When you read the New Testament Bible do you ever wonder if what is written is from God and if it is reliable as authoritative holy documents? I know I have. I know there were times in my past that I questioned if what I was reading was true or if it was made up by a group of people forming a hoax trying to trick us into some kind of belief system that was not true. Maybe you have had those same thoughts. If not maybe you will and hopefully through these thoughts written here you will be well prepared to debate it in your own mind or with your friends who question it too.

I have had friends that question whether the New Testament if it is a reliable piece of Holy Scripture or not. Some have said the New Testament documents cannot be inerrant (without mistakes) because we do not have the original autographed manuscripts. My friends would say, “All we have are copies of copies of copies which are filled with thousands of mistakes.”

However, statements like this are extremely misleading. It is a fact that the New Testament is the best-attested book of antiquity based on two facts: 

# 1 the number of manuscripts available 

# 2 the date of the manuscripts to their original counterparts. 

When comparing the thousands of manuscripts to each other, textual scholars are able to reconstruct the text of the original autographed documents to about 99% accuracy.

So let’s talk about the discrepancies: There are about 138,000 words in the New Testament and only 1,400 of those words are questionable as to how they are translated. However, these words can be best described as trivial anyway. An example would be like: 

    • 1 John 1:4 – Some manuscripts say  “we write, so that our joy may be made complete”.  Other manuscripts say, “we write so that your joy…”.  It doesn’t really make a difference if it is “our” or “your”. Nothing doctrinal or theological hangs upon that kind of trivial uncertainty.  

So, only 1.01% of the words in the New Testament are uncertain. So when scholars pick up their Greek New Testament and begin to translate it they can rest sure that 99% of the words are accurate to the original words penned by the New Testament authors. 

When I pick up my New Testament today and you pick up yours. It should give us great confidence that we can read it and believe it. I hope you feel the same way. 

Can you believe it? You bet you can!