Answer:
Excellent question, which brand of Christianity is right? The answer, I believe, begins to form around your statement, "we can only receive passage through Christ". What you`re assuming is that if all these religions, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, JW`s all build their hope for salvation and peace with God on Jesus Christ, then doesn`t that mean that Jesus is the key somehow? If every world religion loves Jesus and upholds him as a key teacher, and believes he spoke and lived the truth and showed us God in some way... then shouldn`t we look at this man who is the common denominator, for some clue to what is essential in understanding God and the way to God? Makes sense to me.
But now we are faced with another question: Who knows what they’re talking about? Who gives us the best, most accurate information about Jesus? And it`s at this point that the religions and the brands of Christianity begin to sort themselves out.
Let’s start historically and go backwards. The JW`s have this idea that Jesus is really the arch angel Michael in disguise. He`s not really one with God but a created being, less than God, sent to do the dirty work of carrying our sin. This belief rests on the teaching of Charles Taze Russell who hated the Trinity doctrine and who was an end times buff who predicted Jesus coming many times. His movement finally settled on the doctrine of a secret coming in 1914. So do we trust the unique vision of Jesus from a man writing in the 1870`s – 18 centuries removed from Jesus himself? Did he know what Jesus really meant, did he have insight into Jesus that no one had had for all those years? How could a guy so far removed from the events of Jesus life and so out of step with what most followers of Jesus have taken for granted have any advantage in knowing the real identity and mission of Jesus? We need to get closer to Jesus himself to get better info.
If we go back just a few more decades, you have Joseph Smith who had his own vision of Jesus. Jesus to him was the spirit brother of Lucifer and not really the supreme God, but a literal Son of God who rules this planet, just as we can also be similar gods running our own planets when we die. Now again, we should ask, what gives Joseph Smith the right to tell us who the TRUE Jesus is? While he taught people to "believe" in Jesus, which Jesus is he talking about? His own invented Jesus or the real one? He wrote in the 1830`s, so should we trust a man whose only qualification to speak about Jesus was a secret encounter with an angel and golden tables which are lost forever? Again, we need older info, better evidence, closer to the source before we sign off on him as an authority.
So you have people like the Muslims who also affirm Jesus. Their vision of Jesus is built on information from a 7th century mystic (Muhammad) who never spoke with Jesus, never knew him, never lived in the same century as him, never lived inside the Jewish culture and as far as we know, never studied Christianity or Judaism much at all. His main source of information about Jesus is a vision from the angel Gabriel in a cave, with no witnesses... stuff he wrote down in the Koran. He`s complimentary of Jesus, and believes that he was born of a virgin, Mary, and that he was a prophet... but he denies the crucifixion or that Jesus was the son of God. Again, we must try to get closer to the source if we can.
Many Gnostic gospels about Jesus were written about 150 to 350 AD. They describe a Jesus that was really a ghost type of figure, who was all divine, but not really a man at all. He was a “Christ Essence”, trapped in a human body and the crucifixion was said to release him. Gnostics “believed in Jesus”, but they didn`t really believe that salvation came from Christ’s sacrifice for sin, but rather from secret spiritual knowledge that came only to the elite.
You can see that though Mormons, JW`s and Muslims and Gnostics "believe in Christ", what they believe is so different that there’s no way it could have come from the same Man.
So again, we want the best information about Jesus, and to get that we have to get as close to his life as possible. The best we could get is if Jesus wrote something himself, but Jesus never wrote a book. So the next best thing would be writings by eye witnesses and close associates of Jesus within a generation of Jesus life. This we have in the New Testament! It’s documents are closer to the events of Jesus life by 100 years from all Gnostic texts, 600 years closer than Muhammad, and over 18 centuries closer to Jesus than Joseph Smith or Charles T Russell.
Now it’s true that people who reject these other sources and accept the Bible as the rule for understanding Jesus still disagree on many things. But what most critics of Christianity fail to mention is that what they disagree about is nothing compared to the gaping canyon of distance between people who do not accept the New Testament as authoritative or those who ADD to those earliest, most reliable documents with less reliable ones.
And we notice this curious thing: Everyone who accepts the NT as the authority on Jesus believes that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and everyone who adds to that Bible, or subtracts from it, or considers it corrupted fundamentally, tends in EVERY case to add works to the requirement for salvation. They always make it about their special knowledge (Gnostics) or their special beliefs (JW’s), or their special teacher (Mormons, Muslims) or their secret rituals or their proofs or works. Only those who accept the gospel as delivered by the Apostles and recorded in the NT hold to the idea that salvation is by God’s GRACE through repentance and faith.
Many movements have sought to add to this simple message and the apostolic tradition. Sometimes by papal bull, sometimes by special teacher, a new book or even a new revelation purporting to come from angels. This is very ironic since the first followers of Jesus said, “even if an angel comes from heaven and preaches any other message, let him be forever cursed!” (Gal 1:8). This warning fits both Mormonism and Islam to a tee.
Why wouldn’t we want another message as time rolls on and human knowledge advances? Well, if Jesus Christ really was who he said he was, whom the earliest records say he was (John 1:1, Phil 2:6: God in the flesh), then why would we ever need MORE than God himself to find our way to God? Yes, we don`t understand everything the Bible says and we must look to other Christians in history to clarify our understanding of the Apostles teachings... but if Jesus was God’s ultimate revelation, then anything that adds to that revelation really takes away from it. It`s like photocopying from a copy instead of from the original. Every copy of Christianity that builds on the original (the historical Jesus) is imperfect – BUT those that build on a copy of the original are even MORE imperfect. And eventually, do this long enough, and the copy hardly even resembles the original.
Even within the New Testament era, they practiced this requirement of “backwards compatibility”. Paul did much preaching in the Roman world, but after he had built many churches, he came under fire from Jewish Christians who thought he was passing on incorrect teaching about Jesus. So he goes back to Jerusalem to talk to Peter and James and other disciples (Gal 2:1-10). Why? To cross check his message. To make sure he was being faithful to the truth. To check with others who had lived and talked with Jesus directly in the flesh. And they affirmed Paul’s message as consistent. So he sets a nice precedent that we ought to always check our teaching about Jesus with the apostles teaching.
But let’s say two people accept the apostles teaching but radically disagree? Using the same principle of backward compatibility, we check with church history. If we’re believing something about Jesus that we think we can defend from the Bible, but which the vast majority of Christians from all times and all places have NEVER believed, then chances are we`ve missed the apostles meaning.
When we get to this humble place, we put aside any idea that we could “rediscover” the “secret” or “lost” teachings of Jesus. We agree that the church is always in need of reform back against it’s original template, but we don’t get caught up in meaningless controversies that fuel only doubts and arguments (1 Tim 1:4). Instead we focus on the main things of our Faith, using Scripture and creeds to define those, and allow for disagreements among Christians on peripheral issues and hold our own positions with love and a clear conscience (1 Tim 1:5). I believe it was Augustine (circa 400) who first said: in the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.
