Idaho_Shooter: Copies of the New Testament can be found in more ancient manuscripts than any other work of ancient literature. There are an estimated 5,800 ancient Greek manuscripts alone of the New Testament, as well as thousands of others in languages like Aramaic and Latin. And some of these manuscripts were written in the first century on parchment, and they remain intact to this day. And many thousands of them predate the time periods that you mention above.
World renowned New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman is proficient in Greek and Aramaic and he has personally read thousands and thousands of historical New Testament texts…in the original languages…and he concludes that we can have a high degree of confidence that we can reconstruct the original text of the New Testament, the text that is in the Bibles that we use today, because of the abundance of textual evidence we have to compare. He says that any variations are largely minor and don’t obscure our ability to construct an accurate original text. And he’s not only an expert in biblical textual criticism, he’s also an atheist.
