Is Hinduism Older than Christianity?

By Dave Sterrett

I just received an email from a reader of www.probe.org and thought I would start posting some of my responses. This is a quick email response and may contain some errors.

Here’s the Question I received from a listener of our ministry: Indian Hindu’s claim that Hinduism is the oldest religion, but Bible teaches us that God created all this in Jewish form, if so why those Vedas and upanishads say they are older than Bible?

My response: This question seems to be a complex question with multiple implications and I think we need to be careful to define some of our terms. First of all, even though God did create Adam and did have a special calling, promise and blessing on Abraham and his descendents, the Bible doesn’t say that “God created all this in Jewish form.” When God created Adam, Judaism was not necessarily in complete form yet, even though Judaism would descend from Adam and Abraham’s blood. Second, even amongst scholars of the writings of the Vedas, there is some dispute about when the actual writings of the Vedas were written. Some of them might date back to 1500 BC, but some Biblical scholars date the Exodus of the Hebrews around this time. Conservative Biblical scholars (and myself) hold that Moses was the primary author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible.) This would date the Pentateuch as being as old as some of the Vedas. But it is true that Christianity was started with Christ or technically after his resurrection. The New Testament was written in the first century. So, in one sense, one might claim that Hinduism, is older than “CHRISTianity” because it dates back before Christ. But if a Hindu apologist uses the phrase “Hinduism is Older than Christianity” kind of as a “Gotcha” statement trying to make something more credible because of it’s age, their implications include a couple fallacies. First, Hinduism has changed and added books with their Vedas over the years and it’s difficult to say all the Vedas are older than the Torah. Second, just because something is older doesn’t make something more true. This is the logical fallacy “Argumentum ab Annis” (argument because of Age) Just because a religion, a thousand years ago from a primitive group taught that child sacrifice was good to the gods, didn’t make their belief or their practice true or good. Even though one religious practice is older doesn’t make it necessarily better. However, God’s existence, his creation, the existence of Adam, and calling of Abraham existed in reality years before Moses documented in the Torah.