The question of the historical reliability of the New Testament is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars and historians. Most scholars argue that the New Testament provides a historically accurate account of the life and teachings of Jesus, while others argue that the accounts in the New Testament have been altered over time and contain legendary and mythical elements.
The issue of the accuracy of the New Testament was that it was written some years after the events it describes, and it was written by a variety of authors with different perspectives and purposes. Also, a claim repeated by skeptics and leaders in other religions is that the texts of the New Testament have been copied and transmitted over the centuries, and there are differences in the manuscripts that have survived, which can make it difficult to determine the original text.
However, many scholars believe that despite these challenges, the New Testament can still be considered a valuable and authoritative historical source. For example, some of the details in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life, such as his baptism by John the Baptist, his trial before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and his crucifixion, are supported by other historical sources, and are agreed as fact by Christian and non-Christian scholars. Another note is that while there are indeed hundreds of textual variations between ancient manuscripts, this is an overstated claim as to the substance of the differences. Most of the changes are spelling differences, word order, punctuation changes and additions, and dialect differences. None of these have any ramifications for translators – and any uncertainty in translated differences are explicitly mentioned by the publishers of bibles in the footnotes!
Overall, we can be VERY certain that the Gospels we have today are as they were written by their original authors in the first century.
For more reasons to believe go to Curated Resources