[Someday]

So one day we wake up, and all of the Bibles on Earth, and all of our ability to rewrite it have disappeared. Are you imagining this?
So a few years later you are hanging out in a coffee shop and some guy walks up to some teens and you overhear him talking about this Jesus guy. You hear him tell them how Jesus raised an army and fought along side of the romans in destroying the Temple at Jerusalem, kicking the Jews out who were selling sacrificial animals and changing money or some other thing you don't believe. So these kids are clearly buying it. You hear them repeating the quotes from Jesus this guy taught them. One of them goes something like: "Surrender all things unto Caesar and send all things of God unto him likewise." or " Beat your plows into swords for the glory of God".
We approach these misled teens with a picture of a different Jesus, and we talk about love they neighbor as yourself, and love your enemies, etc etc.

My question to those who seem to conclude the Bible as meaningless stuff, how does one show these kids that this guy is making stuff up off the top of his head? Why should they believe you? How do you counter the Charismatic figure? How do you prevent perverted cults that can teach any Jesus message they like? We already have some measure of that now, can you imagine how much more of that is possible without some written, agreed upon collection of knowledge about God?

Have you ever played that game where one person whispers a phrase into the ear of another and then they whisper it into the ear of another and then another, etc.? We all know what happens to that whispered message when it reaches the end of the chain. Almost always it is perverted into something having nothing to do with the original phrase.
There was a time, before our society was literate, where oral tradition was passed from generation to generation nearly unchanged. That changed with the advent of books and literate society. Our memories for the spoken word is nothing like it used to be.

Would you still throw the Bible out?

You may say I'm being silly, or that that wouldn't happen, but the fact of the matter is, look around you, it already happens. Christian cults already exist that distort the message of Jesus in ways that are very harmful towards themselves and others. Some more mainstream Christians distort it in some ways when it pleases them, and we have the Bible to counter it. I wonder how to counter it in ways they would find meaningful without referring to the Bible?

This is exactly why the New Testament was put together to begin with. Not to be inspired holy writings to be worshiped in the place of God, but to counter the many perversions of what many orthodox Christians considered false instructions by groups that adopted Jesus, such as the Gnostics did.

Blessings