With no original texts and 400,000 contradictions in the COPIES of the New Testament, the bible is unstrustworthy. Read Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus'.

Ehrman is a serious scholar and the variants are real; nobody honest denies that the copies differ. What is in dispute is what the number means, and whether many differences add up to an untrustworthy book.

1. Variants are differences, not contradictions. The figure of roughly 400,000 counts every point of difference between every surviving manuscript. A contradiction requires two claims that cannot both be true. Spelling, word order, and 'Christ Jesus' versus 'Jesus Christ' are differences; they are not contradictions, and most of them cannot even be carried into English.

2. The count tracks the number of copies. The New Testament survives in about 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus thousands of Latin, Syriac, and Coptic copies and thousands more quotations in the church fathers. More copies means more places to count a difference. The number is large because the evidence is abundant, and abundant evidence is how you reconstruct an original.

3. No ancient book has an original. That is the normal condition of antiquity, not a scandal specific to the Bible. We do not have Thucydides' autograph or Tacitus' either. Measured by the gap between the events and the earliest copies, the New Testament stands closer to its subject than nearly anything in classical literature. The theological claim riding on that is not that every copy would be flawless, but that God's word would not fail: 'The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever' (Isaiah 40:8).

4. Only a few variants matter. Textual critics sort variants into categories, and the operative one is 'meaningful and viable': it changes the sense and has real manuscript support. The great majority fail one test or the other. That is why the published critical editions are stable and why the differences between them are small enough to list.

5. The text is reconstructed, not guessed. The question is not whether variants exist but whether the earliest reading can be identified, and the answer is usually yes, by comparing manuscript families, dates, and the habits of scribes. Daniel B. Wallace and others put the recoverable text above 99 percent. That is a claim about method, and the method is public.

6. The disputed passages are named. The woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9-20), and the comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7) are known textual questions, and Christians who care about truth should say so out loud. None of them carries the central gospel message. Pretending otherwise is what makes skeptics distrust the whole business.

7. The objection uses the text it distrusts. To know there are 400,000 variants, you must compare manuscripts and reconstruct what they are variants from, which assumes a recoverable original. And 'the Bible is untrustworthy' is a sentence you can only form by reading the Bible closely. Textual criticism is the discipline that produces the objection's own evidence; the objection then uses that evidence to indict the discipline.

8. The core predates the copies. Paul passes on what he 'received': 'that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day' (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Most scholars date that creed to within a few years of the crucifixion, which is earlier than any manuscript we possess. The central claims are not hostage to the copying process.

9. Inerrancy is a separate argument. Whether the Bible is inerrant is a theological claim on which Christians differ; both sides cite 'All Scripture is breathed out by God' (2 Timothy 3:16), and they disagree about what that guarantees. The Chicago Statement's formula about error in all that is affirmed is not the same thing as 'no two manuscripts differ.' The textual evidence does not settle that debate, and the case for trusting the text does not depend on settling it.

10. Untrustworthy is the wrong word. A text with thousands of independent witnesses and a stable core is not untrustworthy. It is the best-attested text of antiquity, copied imperfectly, the way every ancient text was copied. 'Imperfectly transmitted' is true and interesting. 'Untrustworthy' is a conclusion the evidence will not carry.

The variants are a real phenomenon and a manageable one. They show us a text copied by hand for centuries and reconstructed with unusual confidence, not a text we cannot know. If the standard is 'no differences among copies,' then no ancient document passes, including the ones that tell us what Ehrman's sources said.

Sources: Daniel B. Wallace; Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts; Bruce Metzger; The Text of the New Testament; James White; Bart Ehrman; Misquoting Jesus.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!