Is it true?
Can we trust the New Testament text?
Has it been changed over the centuries? Here is what the manuscripts show.
We do not have the original pages Paul or the Gospel writers wrote. We don't have the originals of any ancient book. What we have are copies, and the question is how good they are.
For the New Testament, the answer is: far better than for any other ancient text. There are more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus thousands more in Latin and other ancient languages. Some are very early.
Copies by hand are never perfect, and the manuscripts do differ in places. Scholars count around 300,000 differences. Most are minor, like word order. A few are bigger, and they are openly known and discussed. Because there are so many copies, scholars can compare them and see where and how the text changed.
More copies than any other ancient work
The New Testament survives in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, about 10,000 Latin ones and over 9,000 in other ancient languages such as Syriac and Armenian.
Sources
For comparison: Tacitus
The surviving parts of Tacitus's Annals rest mainly on two medieval manuscripts, written around AD 1000-1100, roughly 900 years after he wrote. Historians still use him with confidence.
Sources
P52, a tiny early fragment
This credit-card-sized scrap of John's Gospel (John 18) is kept at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Dates proposed range from the first half of the second century to around AD 200. It is generally seen as the earliest known New Testament fragment, though that is not certain.
Sources
Codex Sinaiticus
Written in the mid-fourth century, it contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Most of it is in the British Library, and the whole manuscript has been online since 2009.
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The variants, honestly
About 300,000 differences exist across all these copies, most of them trivial. The best known larger ones are the long ending of Mark (16:9-20) and the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), which are missing from the earliest manuscripts.
Sources
My verses
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work.
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.
Many have undertaken to compose an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by the initial eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
For we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.
Further reading
Links open independent sources, not church websites.