I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you (Psalm 119:11, ESV).
Experts do not work with the original manuscripts of the New Testament; they work with copies.
When considering the reliability of any book in antiquity, scholars consider two things: first, it’s preferable to have many manuscripts for comparison, and second, the closer the time of the writing of a manuscript to the original, the better.
Summary: Textual scholars consider numbers and age (with older being better).
By comparing these manuscripts, textual scholars aim to give us what was originally written, so that when we pick up an English Standard Version or New American Standard Version (1995) — my two favorite translations — we read what was originally written.
Let’s now consider the reliability of the New Testament in comparison to Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and Plato’s Philosophy. These two writers are among the most significant outside the New Testament. As N.T. Wright (big-time current scholar) says, “If Homer functioned as the Old Testament for the Hellenistic world, then Plato would be the New Testament for the Hellenists.”
Homer lived about 800 B.C. and authored two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. About 2,000 manuscripts of these poems are known to exist, and the earliest is dated at 400 B.C. And then Plato, who lived about 400 B.C. — his extant manuscripts total 275, with the earliest of his surviving writings dating to 210 B.C.
Note to remember: the first known manuscript of Homer was about 400 years after his death, and the first known manuscript of Plato was about 190 years after his death.
Now, the New Testament has 5,000 known manuscripts, with the earliest known fragments dating to 100-200 A.D. (one fragment of the Gospel of John was written in 125 A.D., 35 years after John wrote the Gospel in 90 A.D.). The earliest known complete manuscripts of the entire New Testament date to about 300 A.D., with thousands of smaller manuscripts dating to between A.D. 125 and A.D. 200.
As one author writes…
We have more manuscripts for the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world – many, many more manuscripts than we have for the writings of Homer, Plato, Cicero, or any other important author.
There are variances in the 5,000 New Testament manuscripts, but most of them are differences in spelling and variations in sentences. However, after comparing manuscripts, one skeptic of the Bible admits, “For essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in manuscripts.” Another conservative scholar writes the following (please read several times)…
Those reading the New Testament can be certain in all essentials, and even in most particulars, we can be relatively sure that we are reading what the autographs [originals] said.
The #1 reason for the reliability of the New Testament. Amen, let’s read the Bible as the Word of God preserved and complete.