Since we no longer possess the originals, we’re faced with an important question: Are the copies of the New Testament we have today accurate replicas of the originals?

It’s become something of a fad recently for public figures to claim that our New Testament is not very close to the original. In “The Da Vinci Code,” for example, Dan Brown suggests (among a number of things) that the early Church just doctored up the New Testament to make Jesus look divine. On a more academic level, in his recent best-selling book “Misquoting Jesus,” Bart Ehrman argues that early scribes intentionally and unintentionally distorted so much of the New Testament that we can’t know what large portions of the original said.

These sorts of claims are shaking the faith of some. Just last week I met a distraught young man who told me Ehrman’s book “completely destroyed” his faith. Followers of Jesus need to be ready to respond to claims like this (I Peter 3:15). There are four points I’d encourage you to keep in mind.

First, there’s a scholarly discipline known as “textual criticism” that specializes in collecting and comparing copies of ancient manuscripts to determine when, where and how mistakes crept into a text as it was being copied. In this way experts help us get back as close as possible to the original text.

So how has the New Testament fared in light of textual criticism? In a nutshell: fantastically. We have much more reason to be confident that our version of the New Testament is close to the original than we have for any other ancient work in history.

We possess over 25,000 New Testament manuscripts to compare and contrast as we work our way back to the original. The next most accurate ancient work is Homer’s “Iliad,” for which we have less than 700 published manuscripts. Most ancient texts have far less than that. For example, we possess only nine Greek manuscripts of Josephus’ “Jewish War” and 10 good manuscripts of Caesar’s “Gallic War.”

Obviously, the New Testament is in a class by itself. If anyone is going to doubt that the copies of the Gospels we possess today are reasonably close to the originals, they would have to completely reject the reliability of virtually every other ancient text.

Second, not only is the sheer number of New Testament manuscripts far greater than any other work, but many of these manuscripts can be dated much closer to the originals. For example, our earliest New Testament fragment comes from the first half of the second century. Over 20 portions of the Gospels can be dated to the third and fourth centuries. And five virtually complete texts of the New Testament date from the fourth and fifth centuries. By contrast, the earliest manuscript we have for Homer’s “Iliad” comes approximately 900 years after the original—and that’s considered exceptionally good by the standards of textual criticism!

Third, we can reconstruct the vast majority of the New Testament just by compiling quotes from the church fathers in the first three centuries.

This is another way experts can cross-check ancient documents. If someone in the second century quoted one of the Gospels in a sermon, for example, and a copy of that sermon matches the ancient copies we have of the New Testament, it helps prove the Bible’s reliability. This fact alone completely blows apart any conspiracy theory (like we find in The Da Vinci Code) that people were doctoring the text in the third and fourth centuries.

Finally, even with this unprecedented wealth of material that experts have, we must grant that we can’t always be completely certain about every small detail in the original text. But this need not worry us. The vast majority of scholars grant that only about 2 percent of the New Testament is really questionable, and none of the passages in question affect the substance of the New Testament’s message. Most importantly, those passages that establish Jesus’ identity as the divine Son of God and savior of the world are rock solid.

So are Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman right when they claim the New Testament’s been doctored up? No way.

Making claims like this may sell a lot of books and generate a lot of buzz. But they should never cause disciples to lose confidence that our Bible is an accurate replica of the original.


Greg Boyd is the Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul and former professor of theology at Bethel University. He has published 15 books, including the best-selling and award-winning “Letters From a Skeptic” and most recently “The Myth of a Christian Nation.”