Were the likes of Peter and Paul guilty of beating people over the head with the Bible?
Peter and Paul didn’t have ‘the Bible’. Somehow many people have gotten the idea that the Bible is Christianity, and as the Bible goes, so goes Christianity. For me, nothing could be further from the truth. Christianity does not rise and fall on the integrity or the verifiability of the Bible. Christianity preceded the Bible; the reason we have the Bible is because of something that happened. There were many thousands of Christians before ‘the Bible’ ever came along in the 4th century.
Jesus told His Jewish followers that their scriptures pointed to Him. He said He was the fulfillment of all in what we call the OT. And some of His followers believed Him, they saw that it lined up with Him and the things they were seeing. They started believing He was the Messiah who was the fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures. And then He was crucified...game over, lights out...clearly He was wrong and they were wrong about Him. And there were no Jesus followers immediately after the Crucifixion. And they no longer believed that Jesus was the son of God when they saw Him die. And then He rose from the dead and the whole thing got started; and suddenly all those Jewish followers went back to those scriptures that Jesus said told of Him and concluded that He was right, they’d lost faith, He was back, they were back, and everything in their scriptures pointed to Him. Christianity preceded the Bible. If you never opened the OT, if you never saw an OT, if suddenly the entire OT vanished from Christianity, it would do nothing to undermine Christianity. Because Christianity began when Jesus rose from the dead, and they recognized He was who He claimed to be.
People followed Jesus after the resurrection because of the resurrection. That’s how Christianity got started. It is not near as fragile as many think; it does not hang by a thread of some passage in scripture or by some miracle Jesus performed in the NT, it’s much more sturdier than that. If it was that fragile, Christianity would have never survived the 1st century.
