How accurate is the text in the Bible?

[nicholas.slaydon]

I'm no expert on Bart Ehrman, but I do know that his arguments that we can't know what the original text of the New Testaments said because of a large number of textual variations is highly erroneous. If we were to take his position that the New Testament text is corrupted due to textual variation, and applied it to any other work of the ancient world, we would have to throw out every work of the ancient world. If textual variations equal corruption, then he would have to admit that if his theory that we can't know what the original text of the New Testament read, then he would have to admit that we don't know what Aristotle said, or Cicero, or Plato, or indeed any other writer in the ancient said because all of the manuscripts of their works contain textual variations.

No scholar of any of the works of the ancient world would embrace the sorts of positions on the works that they study that Erhman takes on the New Testament. However, textual criticism of the Bible is deeply rooted in bad faith arguments, and people who enter into textual critical studies with massive preconceptions (such as believing textual critics who enter into such studies with the preconception of divine inspiration, or the jaded former Christians, like Erhman who lost their faith due to textual variations and thus take a 180 degree turn from where they started and rather than believing that the Bible was divinely inspired believe that nobody can even know what the text actually said, and atheists who seek to propagate their ideology by undermining other peoples faith through a slap dash, rough shod handling of textual critical debates and studies).

[nicholas.slaydon]

The "contradictory accounts" in the Gospels are reflective of the different audiences for each Gospel, and the emphases of each discipline who composed them and their acoloytes who presumably wrote them down.

Including the fact that the writers of the Gospels, whomever they were, were not likely eyewitnesses to the events they are writing about. Never, in any Gospel account does the author say anything like "i saw" or "and he said to me" or "we did this", or "we did that", their descriptions instead were always as if they were recording what happened to other people, not what had happened to them. The writer of the Gospel of Luke is a perfect example, wherein he thanks his patron for funding his attempts to compile the eyewitness accounts of the ministry of Jesus.

So it makes sense that the accounts might not add up 100%, as peoples memories are not always accurate, and the compilers of the Gospels likely didn't share the same eyewitness sources for their compilations to begin with.