Is the New Testament (NT) reliable? (Part I: The reliability of the manuscripts)
NT critic Bart Ehrman claims that the manuscripts we have today don’t represent the original writings, but in fact are error-ridden copies that cannot be trusted. The number of variations among these manuscripts even exceed the number of words in the NT in its original Greek language. He suggests that there are about 400,000 variations in the manuscripts we have and about 138,200 words of the Greek NT; that means that for every word that exists there’s around 3 options for it! However, is that really an indication of the accuracy of the manuscripts? and what do the numbers really mean? To answer this question and determine the reliability of the NT manuscripts, we need to look at how historians assess any work of antiquity coming from the ancient world. Historians generally assess any text by looking at three things: A) the number of manuscript copies that exist…