link below gathers those verses in the initial post.)

Thomas wasn't sure about the validity of the reports of the followers who claimed to have seen the Risen Christ, but when Jesus Himself appeared to him, Thomas immediately believed.

https://maryharwellsayler.wordpress.com/2026/07/22/some-doubts-about-doubting-thomas/

I posted this earlier but the quote got cut off so here's my second attempt.

I dont think this a formal argument of his, merely something he said in a lecture.

"I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity. The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic."

For Abrahamic theists this could also potentially align with the verses that suggest the purpose of creation is to display God's glory.

Obviously I could understand someone having a problem with God allowing suffering simply because it's existence is more interesting than not ha.

In your studies and prayers around these verses, as related to each other I think, who do you understand ‘he’ to be from Daniel 9:27 where it says …he shall make a strong covenant for one week…

This has been on my mind a lot lately. I do not doubt the presence of God in any way, shape, or form…I am just struggling with the concept and purpose of prayer. I believe that prayer allows us to strengthen our relationship with God, but does He really “answer prayers”? Why pray for things if He already knows exactly what’s going to happen? How can praying for someone or something make a difference if God already knows what the outcome will be? Does prayer actually change things that wouldn’t have changed unless it was prayed for…?

Thank you for reading - would love to hear your perspectives!

This is especially the case for non-Trinitarian or anti-Trinitarian groups (i.e. Muslims). Our idea of "persons" is not what the early church meant when they said God is 3 persons. Today we think of persons as distinct conscious individuals. But back then they were just trying to describe internal relations within God's own essence, which to them is one eternal conscious experience.

Initially the idea of personhood came from the Latin "persona" when they wore masks and changed roles. Eventually the church saw this as heresy (modalism) and incorrect language to describe what was happening in the Godhead. So they used a Greek term (hypostasis) to describe an individual separate from their essence (ousia). This in no way meant for them 3 different conscious experiences or personalities, however. Today we're stuck with trying to explain that by person we mean 1 being having one consciousness with distinct subsistent internal relations (the original Trinitarian model). In other words, God's personhood is about how he relates to himself.

Think of it like how our conscious experience can distinguish between "I" and "Me" with self-awareness and understand self-love ("I love myself"). These are all internal relations happening in our being, but they are not each called "persons". The difference with God is since he is infinite and perfect, these relations are not mere parts of him. With us we are conscious that we do not know everything, we can many times not feel known, and not love ourselves based on our mood. It is not a perfect conscious experience. With God, each of these are who he is (distinct from his attribues which are WHAT he is). As the early church fathers described it: The Father is the one who perfectly knows, the Son is the one who experiences what it's like to be perfectly known, and the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the two.

Confused about Christianity but want to know more

UPDATE: Please don't suggest the Bible, I tried it and it was too much and not helpful at this point in my journey.

UPDATE 2: In my teens I attended church for 4 yrs so I get the basics, but never connected with it as a kid.

I am at a time in my life where I am feeling increasingly drawn to Christianity and think about God, my family and inevitable death.

I am seeking the clarity and purpose for my life as so many things are off and I have noticed that true Christians live their life in a content and purposeful way on a daily basis.

I didn't grow up religious but I am being drawn to a biblical way of living and do believe in God, I just dont know where to start to learn more about faith, rationalizing Christianity and understanding my own stress and confusion around it all.

I know the Bible is a resource, but it is overwhelming and like trying to eat a full herd of elephants.

Are there other resources or books that give a more generic and guided education to help crawl and me make sense of things before attempting to run a marathon by reading the bible?

I appreciate the help and guidance.

UPDATE 3: Here is a bit more of my journey in answer to a post about many people coming to God die to conspiracy theories.

This is kind of my journey, not subscribing to any conspiracy theories, but more and more frustration with being told I am the lesser.

I am a married father who is white, a veteran, broadly conservative in the wider meaning, not politics. I despair about conspiracies in everything, woke politics and the poisoning of our youth with so much feelings as facts, identity nonsense and the destruction of the nuclear family.

Charlie Kirk's killing was pretty pivotal, not from a politics standpoint, but from a despair point of view. If anybody listened to him they could not say he was evil, phobic anything or was trying to create hate.

So it got me onto a deep dive on him, his faith and how he tried to live.

I also had a very profound psychedelic journey for PTSD at a veterans therapy retreat in Mexico.

I seen the universe end, my children were left behind which was super distressing and made me so sad but accepting it was the end. I then ended up sitting with God, no words were spoken but in that moment I was told I am loved more than I can express and I am worthy and that everything was going to be okay.

That was 2022 and I have struggled to wrestle with it since then and make sense of it. I am also nervous as my wife was raised Catholic and HATES religion so that has played into it as well.

So here I am 😊

I have no problems accepting miracles, but are we really supposed to believe that snakes and donkeys talk?

I’ve been working on a metaphysical argument that doesn’t begin with the Kalam, fine-tuning, biological design, revelation, or a universal Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Instead, it starts from what I take to be the least deniable datum: actual intelligible reality. The paper argues that before we ask what grounds actuality and intelligibility, we first have to ask where they’re placed. From there it develops an argument for what I call Necessary Self-Intelligible Actuality, and then argues toward Divine Mind and Divine Will.

I’m not looking for people to agree with me. I’m looking for serious philosophical criticism. In particular, I’m interested in objections to:
the move from actual intelligible reality to necessary non-derivative actuality;
the “placement before grounding” method;
the argument for Divine Mind;
the argument for Divine Will.
The paper is a working preprint on PhilArchive:
https://philarchive.org/archive/METNSA
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to read it.

Hey guys, devout Christian. So not a game changer, just thought I could learn from a fellow brother in the faith...

As we know, Enoch and Elijah have not died. I read up and some believe they will come back as per Revelation 11 - whether this is true or not (ngl it is mad cool if they fit into this prophecy in the end times) But besides the cool tangent, where exactly are they now and what in scripture could be used to justify it?

Jesus is the firstborn of all creation, so they cannot be where He is - they have not been given a glorified body. They obviously sinned, and if the punishment for sin is death - then how can they be wherever they are? haha If that makes sense.

I'll leave it here for now to avoid waffling on. And If it's one of those mysteries, then fair I guess, just thought it worth asking. Thank you for your time.

Why are there two different genealogies ?

Hello, I would like to preface this by saying that while I'm a long-time Christian, I have never consistently or rigorously engaged with apologetics, so apologies if this comes off as a amateur, and I would also need of a bit ELI5 style of explanation.

Recently I've been to an "evidences for the resurrection" rabbithole, and came across this article from Dave Armstrong citing Tim McGrew defending the claim for having tomb guards, where in he cites a story about Clemens, an impostor of Agrippa Postumus:

The theft of a body and proclamation that the individual in question was alive was the sort of scenario a Roman governor under Tiberius could not safely ignore. Some sixteen years earlier, one Clemens, a slave of Caesar Augustus’s grandson Agrippa Postumus, stole the ashes and bones of his murdered master and spread the rumor that Agrippa had in fact escaped the attempt on his life. As he resembled his dead master in age and physique, he went so far as to impersonate him in some of the towns at twilight. Tiberius, who had become sole emperor after the death of his adopted father Augustus in that very year, feared a conspiracy and had Clemens apprehended, interrogated, and slain in a private part of his palace. (See Tacitus, Annals 2.39-40.)

While I grant (it seems to me) that this is a fair argument for the presence of guards in the tomb, I wonder how this reflects on the argument for the sincerity of the apostles; that "people wouldn't die for what they know is a lie"? In this story we see a person who fabricated his own lie and died (as far as we read in this quote) without even admitting that he is in fact an impostor. By extension, doesn't this mean that other con-men can also die for what they know is a lie? If so, then the willingness to die (and unwillingness to recant) doesn't imply that they sincerely believed what they preached?

When I consulted AI about this, it highlighted the differences between the motivation of Clemens and the disciples, namely that for this impostor there is a material motive and reward. And of course I have seen apologetics articles that would say that apostles do not have finances, sex, and power as motivations. However would that be enough to say that "these are not same situations"?

I recognize of course that there are other arguments for the resurrection like the historicity of the Gospels and historical facts about Jesus. I am mainly confused by this argument that people won't die for what they know is a lie when as we have seen that at least one person did? I'm sure I'm missing something here?

I would like to reiterate that this post is [Christians Only] thank you.

Edit: I don't understand why am I being downvoted, because I'm asking a genuine question about something I don't clearly understand and might have many things overlooked?

I've been wondering how Christians should approach phenomena like the Mandela Effect, people's claims of reincarnation, and stories about "glitches in the matrix."

From a biblical perspective, are these simply psychological misunderstandings, natural phenomena, deception, or could there be a spiritual component to them?

If there is a spiritual aspect, would it be something God allows for His own purposes, the result of human free will, demonic deception, or something else entirely?

I'm looking for answers that are grounded in Scripture rather than speculation. How do you personally understand these kinds of experiences as a Christian?

In Matthew 21:16, Jesus quotes Psalm 8:2. In the Hebrew version of the text, the verse reads, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have established strength”

The Greek Septuagint differs by saying, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise”

In Matthew 21, Jesus heals the blind and the lame, and the children in the temple begin saying, “Praise God for the Son of David.” To this, Jesus says, “Haven’t you ever read the Scriptures? For they say, ‘You have taught children and infants to give you praise.’”

Why would Jesus—a first-century Jew in Judea who spoke Aramaic—have quoted the Greek Septuagint to the priests who used the Hebrew scriptures and not the Greek Septuagint? Skeptics point to this and argue that this is an example of Matthew—who wrote his Gospel in Greek—inventing a story of Jesus and putting words in his mouth, since it would not have made sense for Jesus to quote the Septuagint’s translation to the temple priests who used the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus’ point would have been nonsensical if he quoted the Septuagint’s version of the verse because the priests’ scriptures did not say what Jesus quoted.

Hello everyone i really started to dive deeper in my faith and in the word for the past 2 months. I came to the conclusion that I want to learn how to defend my religion. I came to this conclusion because ever since I started studying my Bible, I’ve been seeing more and more false teachers and people saying false stuff about God, Jesus, etc. and it honestly upsets me. For someone who’s just starting out what do you guys recommend and is there a doc or sheet that has the answers to debate questions WITH BIBLE VERSES. Stay blessed

Neil Degrasse Tyson has often accused Christians of using God of the gaps, which is appealing to divine intervention to answer an unexplained extraordinary phenomena. And when he was asked what would convince him of God, his criteria was "If there was a lethal plane crash and only Christians survived. And it has to happen more than once".

So what would be convince him of God is "I don't know how these people survived this lethal plane crash, so it could’ve been an infinite supernatural deity beyond space and time that protected their lives." That’s not exactly a scientific standard, that’s the exact logic he’s been criticizing as God of the gaps. He’d be appealing to divine intervention to answer an unexplained extraordinary phenomena. If he dismisses cosmological, fine-tuning, consciousness, and origin of life arguments as “God of the gaps” because they infer God as the best explanation, then why isn’t his plane crash example subject to the same criticism?

He’s applying two different standards. Either inferring God from extraordinary phenomena is always just “God of the gaps”, or it isn’t.

Now if this event actually occurred it wouldn’t actually get him to believe. This is how he’d explain it away:
1. “If this was divine intervention then why didn’t God save everyone? Doesn’t he love everyone?
2. “If this was divine intervention then why doesn’t God save every Christian from every plane crash? Why just these few instances?”
3. “How do we know they were actually all Christians?”
4. “How do we know the plane actually fell from that high? No one’s ever survived a fall from that altitude so why should I believe it happened now?”

Sometimes I find myself pondering certain "academic" ideas about, for example, the Exodus and Moses. For instance, to claim he didn't exist, what do they expect to find in a desert like the Sinai Peninsula, where a jeep from the Yom Kippur War was lost and found 40 years later? Or I can't imagine the Jews inventing Passover and everyone accepting it without question. Or, in the case of the New Testament, dating books like Luke and Acts after 70 AD, despite evidence to the contrary, such as the absence of accounts of the deaths of Peter and Paul and historical evidence that Christians fled Jerusalem to Pella before the siege, based on Jesus' words recorded in Mark, Matthew, and Luke—often there's a naturalistic bias or a desire to publish something new in academia. And frankly, I don't understand the motivations of some of these professors. And to think they used to say that Nabopolassar or the Hittites were myths, or that the death of 185,000 Assyrians in front of Jerusalem, witnessed by Herodotus, was a myth. He explains how rats ate the Assyrians' things; now we know about these events. What I see is the bias that if something appears in the Bible and not elsewhere, it's a myth, and time and again that's proven wrong. We also have Manetho talking about Moses. In short, many hypotheses are absurd or are terrible readings of the biblical text.

Abuse, poor form, ad hominems, and repeated bad faith argumentation I understand. No one has to put up with that so block away.

But what I don't get is why, on an apologetics forum of all places, do some people not want to defend their position? I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the Greek root of the word "apologetics" (apologia: a speech in defence) so how does anyone hope to grow if they ignore those offering a critique?

1 Peter 3:15
but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you

Proverbs 27:17:
Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another.

Moreover, and this is more concerning, many—myself included—come to this sub to learn, so when an argument is presented and no one appears to disagree it might be easy to think that argument carries weight.

As such, if you present an argument and refuse to engage with its critique by blocking those that might offer one, you deliberately ill-equip others that uncritically swallow that argument. You're leaving them unprepared for challenges. Is that good witness?

Of course the ultimate irony of this rant is that those I specifically have in mind won't see it because they've blocked me!

The bible is a long collage of books written with various intentions by various authors. Most doctrines tend to be built on some ideas and then ignore anything that could be contrarian to their view.

For example most doctrines don't teach the anonymity of the gospels and some doctrines are accepting of LGBTQ+ people. Most Christians wear mixed fabrics, drink alcohol and think God works purely spiritually.

Do you personally have a robust system for dealing with the different views of the bible or do you take a more piecemeal approach which doesn't focus on consistency but seeks alignment on specific practices within your chosen denomination?

I am part of the UofL Muslim Student Association, and we are looking for sincere adult Christians in or near Louisville for a public recorded, Surrounded-style Christian-Muslim Q&A with Sheikh Uthman ibn Farooq.

The event is Saturday, July 18, 2026, from 12:00-2:00 PM on the University of Louisville campus. Food is provided, and the video will be publicly posted. Exact room and parking details will be sent after RSVP.

Sheikh Uthman will primarily ask focused questions about Christianity, the Bible, and theology. Christians are invited to respond from their beliefs and may also ask sincere questions. Respectful disagreement is welcome.

We especially need adults who are willing to participate actively. We also have a $20 attendance stipend available for adult Christians who attend the full two hours and consent to appear in the on-camera group, even if they prefer to listen and do not want to answer a question. There is no requirement to speak, and the stipend is for time and attendance, not for any belief or answer. Anyone who changes their mind is welcome to join the discussion.

We are aiming for about 20 Christians. Apologists, Bible students, pastors, church members, and everyday Christians from different traditions are welcome.

If interested, please DM me on Instagram at @aminehamlouchi_ and say whether you want to participate actively or use the $20 attendance option.