Muslims, Why does text prove historically the Gospel is better preserved than the Quran?

We know the New Testament we have today is true to its original form because:

1. We have such a huge number of manuscript copies -- over 24,000.

2. Those copies agree with each other, word for word, 99.5% of the time.

3. The dates of these manuscripts are very close to the dates of their originals

* Ancient history supports the Bible's accuracy as a historical record.

* The Gospels provide multiple reliable accounts of Jesus' life.

* Archaeology backs up the Biblical account.

* Textual scholarship confirms that the books of the Bible have not changed since they were first written.

When one compares the text of one manuscript with another, the match is amazing. Sometimes the spelling may vary, or words may be transposed, but that is of little consequence. Concerning word order, Bruce M. Metzger, professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, explains: "It makes a whale of a difference in English if you say, 'Dog bites man' or 'Man bites dog' -- sequence matters in English. But in Greek it doesn't. One word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence."

Dr. Ravi Zacharias, a visiting professor at Oxford University, also comments: "In real terms, the New Testament is easily the best attested ancient writing in terms of the sheer number of documents, the time span between the events and the documents, and the variety of documents available to sustain or contradict it. There is nothing in ancient manuscript evidence to match such textual availability and integrity."

The New Testament is humanity's most reliable ancient document. Its textual integrity is more certain than that of Plato's writings or Homer's Iliad.

The Old Testament has also been remarkably well preserved. Our modern translations are confirmed by a huge number of ancient manuscripts in both Hebrew and Greek, including the mid-20th century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls hold the oldest existing fragments of almost all of the Old Testament books, dating from 150 B.C. The similarity of the Dead Sea manuscripts to hand copies made even 1,000 years later is proof of the care the ancient Hebrew scribes took in copying their scriptures.

@tebligat: Wrong, the word in John 14-16 is paraklētos it means: Helper,Advocate, or Comforter not Muhammad. I can easily debunk and refute you. Oh, btw those verses you mentioned, they aren't in the Bible, nice try.

@stiggy: The original Bible was put together 300 years after Jesus. But the original Gospels were written in the First Century. We have 8,000+ original Greek Manuscripts, and 15,000+ others in other languages. The Gospel in no way has been changed.

actually you wont be able to get a book that old if it is still around. I remember seeing a documentary about the tribal people is Saudi Arabia and how they actually had a very very old Qur'an hidden in the dessert buried under ground. They said that it has been kept a secret and it is the most priced possession their clan has. So if the government actually was able to get a hold of it they would have taken it away from them and they will lose priced possession. and since there are many tribal desert people how many Qur'ans do you think will be hidden?

Hmm, I don't know, but considering that Jesus was around at 0BC, then why did your 'original' manuscripts pop up about 300 years later? Surely 300 years is enought iem for it to be corrupted, and we all know that the catholic clergy spread several lies about christianity - therefore corrupting it. Quran was spread mainly through teaching from one person to another at first, although there were written copies. Also, I think many of the crusades christians ran against us may have destroyed the original copies, but the wording is still the same - that's what matters to me. If it had been changed, the quran wouldn't be so perfect. There are so many miracles, and specific words ahve meaning too. For example the words man and women have precisely the same amount of mentionings, the fruits and vegetables mentioned have medicinal importance, for example olives are mentioned 7 times in the quran, and figs once, and a japanese scientist (without reading the quran) found out that 7 olives and one fig had the precise amount of a certian chemical (I forget which one) that keeps your body extremely healthy. As soon as he realised this was said in the quran he converted straight away. http://navedz.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/by-the-fig-...