The Reliability Of The New Testament Text

I'm in the process of putting together more posts that will link to some representative material we've written over the years on a given topic. I've done that in the past with our posts on Jesus' resurrection, Roman Catholicism, and other subjects. I'm planning to eventually put all of these posts together into something like Steve Hays' topical index, but with more than his material.

What I want to do in this post is collect some links to our material on issues related to the textual reliability of the New Testament. As with the other link collections I've posted, this one isn't supposed to be exhaustive (of the subject or of our posts about it). My intention is to provide a good overview, hopefully including at least some of our best material on the subject, but I may overlook some posts or make some bad judgments about what should be included. There's no way to get Blogger, Google, or some other source to produce posts like this for us. As good as Google is for online searches, it often misses things. And it can't make a judgment about which posts at this blog are the best ones or are representative of what we've written on a subject. These things have to be done manually and fallibly, and they take a lot of time.

Dustin Segers wrote a post that provides an overview of a lot of the issues involved in judging the reliability of the text of the New Testament. He also provides some comparisons to the evidence we have for other ancient documents.

I wrote a three-part series that focused on the evidence pertaining to the period before our earliest manuscripts: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Steve Hays has written a post that addresses some of the problems with theories involving widespread corruption among the early Christians (widespread textual changes, widespread suppression of opponents, etc.). Read the comments section of the thread, since there's a lot of relevant material there as well.

In a review of James White's debate with Robert Price last year, I addressed Price's speculation that early Christianity might have standardized the New Testament text in a manner similar to what early Islam did with the Koran.

Steve wrote a post on the significance of textual criticism to Evangelicals and other modern groups.

I reviewed the 2009 debate between James White and Bart Ehrman on the subject "Does The Bible Misquote Jesus?". I also reviewed Ehrman's discussion with Peter Williams about the New Testament text that same year.

Last year, I participated in a lengthy discussion about the ending of Mark's gospel.

On the prospects of getting more textual certainty from an allegedly infallible church, see here and here.

Steve wrote about some objections that are often brought up by liberals and Roman Catholics, including the claim that proponents of Biblical inerrancy need to have inerrant autographs or inerrant copies.

Evan May wrote an article about how much modern versions of the Bible change the doctrinal content of scripture.