Reliability of the New Testament

Textual transmission asks whether the text we read reflects what was originally written. Authorship and sourcing ask who wrote it and what access they had. Historical accuracy asks whether what they wrote is true. A strong answer to the first says nothing about the third, and apologetic presentations that slide between them deserve the skepticism they receive.

There are roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, plus about 10,000 Latin and thousands in Syriac, Coptic, and other versions, along with extensive patristic quotation. The earliest fragment, P52 of John 18, is usually dated to the first half of the second century; substantial papyri such as P46, P66, and P75 come from around 200. By comparison, most classical works survive in a handful of manuscripts copied a millennium after composition.

Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is right that there are hundreds of thousands of variants across the tradition — far more variants than words in the New Testament. But the count is a function of manuscript abundance, and the overwhelming majority are spelling differences, word order changes that Greek inflection makes semantically irrelevant, and obvious slips. Ehrman himself states in the appendix to that book that the essential Christian claims are not affected by the variants, a point his popular readers often miss.

The genuinely significant disputed passages are few and well known: the longer ending of Mark 16:9-20, the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:11, and the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7-8. Modern critical editions and translations mark all three. No doctrine rests on any of them, and the honest presentation names them rather than avoiding them.

Paul's undisputed letters — Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon — are dated by nearly all scholars to the 50s, within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion. They contain pre-Pauline material older still, including the 1 Corinthians 15 creed and the Philippians 2 hymn.

Gospel dating is more contested. The common critical range is Mark around 65-75, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, John in the 90s. Some conservative scholars argue for earlier dates, partly from Acts ending without narrating Paul's death or the fall of Jerusalem. Even on the standard range, these are lifetime documents by the standards of ancient history: Plutarch wrote his lives of figures centuries dead, and Arrian's Alexander is four centuries removed from its subject.

Authorship is where the honest case is weakest. The Gospels are formally anonymous; the traditional attributions come from second-century testimony, principally Papias as reported by Eusebius, and from the fact that the titles are remarkably uniform in the manuscript tradition. Richard Bauckham argues for eyewitness sourcing from onomastic evidence — the frequency distribution of names in the Gospels matches Palestinian Jewish naming patterns rather than diaspora ones. Critics respond that this shows local coloring, not eyewitness authorship. Both points are worth stating.

Richard Burridge's What Are the Gospels? established the now-dominant view that they belong to the genre of Greco-Roman bios. This matters because bios permitted compression of time, topical rather than chronological arrangement, and paraphrase of speeches while requiring substantial fidelity to the subject's character and actions.

Licona's Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? applies Plutarch's compositional devices to the Gospel variations and shows that many apparent contradictions match techniques a first-century reader would recognize — transferal, displacement, spotlighting. This is a real explanatory gain, though some conservative readers regard it as conceding too much, and that internal Christian debate should be represented rather than hidden.

The practical upshot: judging the Gospels by the standards of a court transcript imposes a genre they never claimed. Judging them by ancient biographical standards, the differences among them look ordinary rather than damning.

Non-Christian sources — Tacitus on the execution under Pilate, Josephus on Jesus and on James, Pliny on early Christian worship, Suetonius, Lucian, and the Talmud — establish a basic framework: a Jewish teacher executed under Pilate, followed by a movement that worshipped him as divine very early.

Archaeology has confirmed numerous incidental details: the Pilate inscription at Caesarea, the Pool of Bethesda's five porticoes, the ossuary of a crucified man named Yehohanan showing that crucifixion victims could be buried, and Luke's accurate use of shifting provincial titles.

The limits should be stated plainly. Corroborated background does not establish miracles. Confirming that Luke knew his geography does not confirm the resurrection, and treating it as though it does is a fallacy skeptics rightly name. What corroboration establishes is that these are documents rooted in the world they describe, which is a precondition for taking their central claims seriously, not a substitute for arguing them.