The Reliability of the New Testament

Skeptics often claim that the Bible has been copied and translated so many times over millennia that the original message is completely lost. They picture monks copying from copies of copies, making countless errors along the way.

However, this analogy fundamentally misunderstands how ancient documents were transmitted. The New Testament wasn't passed down linearly (like a single line of telephone). It was passed down geometrically—one church made five copies, which were sent to five different cities, which each made five more copies.

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"It is safe to say that there is no other ancient work whose text is established with such a wealth of manuscript evidence as the New Testament."

When historians want to determine if an ancient document is reliable, they look at two things: the number of surviving manuscripts, and the time gap between the original writing and the earliest surviving copy.

For context, Julius Caesar's 'Gallic Wars' has about 10 surviving manuscripts, with the earliest dating 1,000 years after Caesar lived. Homer's 'Iliad' has roughly 643 manuscripts. Yet, historians consider these documents completely reliable representations of the originals.

The New Testament, by comparison, has over 5,800 surviving Greek manuscripts. When we include Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other early translations, the number exceeds 24,000. Furthermore, the time gap for the earliest New Testament fragments is mere decades, not centuries.

Because we have so many manuscripts spread across different geographic regions, scholars can use a science called textual criticism to cross-check them. If a scribe in Alexandria made a copying error, the hundreds of manuscripts from Antioch and Rome will expose the error because they won't have it.

Through this cross-checking process, scholars have determined that the New Testament is 99.5% pure. The remaining 0.5% consists almost entirely of spelling differences or skipped words, none of which affect a single core Christian doctrine.