Is the Bible the foundation of Christianity?

I’d like to come back to the question about how much of the Bible could be debunked before I would stop believing. Lots of Christians have perpetuated the error that the Bible is the indispensable foundation of the Christian faith—i.e. no Bible, no Christianity.

The foundation of the Christian faith is not the Bible, but Christ. That is why I did not answer “if you showed that the Bible was wrong about X, I would stop being a Christian.” The Bible *witnesses* to Christ, and tell us things *about* Christ; but if we lost the Bible, or if it had never existed, we would still have Christ. And we know about Christ from the Church.

The accounts of Christ’s life in the Gospels were written down several decades after his death, for people who *had already come to believe*. The Gospels were not meant to be the founding texts of the Church, like the Constitution is for the United States. They were written down *by* the Church which already existed, for the benefit of the Church, composed of people who already believed, having known Christ or heard the preaching of the Apostles. The Gospels were written down so that when the Apostles who personally knew Christ had died, the Church would not lose their memories of His life.

The earliest historical documents are not the Gospels but St Paul’s letters. Even very skeptical atheist scholars accept that most of these are genuine and were written in the decade after A.D. 50. Jesus died in about A.D. 30—in other words, Paul’s letters stand in relation to Jesus as we stand in relation to the Little Mermaid movie, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and Metallica’s album And Justice For All.

In Paul’s letters we find the foundations of the Church already present: Christ’s death on the cross, the Resurrection, the Redemption from sin, the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper (that is, the Mass), heaven and hell, and Christ’s Second Coming.

It’s the Church who witnesses to Christ, not only the Bible. It was not the Bible who told me about Christ; it was my friend A., while we were making pizzas in the back of a pizzeria. Even if you don’t believe in the Bible at all, you can still see the Christian vision: God saw man’s sorry state, and became one of us and entered human history—not as a mythical figure, but in Roman Palestine in the time of Caesar Augustus—and died on a cross to save us from our sins, and rose from the dead, and left us the Church to bring that Redemption to us. What does that mean if it’s true?