Is the Bible reliable?
Yes it is.
The copies are so accurate that all of the biblical documents are
98.5% textually pure. The 1.5% that is in question is mainly nothing more than spelling errors and occasional word omissions like the words "the", "but", etc. This reduces any serious textual issues to a fraction of the 1.5% and none of these copying errors affects doctrinal truths.
Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940's, the oldest extant copy of any Old Testament writings were the Masoretic Text dated around 916 AD. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, a complete copy of Isaiah was found. Its date was 125 BC.
The difference in dates between the oldest copy and the newly discovered Isaiah document was 1000 years. This provided a pristine opportunity to judge the copying accuracy of the Old Testament documents since it would be easily discernable which errors crept in over 1000 years.
The documents proved to be 95% textually identical. The 5 percent that was different were mainly misspellings of words and did not constitute any threat to the content or reliability of the text. This shows how accurately it was transmitted.
If the critics of the Bible want to disregard it because some of the copies of the documents are not perfectly identical, then they must also throw out other ancient writings which are no where near as well preserved as the biblical documents (Caesar, Plato, and Aristotle etc.)
The New Testament documents fall into three categories: 1) Greek manuscript copies, 2) other language copies, and 3) citations in early church writings. The NT was written in Greek and we have more than 5000 different Greek Manuscripts from which to compare. Additionally, there are another 19,000 manuscripts of ancient origin that are translations. That is, we have 19,000 manuscripts of the New Testament in Latin, ..... And finally, all of the NT (except for 11 verses) can be reconstructed from quotes of early church writings. It is very well preserved.
The New Testament is more reliable/accurate in it's copies than texts by Caesar, Plato, and Aristotle. Interesting eh...
http://www.carm.org/demo2/bible/reliable.htm
this page is where i got the info from and it has a really good table summarising the reliablilty of the New Testament in comparison to other historical texts. It's amazing.
