My perspective is that the core faith of Christianity can stand on its own two nail-scarred and resurrected feet. If we lost the Old Testament or it had so many holes poked in it that nobody could take it seriously anymore — that does nothing to diminish Jesus. At all.
The fact that He predicted the destruction of the Jewish Temple, and it happened exactly as He predicted, is pretty remarkable. And then there’s the prediction of the resurrection, and then there’s the eyewitness accounts of it, and then there’s the incomprehensible and explosive growth of the early core faith of Christianity. And even the agnostic/atheist scholar Bart Ehrman admits that…minus the fact of an explosive growth early in the life of the core Christian faith…there’s no way to get the 3.5 million followers of Jesus that there were by the fourth century. Somethin’ about their message was alluring and attractive, and convincing.
Dawkins and Ehrman and Harris can dance around that all they want to because the historicity and reality of the core faith of Christianity is uncomfortable for them. There clearly was something way outside of the norm happening here. The core faith of being a Jesus follower doesn’t hang by a thread like the parting and crossing of the Red Sea or the six-day creation of the universe. If it’s scientifically impossible for Noah to have accomplished what he did with the ark, or for Jonah to have spent three days and nights in the belly of a great fish, that does nothing…zero…to diminish the core faith of Christianity. It’s founded on something much larger and more important than all of that.
