The Reliability of the New Testament

Now that the reliability of the Qur’an has been covered, I will address the reliability of the New Testament. As someone who often discusses the NT with Muslims, I have noticed that people share many of the same misconceptions about the New Testament. I will address these “Islamic myths” that come up so often.

Myth #1: The New Testament does not exist in the original Greek.

False. Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, false. You can view Codex Sinaiticus—the oldest (mid-4th century) complete copy of the New Testament—online by clicking here. You will notice that the entire NT is in koine Greek—the original language of the Bible. For those who didn’t click the link, the picture above is a picture of the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark.

You can even own your own copy of the NT in Greek, like me! Here’s the one I own. I cannot count the number of times I have been told by Muslims, “if only the Christians had the original Bible! They would believe what we believe!” Folks, we do have the NT in the original language, please stop making this claim if you want to be taken seriously.

Furthermore, if we were to approach the Qur’an and the NT in terms of the preservation of their messages—the NT is much purer than the Qur’an. The language of the Qur’an, as I have demonstrated, was a mess and open to much error in transcription because of this issue. Early copyists were able to copy and preserve the message of the NT because it was written in Koine Greek—a well-established language spoken by the common man. The Qur’an, by contrast, was dictated at a time when the Arabic language was early in development and quite uncommon. As the language developed in subsequent centuries, it was very easy for copyists to misread the Qur’an and therefore make errors when producing a copy. Consider how different modern English is from Old English and Middle English. A modern reader simply would not be able to read a document written in Middle English. Likewise, given the rapid development of the Arabic language during the early centuries of Islam, the Qur’an was highly vulnerable to corruption.

Myth #2: The Greek as it is today has been corrupted.

After establishing that we do indeed have the NT in the original language, most Muslims resort to the claim that the NT has been corrupted over time and appeal to the Qur’an to support their claims (Surah 2:75,79; Surah 3:78; Surah 3:187; Surah 5:13-14; Surah 6:91). Unfortunately, this is merely another example of an error found in the Qur’an.

While I have demonstrated that the Qur’an has been purposely and heavily edited, the same cannot be said of the New Testament. At a whopping 24,000 copies of manuscripts/pieces of manuscripts (5,000 in Koine Greek), the NT blows any other ancient text out of the water. Homer’s Iliad comes in second place at only 650 copies. Even if a mere fraction of these manuscripts are usable (i.e. they contain a significant amount of legible text), say as low as 10%, that still leaves the number of available and usable manuscripts at 2,400—over three times the number of Homer’s Iliad. The sheer amount of manuscripts we have is evidence enough that it would have been nearly impossible for the Apostle Paul or the Early Church to purposely alter the NT and get rid of any variant texts, as Muslims like to claim happened. Consider how difficult it would be for Christians, all over the Roman Empire, to alter every single manuscript of their scriptures, especially given that early Christians endured periods of persecution until the accession of Constantine in 313 AD.

And with the number of manuscripts we have available, most scholars believe that we know over 99% of what the original manuscripts of the New Testament said with virtual certainty. Contrary to legend in the Islamic community, this is orders of magnitude better than what can be claimed about the Qur’an. On top of this, about 95% of variations found in the New Testament text are irrelevant- spelling and punctuation mistakes that change nothing about the meaning. Such is not true of the Qur’an which was intentionally corrupted in order to conform to an arbitrarily chosen standard reading. The other 5% of variations found were likely intentional—but the vast majority are easily eliminated as corruptions so that scholars can, very simply, establish the textual purity of the New Testament. The message of the original NT is the same message of the current NT, and the content of the NT is much more historically reliable than the content of the Qur’an (a topic I have addressed).

Books on the compilation/transmission/preservation of the NT:

• Arthur G. Patzia, The Making of the New Testament: Origin, Collection, Text and Canon
• Archibald M. Hunter, Introducing the New Testament
• Bruce Metzger & Bart D. Erhman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration

Myth #3: Even if the Greek exists and hasn’t been corrupted, people aren’t translating it properly and therefore the message has been lost.

After establishing the existence and preservation of the NT in the original koine Greek, there is still the issue of the 450+ English translations of the Bible. Obviously if there are so many translations scholars aren’t properly translating the original Greek resulting in a corrupt message, right? False.

First, being able to read/write/translate koine Greek is a bare minimum for anyone who desires to even be accepted to any graduate school for general religious studies—let alone New Testament studies. I am an undergrad taking koine Greek and I know people my age who can already read/write/translate koine Greek. Claiming that scholars are just incapable of translating the NT is a laughable claim—you can have bad translators/translations, but that doesn’t mean the message is lost or that none/most scholars cannot properly translate the NT.

Second, the reason there are so many different English translations is because each translation has a specific audience and each translator takes a different approach. For example, some translations like the ESV or NASB were meant to be more literal translations (the NASB even maintains the Greek syntax, which makes it difficult to read in English for some). Other translations like the NLT or MSG (if you even consider the MSG a translation) are meant to make the Scriptures easy to understand and directed at an audience with a different reading level.

Third, translating anything from any one language to another will result in different translations. This is even the case with the Qur’an, all you need to do is simply set different English translations side by side and you will notice a difference between Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, Muhammad Asad, Shakir, Ghali, Khan, etc. They are just as varied as English translations of the Bible. This is because sometimes there is more than one specific word that can be used when going from one language to another, the word كافر for example, can be translated as ‘unbeliever’, ‘infidel’, ’faithless’, ‘non-religious’, ‘godless’, etc. Translating, also, is not a completely unbiased business. You see this even in translations of the Qur’an that, in order to be more politically correct, will translate كافر as ‘unbeliever’. While this is an accurate translation, ‘unbeliever’ also sounds a lot kinder than the more commonly used translation of كافر, which is ‘infidel’.

Another example, pertaining specifically to the Greek to English translations of the New Testament, is the recent rendering by the translators of the ESV (the English translation I read) of the Greek word “δοῦλος” (pronounced ‘doulos’) as ‘bondservant’ instead of ‘slave’ in certain passages of the New Testament. This is meant to help the reader better understand the message the author was trying to relay. While people may disagree upon whether or not this is the best way to translate δοῦλος it does not change the fact that the original text still says δοῦλος and it does not change the fact that ‘bondservant’, though different from ‘slave’, is still an accurate way of translating the original word from Greek to English.

All in all, there will be some bad translations here and there, but it would be silly and illogical to say that because of this the entire message of the New Testament has been lost or that each translation has a different message.

The New Testament is one of, if not the most, well preserved ancient text(s) we have. When put through the same type of textual criticism the NT faces, the Qur’an fails the test. With all the editing and burning of variant texts, the Islamic holy book does not even compare. I hope this was helpful in putting an end to Islamic myths concerning the preservation of the New Testament.