Dr. Frank Turek

"Cross Examined" host

June 2018 – Is Christianity true just because the inerrant Bible says it is? No. Christianity would still be true even if the Bible were never written. Let me explain.

It’s a common belief prevalent among some Christians today that what we know about Christianity depends on an inerrant Bible. Sure, we know that there are several non-Christian writers from the ancient world that make brief references to the first-century events and the beliefs of the early Christians, corroborating what we read in the New Testament. We also know that there is an increasing number of archaeological findings that support characters and events in the Christian storyline.

But some of us erroneously think that Christian beliefs cannot be sustained unless the Bible is without error.

Although I think there are good reasons to believe in an inerrant Bible, inerrancy is an unnecessarily high standard by which to establish the central event in Christianity – the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity hinges on that historical event. If Christ rose from the dead, then, game over, Christianity is true.

But you don’t need inerrant sources to establish that the resurrection actually happened, or any other historical event for that matter. For example, if you found an error in the stat line of a football game, should you assume that every game, story, and stat line in the newspaper was a complete fabrication? Then why do some people do that with the New Testament?

They assume that because they are confusing the fact of the resurrection with the reports of the resurrection. Conflicting reports of a historical event are evidence that the event actually occurred, not the reverse. In other words, to return to our sports analogy, the only reason there is an error in the stat line to begin with, is that the game was actually played, and someone tried to report on that game. Neither the stat line nor the error would exist unless the game had actually been played. After all, who reports on a game that didn’t actually take place?

The same is true with the New Testament documents and the resurrection. Even if one were to find an error or disagreement between the multiple accounts of the resurrection story, the very fact that there are several eyewitness accounts shows that something dramatic actually happened in history.

So Christianity isn’t true just because the Bible says it’s true. Christianity is true because an event occurred. True, we wouldn’t know much about Christianity if the reports of the resurrection had never been written, but the resurrection preceded the reports of it.

Contrary to what some skeptic may think, the New Testament writers didn’t create the resurrection. The resurrection gave us the New Testament documents! There would be no New Testament unless the resurrection had occurred. Observant Jews would never have invented that.

This is why the foundational beliefs of Christianity…are true even if the reports have some errors. Getting details wrong in reporting the resurrection doesn’t change the larger point that the resurrection actually happened. In fact, if all the accounts agreed on every detail, we’d rightly assume they colluded. Actual eyewitnesses never describe the same historical event in the same way.

For example, survivors of the Titanic disagreed how the ship sank. Some say it broke in two and then sank. Others say they thought it went down whole. Does that disagreement mean that we shouldn’t believe the Titanic sank? Of course not. They all agree on that! They were just viewing the same historical event from different vantage points.

The historical documents we’ve collected and put into one binding we call the New Testament are just what the name implies. They are testaments or reports of what honorable people witnessed and had no motive to invent.

The Bible is inerrant, but you don’t need to go that far to show that Christianity is true.   

Dr. Frank Turek is a noted author, apologist, and host of Cross Examined, a one-hour radio program heard on afr.net (Saturday 9:00 a.m.; Sunday 4:00 p.m.). This commentary is condensed from its post on afa.net/the-stand.