Sadly, we don’t have any original copies of the Gospels. It’s probably gone in dust. 🙁
But fairly, we also don’t have any original copy of any classical author of Antiquity.

How can we know that it wasn’t changed, corrupted, added, suppress, etc… through time?

Scholars use a technique called textual criticism, a method where we compare the surviving copies to reconstruct the originals.

	Any ancient history	New Testament
Numbers of surviving copies after 300 years	0	124

We can be much better confident about what was written early with the New Testament than other writings.

According to Dr. Daniel Wallace, about only 2% was added in more than 14 century. Again, with the help of textual criticism and the massive numbers of copy that we have, we are able to deduce which ones were added or deleted.

The oldest fragment we have currently is the Rylands Library P52 (125 – 175 AD), from the Gospel of John (90 AD).
The text is from the chapter 18, verse 31-33, 37-38.

The earliest complete New Testament manuscripts are the Codex Sinaiticus (330 – 360 AD) & Codex Vaticanus (300 – 325 AD).

In between the gap, we also have Church Fathers quotations.

Plus, we have early non-Christians sources (same period of time) about some of the internal claims of the Gospels.

Conclusions? The wording of the Bible is far way more accurate & reliable than any classical author.

Scholars have found about 400k+ variants/differences between the surviving manuscripts (around 2-3 differences per words). That’s a lot! We don’t have any copy that is exactly similar to another one. Good reason to be skeptical.

It sounds big, but the reason why there’s so much variant it’s because we have a lot, and a lot of copy. If we only have 1 copy, there would be 0 variant. And that number doesn’t mean much because 99% of them are insignificant. Bart Ehrman repeats that in every debate he has with evangelical scholars. The 1% remaining do have a meaningful impact, but doesn’t affect any fundamental doctrine of Christianity.

Ex: the number of the beast is 666 (Revelation 13:18), but our earliest manuscripts of Revelations tells us that the number is 616, perhaps the address of the neighbor of the beast (just kidding), but honestly, this doesn’t affect any doctrine at all

Divide the number of variants (400k) by the number of manuscripts we have (24k), and we get a small number of 16,7 variants per manuscript on average.

There are about 2-3 variants per words in the New Testament, but after checking them, it’s mostly spelling errors and doesn’t affect the teachings of the Church.

When we talk about the Bible being the inspired Word of God, it doesn’t guarantee that the modern translation we have today is 100% perfect. It’s reliable, yes! It claims that the original version and the message of Jesus Christ is truly the Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit who guides the authors.

Authors
Livy (B.C. 59 – A.D. 17)
Tacitus (58 – 120 AD)
Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 AD)
Plutarch (46 – 120 AD)
Josephus (37 – 100 AD)

Livy (B.C. 59 – A.D. 17) wrote 142 volumes, only 25% survived
Tacitus (A.D. 58 – 120) : only 1/3 of his work survived
Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23 – 79) : 200 copies, only 700 years later do we have the 1st copy
Plutarch (A.D. 46 – 120) : 800 years after he wrote
Josephus (A.D. 37 – 100) : 20 copies not earlier than the 9th century

How many New Testament manuscript copies to we have to compare with, before the invention of the printing press (1440 AD)?

Language	Number of manuscripts
Greek	5,856
Armenian	2,000+
Coptic	975
Gothic	6
Ethiopian	600+
Latin (Old + Vulgate)	10,100+
Syriac	350+
Georgian	89
Slavic	4,000+

Total number for Greek + non-Greek manuscripts
23,986

Total number of Old + New Testament combined
66,286

Total number of Greek + non-Greek manuscripts

We didn’t have any official Holy Bible until the 4th century.
It was during the Council of Nicea, Rome, Hippo (393 AD), Carthage that it was officially recognized.

Meanwhile, the Church already begun to affirm doctrines based on the New Testament content and the Tradition (ex: writing of the Church Fathers) that have being pass down to them.

Also known as “The Teaching of the 12 Apostles”, it’s a 1st-century document, considered as the oldest catechism that we have. It gave instructions about Christian ethics, baptism, the Eucharist, and Church organization. Notice that if the sacraments are already mentioned in the 1st century, and they are rooted in what Jesus said and did, we can be confident about what the Gospels wrote about them.

Some instructions inside the Didache that is mentioned in the Gospels
Baptism: Trinitarian immersion (chapter 7 to 10); confirm the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Gospel passage (BIBLE VERSE)
Fasting: (chapter 8)
Daily prayer: Our Father prayer; confirm the passage where Jesus taught how to pray in (BIBLE VERSE)
Eucharist: (text here); confirm all the passages where Jesus taught implicitly & explicitly about the Eucharist (BIBLE VERSE)

1 million + Church Fathers quotations

7,957 verses in the New Testament

125 quotes / verse in average

Let’s pretend that we lost the 4 historical Gospels from the Bible. Well, can we reconstruct a good summary of their works? Yes. How? By using external sources. We’re pretty lucky, the Apostles had students themselves, we call them the Early Church Fathers. In their writings, they refers back to the original texts, so we can be sure that the stuffs in the New Testament are still authentic & accurate to the originals, if you have some doubt about the copying of the Bible through time until now.

Let’s pretend that one day, we completely wipe out all the manuscripts of the 4 Gospels, do you think we can reconstruct them back, mostly? Yeah, of course. With the help of the Church Fathers.

There’s more than 1 million + quotations from the Church Fathers’s writings about the Gospels!

And the New Testament itself has more than 7,957 verses.
That would be an average of 125 quotes per verses.
Now, that doesn’t mean that every single verses have a specific quotation for it!
It’s just an brief overview to give you a general idea; and of course, the central teachings of the Christian faith are mostly focus & repeated through time (Jesus is God, born from a virgin, crucified, die & rose from the dead, etc…)

That’s very impressive! Here’s an example of their works:

Pretty impressive huh?

Now let’s see what non-Christian sources can gives us about the life of Jesus / early Christianity.

Apocryphal Gospels.
The early Church Fathers knew which ones are real and which ones are forgeries.
The false ones are teaching & promoting Gnosticism, a philosophy that is contrary to the ones spread by the Apostles. We see them re-surging in the “Da Vinci Code” book & movie. They were created to attract people toward Gnosticism & borrow the names of the disciples to look more reliable & authoritative.

While all 4 Gospels are written within the 1st century, others were written from the 2nd century and above.

Here’s some examples:
– Gospel of Peter (2nd century)
– Gospel of Thomas (2nd century)
– Gospel of Mary Magdalene

“The question isn’t to see if the Gospels are 100% accurate so I can trust it, the question is, do the Bible have enough evidences in order for me to make a 100% commitment out of it?”

Memories from emotions

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

1) When you have a very strong emotional feeling (lost someone, earn a promotion, painful suffering, psychological wound, depression, sadness, etc…), your body release dopamine in your brain to save the information so it’s saved directly in your memory.

2) When you believed that you are a disciple of the Son of God or the real Messiah, I’m pretty sure that you really care & have a very high level of attention to what he says to you.

3) My grandma (who passed away) had no problem telling me several details of World War 2 from Viet-Nam. And yet, it’s being more than 40 years, later.

4) When you lose someone, we tend to remember important quotes they told us so we remember them as a valuable life lesson.

Several events can’t be forget: seeing Jesus being crucified, seeing Jesus alive, seeing Jesus accomplishing miracles, seeing Jesus doing exorcism, I mean, people aren’t ready to forget that.

Cultural transmission is faster by oral

People of that time didn’t know how to read and write, only the educated or high social-class people (Pharisees, scribes, etc…) has that ability. The goal is to spread the ‘good news’ message as much as possible, and quickly. What is the best way to do it, if majority of people don’t know how to read? By oral transmission (mouth to ears).
Since people can’t read, they had to rely on their memories. Children are taught the 613 Jewish laws since their young ages.

Keep repeating

“Practice makes perfect.”

What did the Apostles do as a “full-time job” after the resurrection of Jesus? Preaching all the time! If someone ask me to tell the name of my family, I could easily do it, because I do it daily. Not only did the Apostles hear Jesus’ teaching over and over (3 years in a row), with a high knowledge of the Old Testament, but they became full-time preachers after his resurrection. They just did that all day-long: preaching! When you repeat the same message over and over again to other people, I’m pretty sure you know & master your material pretty well!

All my high school French teachers know their grammars perfectly (or almost) because they keep teaching it as a full-time job for years and years.

None of them seems to contradict each others on major theological issues.

Takes times for consulting other eye-witness
…
Within 1 generation after the death of Christ, eye-witness are still alive. If you forgot a specific detail, you can also go back to ask them. Or, the ones who have the good answers could have time to correct the errors as well.

Presence of Old Testament
The disciples were truly convinced that Jesus was the Messiah because he proves everything that was predicted in the Old Testament (virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, etc…). As Josephus states, at that time period, there was a lot of false Messiah. But only Jesus was able to accomplish them all. I mean, they could have being skeptical about him, like several times in the New Testament, but again and again, Jesus proves that He was the one that people where waiting for. They were so sure of it they were willing to die for it. And since Jesus did accomplish all the prophecies, the writers could easily rely back on the Old Testament (which is easily accessible by the way) to describe how Jesus fulfills it, as we can see on several passages as well: (BIBLE VERSE).

Since Jesus is the true Messiah that fulfill all the prophecies of the Old Testament, it would make it easier for the writers to remember specifics predictions of the coming of Jesus. Since they truly believe that Jesus is the one, and they saw, listen, live with Him all the time, and witness his resurrection, they could have rely on the ancient texts in order to remember details of what Jesus did & say. I mean, if they weren’t convince that Jesus is the Messiah, they could have leave him alone, like what Josephus tell, there was a lot of false Messiah on that time.

Criteria of embarrassment
If you want to convince others about the truth of your message, you can’t just make it looks good all the time. You have to be honest & admit that there’s embarrassing material about you. Also, the whole Bible is telling honest flaws of humanity, claiming that we’re perfect, compared to a lot of other ancient history books or sacred books.

Here’s some examples of embarrassing stories:

• Jews were waiting for a warrior-type Messiah like King David, not a dying carpenter
• Peter was called “Satan” by Jesus (Matthew 16:23)
• Thomas the Apostle was skeptic about the resurrection (John 20:25)
• Women were the firsts to discover the empty tomb
• Peter doubt and sink under the water (Matthew 14:30)

Accurate transmission

Presence of problematic passages
If the writers knew that there was passages in the New Testament which they don’t like or could possibility create an a controversy for the readers, they could just have simply remove them. But no, it’s still there. Great are the numbers of passage in the Bible which modern atheists use to attack the Holy Scriptures. Well, that’s a good example of how honest people were when they copied the texts. As a believer, I don’t tear down something just because I don’t like it, I have the responsibility to dig deeper.

Since people truly believe in what they wrote to be truth, the risk that it imply can be dramatic:
– lose of their salvation for false information

The Bible isn’t intend to be a scientific manual.
“If we read the Bible with a very high standard of precision consistently, the whole history of the ancient world would be gone, you’ll have nothing left. The NT is extremely early and well-documented, with external collaboration and archeological evidences.” – Dr. Craig Evans, New Testament scholar (interviewed by Dr. Scott M. Sullivan)
…

External evidences
– Dr. N.T. Wright says the fast & rapid growth & expansion of Christianity in human history is due to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
– Archeology & artefacts (Shroud of Turin, relics, tombs, etc…)

“I was…too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myth” – C.S. Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia”

Transmission bias
– Jewish people have incredible well-developed memories
– Torah wasn’t always accessible or affordable; people memorize to bring back home
– If it has been 40 years since you’ve been teaching the same thing, there’s a good chance you will remember
– a math teacher might remember formulas because they teach it repeatedly everyday for a long period of time
– God coming down to earth is an unforgettable and emotional moment; you can’t forget something as powerful as that
– my grandma despite her age was able to tell me all the details of her experience of the WW2
– Apostles wrote the Gospel and taught it to new disciples (Early Church Fathers) who wrote documents which refers directly back to the Apostles’ letters
– They were inspired by the Holy Spirit, who unites minds

There were many authors, not just one, they could have told different stories, but they all told a consistent story and didn’t contradict each other.

We don’t have 3 different Jesus, but 3 eyewitness accounts of Jesus

There’s controversial passages, it might prove their honesty to not hide the truth (it makes a preacher’s life harder to prepare a homily / sermon but they didn’t took it away)

• Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary
• Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, professor of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina
• “Evidences that demands a verdict”, Josh McDowell & Sean McDowell, PhD
• “The Historical Reliability of the New Testament, Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs”, Dr. Craig L. Blomberg