All religions lead to the same God. People usually offer that sentence as humility, often out of love for neighbors who believe differently. It also rests on a premise that is seldom said out loud: that claims which deny each other can all be true at once, or that their denials do not matter. Tested, that premise fails. The religions contradict each other on who God is, what is wrong with human beings, and what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. Where they contradict, they cannot all be true.
That leaves a harder question: how could anyone tell which claim about Jesus is right? Here the Christian claim has an unusual feature. It rests on a reported event, the resurrection, and evidence can reach a reported event. Its earliest writers even named the condition under which their message would be false. A claim that exposes itself that way is a different kind of claim from a mood, a practice, or an inherited preference.
The work ahead builds four abilities in order: stating a religious claim precisely, testing whether two claims can both be true, asking what kind of evidence could settle the matter, and holding a conclusion inside real friendships. The guides are voices from Jude 3 Project conversations: Abdu Murray, a former Muslim and a lawyer by training; Rahil Patel, a Hindu monk for twenty years before he came to Christ; Dr. Vince Bantu, a scholar of early Christianity in Africa, the Middle East and Asia; Dr. Craig Hazen, who studied world religions in a secular doctoral program; and Dr. Joseph Byamukama, a New Testament scholar and church planter in Kampala.