Is Christianity true just because the inerrant Bible says it is? No. Christianity would still be true even if the Bible had never been written.

Let me explain.

It’s a common belief 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. Their writings corroborate what we read in the New Testament. We also know that there are more and more 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. That might imply that the Christian faith is a fragile house of cards. It would be ready to collapse, if just one verse or reference in the New Testament were discovered to be false.

Inerrancy Doesn’t Determine Whether the Resurrection is True

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 doesn’t hinge on inerrancy. It hinges on that historical event. If Christ rose from the dead, then, game over, Christianity is true. On the other hand, if he didn’t rise from the dead, then, as a first-century eyewitness by the name of Paul admitted, Christianity is false.

If Christ rose from the dead, then, game over, Christianity is true.

But you don’t need inerrant sources to establish that the Resurrection happened, or any other historical event for that matter. Suppose 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 simply made up for some reason? Then why do some people do that with the New Testament? Why do they assume that unless every word of it is true, then most of it is false?

They assume that because they are confusing the fact of the Resurrection with the reports of the Resurrection. Conflicting reports of a historical event actually support the idea that it actually occurred, not the reverse. In other words, to return to our sports analogy, there’s only one reason there is error in the stat line. It’s because 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 hadn’t actually been played. After all, who reports on a game that didn’t actually take place?

The Ones Who Reported It Put Their Lives on the Line

The same is true with the documents comprising the New Testament and reporting the Resurrection. Again, suppose we 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. That’s especially true since the folks who wrote it down had everything to lose by proclaiming Jesus rose from the dead.

That is, all of the New Testament reporters (except Luke), were observant Jews who would pay dearly for proclaiming the Resurrection. Why would Jewish believers in Yahweh — people who thought they were God’s “chosen people” for two thousand years — invent a Resurrection story, knowing it would get them excommunicated from the “chosen people” club, and then beaten, tortured and murdered?

Answer: They wouldn’t. They saw something dramatic that they weren’t expecting. Then they proclaimed it, altered their lives because of it, and later wrote about it, despite the fact that doing any of that would get them killed.

The Resurrection is the Reason for the New Testament

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.

As my friend Andy Stanley asks, “Do you realize that there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written?” Paul was a Christian before he wrote a word of the New Testament. So were Matthew, John, James, Peter, etc. Why? Because they had witnessed the resurrected Jesus.

Contrary to what some skeptic may think, the New Testament writers didn’t create the Resurrection — the Resurrection created the New Testament writers. Or we could say it this way: The New Testament documents didn’t give us 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.

The Foundational Beliefs Would Be True Even if They Had Some Errors

This is why the foundational beliefs of Christianity — what C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity — would still be true even if the reports had some errors. If the writers got some details wrong in reporting the Resurrection, that wouldn’t change the larger point, which is that the Resurrection really happened. In fact, if all the accounts agreed on every detail, we could assume they had colluded. Actual eyewitnesses never describe the same historical event in the same way.

For example, survivors of the Titanic disagreed over how the ship sank. Some said it broke in two and then sank. Other said they thought it went down whole. Does that disagreement mean 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.

Likewise, all the writers agree that the Resurrection occurred. But they will differ on the minor details. Who got to the tomb first? Did you see one angel or two? And so on. These differences aren’t necessarily contradictions. They’re the natural result of 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. In fact, given who they were and how they suffered, they had every motive to say it wasn’t true. And there are several other excellent reasons that show it takes more faith to be an atheist than a Christian.

So inerrant Bible or not, the Resurrection we celebrate on Easter actually occurred about 1,985 years ago. That means you can trust that one day you’ll be resurrected like Jesus if you put your trust in him.