This is a working investigation into the origins of Christianity — the manuscripts, the councils, the doctrines, the man at the center of it — built one verified topic at a time. This page explains the project's posture, method, and limits, since those matter as much as any individual finding.
Every report here started from the same question: what actually holds up, when you check? That meant going to primary sources, manuscript evidence, and the scholarly record directly, rather than starting from either institutional church teaching or popular skepticism and working backward to confirm it.
The findings are not uniform. Some hold up extremely well under scrutiny. Some reveal real, documented gaps between what's commonly taught and what the earliest sources actually say. Some questions — particularly anything touching the supernatural — sit outside what historical evidence can settle at all. The reading key on the homepage marks which is which on every report, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest about what's actually known.
It would be easy to read findings like the ones in the tithing report or the consumerist church report as an attack on faith itself. That's not the intent, and it's not what the evidence actually supports. Several reports — on the historical Jesus, on the core ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, on the reliability of the core New Testament narrative — hold up as genuinely well-evidenced. The goal throughout has been to separate what's well-supported from what's institutional accumulation, not to declare the whole tradition false.
It's also not a finished position. Several reports note open questions explicitly, and new evidence or a better argument can and should change a finding. Nothing here is presented as the final word.
Each report follows the same method: start with primary sources and the earliest available manuscripts, bring in the relevant scholarly debate from both theological and critical-secular perspectives, mark clearly where genuine consensus exists versus where serious scholars disagree versus where the question is beyond what evidence can resolve, and end with a synthesis that states the most defensible conclusion plainly — including its limits.
Theological and critical-scholarly positions are both presented in full, not as a strawman to knock down. Where they genuinely diverge, the divergence is stated directly rather than smoothed over.
Every report carries one to three colored markers showing how settled its claims are — and a report can carry more than one, since most real questions are part well-evidenced, part contested.
| Marker | What it means |
|---|---|
| Well-evidenced | Broad agreement among scholars, regardless of theological position |
| Genuinely contested | Serious scholars land on different sides, with real arguments either way |
| Unsettled | Beyond what historical evidence can resolve — the line between history and faith |
If a report misstates a source, misses an important counter-argument, or draws a conclusion the evidence doesn't actually support, that's worth knowing. The comments section on every report exists for exactly this — questions, pushback, sources worth checking, or a correction. Since the discussion thread is currently shared across all reports rather than separated by page, mention which report you're referring to when you comment.
This project is intentionally not signed with a name or biography. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight — the investigation is still in progress, and the aim is for each report to stand on its sources and reasoning rather than on who wrote it. The findings should be checkable by anyone regardless of who's asking the question.
This is a good-faith attempt to find out what's actually true about Christianity's origins, using the same standards of evidence that would apply to any other historical question — built to be checked, not just believed.