Is the Bible Reliable?

The fear that "the Bible has been changed over the centuries — telephone-game style" is widespread and almost entirely backwards. The New Testament is the best-attested document of the ancient world by an enormous margin: over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus thousands in Latin and other languages, the earliest fragments within a generation or two of the originals. By contrast, most classical works survive in a handful of copies made a thousand years after the fact, and no one doubts those. We can see the transmission and reconstruct the text with very high confidence; the variants that exist are overwhelmingly trivial (spelling, word order), and none touches a core doctrine.

The dating worry — "the Gospels were written centuries later" — has also faded under scrutiny. The consensus places them within the first century, within living memory of the events, while eyewitnesses (friendly and hostile) were still alive to correct them. Paul's letters are earlier still, and 1 Corinthians 15 preserves a creed about the resurrection that scholars across the spectrum date to within a few years of the crucifixion.

What about contradictions? Many famous ones dissolve on inspection: different Gospel writers report the same event from different angles, with different emphases and details, exactly as independent witnesses do — the kind of variation that, in a courtroom, argues for authenticity rather than against it. Some genuine puzzles remain (numbers, chronologies, hard-to-harmonize accounts), and honesty admits them rather than forcing every one shut. But "puzzle" is not "disproof." The reasonable verdict, shared even by many skeptical scholars on the historical questions, is that the Bible is a remarkably well-preserved and historically serious set of documents — not a late, corrupted invention.