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Why trust the Bible?

On the basis of these three tests, the New Testament Gospels are overwhelmingly more trustworthy than any other ancient manuscript-ancient manuscripts that we had always accepted as undeniably accurate. To recreate the texts by Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and others that I had read in college, scholars often had only tens of existing manuscripts to refer to. Yet for the New Testament we have over five thousand manuscripts in Greek plus an equal number in various translations-not to mention all the quotations of it in letters and other writings from the first centuries after Christ. Additionally, the earliest New Testament manuscripts we have were written within decades of Jesus' ministry-close enough to the actual events that the possibility of fabrications having crept into them was statistically insignificant.

In contrast, the purported copies of most ancient manuscripts that we have today were created centuries after the death of the author. Finally, while in even the limited numbers of copies of other ancient texts we can see significant variation from manuscript to manuscript (chapters may be missing in one, sentences and paragraphs conflict, entire sections are clearly edited, et cetera), the variations in the thousands of manuscripts for the New Testament are less than one percent and never interfere with the sense of the passage. Clearly, the New Testament is more accurate than any other history from antiquity.

From the article "Jolted into Dealing with the Historical Reality of Christ", This Rock, Volume 12, Number 6, July-August 2001, link

There is a big difference between the Bible, particularly the New Testament, and the Quran. The earliest New Testament texts were written within the lifetime of the apostles, to record permanently the apostles witness that Christ had indeed risen from the dead. Mohammed never left a definitive book before he died, The Quran was gathered together by tales handed down orally. It is far beyond the scope of this little web site to present all this information, but the following links are helpful:

Truth Unchanged, Texts Unchanging? A comparison of the history of the Quran and the New Testament.
The Textual History of the Qur'an A great read on the history of the Quran.
A Perfect Quran The book, delving into inconsistencies and textual problem with the Quran, is very long. Click on the "Book Summary" for a good overview.
Defense of the historical accuracy of the New Testament.
Evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament More proofs of the accuracy of the New Testament.
Combating Biblical Skepticism The first two sections are interesting, but skip to the "Traditional Notions of Authenticity" for evidence of the New Testament's authenticity.