New Testament is reliable
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL TEST SHOWS THE NEW TESTAMENT IS RELIABLE
The military historian C. Sanders devised a three part test when investigating any historical document as to whether it was reliable. Because of space limitations, we'll look at just two of these. The first of these tests is the bibliographical test, which judges an ancient historical document to be more reliable the more manuscript copies that exist for it.
Also, it maintains the smaller the time gap that exists between the first copy of the document and the first surviving copy, the more reliable it is because there is less time for scribal errors to creep into its preserved text. By these two standards, the NT is the best attested ancient historical writing.
Some 24,633 known copies (including fragments, etc.) exist of it, with 5309 of these being in Greek. By contrast, the document with the next highest number of copies outside the Hebrew Old Testament (OT) (which has over 1700 copies) is Homer's Iliad, with 643. Other historical writings by prominent ancient historians have far fewer copies: Thucycides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 8; Herodotus, The Histories, 8; Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, 10.
Furthermore, the time gap between the earliest preserved copies and the autograph, or first manuscript, is much smaller for the NT than these works. For the NT, the gap is about 90 years or less, since most of it was first written before 70 A.D. Scholar John A.T. Robertson (in Redacting the New Testament) has maintained that every NT book was written before 70 A.D., including even John and Revelation.
Dates that place the writing of the NT in the second century have been generally discredited by scholars in recent decades. A fragment of John, dated to 125 A.D., is traditionally cited as the earliest copy known of any part of the NT.
However, nine fragments of the NT were found in 1972 in a cave by the Dead Sea. Among these fragments, part of Mark was dated to around 50 A.D., Luke 57 A.D., and Acts from 66 A.D. The earliest major manuscripts, such as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are dated to 325-50 A.D. and 350 A.D. respectively.
By contrast, the time gap is much larger for the pagan works mentioned above. For Homer, the gap is 500 years (900 b.c. for the original writing, 400 b.c. for the first copy), Caesar, it's 900-1000 years (c. 100-44 b.c. to 900 A.D.), Herodotus, 1300 years (c. 480-425 b.c. to 900 A.D.) and Thucycides, 1300 years (c. 400 b.c. to 900 A.D.).
Hence, the NT can be objectively judged more reliable than these pagan historical works both by having a much smaller time gap between when it was written and the first preserved copies, and in the number of ancient hand-written copies.