The Bible is unnecessary to the Christian faith.

I will rebut this point in consideration of what “Christianity” is, per se. It is arguable whether early adherents of the faith considered themselves “Christian” or rather as devout Jews who had accepted the reality of Jesus as the Messiah. The idea of the Messiah requires the history entailed in the Old Testament. I will further argue that Paul’s Epistles actually help establish what is and what isn’t Christianity moreso than the synoptic gospels, all of which post-date Paul’s writing by a significant amount of time. Estimates are that Mark (the oldest of the Synoptic gospels) was probably written between 67and 70AD [1] whereas Paul was probably writing around the 40’s to 50’s AD [2] Paul himself never meets the physical Jesus, but only visits some of the Apostles in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death (Acts 9:27 et seq) and later Paul has a disagreement with Peter (Gal 2:11) over various aspects of the role of Gentiles in the faith. Of course my primary question is: how could one who had never met Jesus disagree with one who was a Disciple? But the greater point is, arguably much of what we have as the basis of Christianity starts with Paul’s epistles. As such, his writings help establish to the various congregations he addressed, what it meant to be a Christian. Since this makes up a great deal of the faith and how it later started to develop it becomes quite important. Christian soteriology, which fundamentally marks Christians as a separate faith is predicated on the idea that Jesus is The Way to the father (John 14:6) which is, again, a part of the Gospels. Pro’s sub-point about the Holy Trinity is also quite appropriate to the debate. The Trinitarian view (Father Son and Holy Spirit) is, in no small way, predicated on the “Johannine Comma” (1 John 5:7-8) which does not appear in the older Greek manuscripts nor in the oldest Latin Vulgate, and indeed when Erasmus was writing the textus receptus he initially refused to include it in his translation, insisting that the Church provide him with evidence that it was an actual part of the earliest manuscripts. This detail underscores the importance of the Trinitarian orthodoxy, but also shows the importance of its foundation in the text of the Bible (whether one believes that the document the Church provided for him was genuine or produced to calm the problems the lack of the comma produced for the orthodoxy). Finally: the idea of Jesus, the concept of the man who was simultaneously all man and all God, whose sacrifice atoned man to God and the acceptance of him as savior rest firmly on the information going out in a codified manner. The first and basic of these codifications would, by definition, be the Bible. Let us theorize that perhaps Christ never actually existed (no contemporary of Jesus writes about him) but that the faith was developed as an outcome of the general intellectual milieu of the middle east at the time. In fact there were a number of competing “messiahs” and a variety of religions pre-dating Christianity which so resemble the concepts of Christianity that one of the early Church Fathers, Justin Martyr in his “First Apology” (Chpt LVI) establishes the concept that these predecessor faiths were a form of diabolical mimicry, an “anticipation” that the savior was to arrive so the devil sent forth forces to make up false religions “anticipating” the true faith thereby making it look like “marvelous tales”. It becomes necessary to have some form of basis for the dogma. Has it been shown, apart from the authors of the books of the New Testament, that people have come to the understanding of Christian soteriology’s subtle nuances? SOURCES 1. . http://bible.org... 2. . http://www.religioustolerance.org...