Historical Reliability of the Gospels

The following arguments analyze the historical and objective evidence for the Gospel accounts.  Some of the arguments relate to the New Testament as a whole, while other specifically upon the four Gospels.

1. The New Testament documents are the best attested documents of antiquity in terms of total number of manuscripts.

Generally speaking, very few manuscripts of the ancient classical writers (Aristotle, Plato, Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides, Herodotus, etc.) exist.  The best cases average about twenty extant manuscripts for any given historical work.  And this number is generally considered an exceptional quantity in terms of manuscript attestation.  However, in most instances far fewer manuscripts remain.  In fact, for most authors's works the number amounts to a mere handful.  Yet by the accepted standards of historiography, even those are not rejected as inauthentic or unreliable on the the basis of their sparse number.  The reality is that some ancient documents are accepted as authentic test with extremely thin manuscript attestation.

In stark contrast to these familiar classical works, the New Testament documents are backed by an astounding quantity of manuscript evidence.  For example, more than 5,000 individual Greek manuscripts that contain all or part of the New Testament exist.  These manuscripts are augmented by more than 8,000 copies of the Vulgate, and important Latin version of the Bible translated by the early-fifth century Western church father, Jerome.  Further attestation comes in the form of several thousand early New Testament manuscripts translated into Eastern languages such as Syriac, Coptic Armenian, Slavic, and Ethiopic.

Even without  these thousands of extant manuscripts, virtually the entire New Testament text could be reproduced from specific scriptural citations within the written (and preserved) sermons, commentaries, and various other works of the early church fathers.  These Christian leaders, apologists, and writers served from the second through the fifth centuries.  The Patristic writers, as they are also called included (among others) such prominent Christian figures as Tertullian, Athanasius, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine.

The New Testament stands as the best attested document of the ancient world.

Excerpt from Without a Doubt, Author - Kenneth R. Samples
(pages 92-93)