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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.

How do I refute the claim that Jesus was a created being?

Question:

It seems that a trademark belief of many sects is the claim that Jesus was not God in the flesh. Instead, they insist he was just a perfect man, a great teacher—essentially just a created being. What is an easy way to refute this assertion?

Answer:

One of the easiest ways to demonstrate the fallacy of the claim that Jesus was a created being is to turn to John 1:3: “All things came to be through him [the Word], and without him nothing came to be” (New American Bible, revised edition).

The Greek word choris, which is here translated “without,” means “separately” or “apart from,” and it shows that the Word is the instrumentality by which all things came into being. (Some Bible versions read, “and without him not even one thing came into being.”)

So if the Bible says that nothing or not even one thing came into being apart from the Word’s creative activity, how is it that the Word himself could have been created? If that were true, he would be “one thing” which came into being apart from himself, and this fact would contradict John 1:3.

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