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Aland and Aland in their 1995 publication, The Text of the New Testament. They compare Nestle-Aland's Greek New Testament with seven other editions and conclude that 62.9% of verses in the Nestle-Aland version differ from at least one of these editions. This excludes differences in spelling or of one word. The proportion of variant-free verses is highest for 1 Timothy at 81.4% (the only one above 80%) and lowest for Mark at 45.1% accuracy. The gospels together score just 54.5%, with none being above 60%.

Another study, by Aland, Black, Martini, Metzger, and Wikgren in 1968, using slightly different criteria, found that 81.8% of verses of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament were textually certain, 1.6% were virtually certain, 6.1% were doubtful to some degree, 8.8% were of considerable doubt, and 1.7% were very highly doubtful. Adding in the "virtually certains", this gives an accuracy of 83.4%. In other words, there was uncertainty with over 1300 verses, including more than 830 of considerable doubt or worse.

These studies only consider variations between different versions. Neither study takes into account that much of what is in the Bible is arguably fiction to start with, such as many or most references to Jesus, given that a historical figure can't be reliably found in any non-biblical source. And there's no mention of Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls. His birth and death dates are usually given as a range of possible dates spanning several years. Islam believes the crucifixion was an illusion. If there was a three hour eclipse and an earthquake, hundreds of thousands of people would have witnessed it, and the time, day, month, and year of Jesus' death would have been well known and written in various documents, biblical and non-biblical, in the first century. And whatever happened to Paul's 500 witnesses?

Numerous articles, books, and websites point out specific textual and other problems with the Bible. One that I like is Joe Wallack's site, www.1001errors.com. It is not necessarily the best one or the worst one, but it's well structured and goes through the verses of the first five books in turn. One of my favorite biblical errors, and an important one in my view, isn't among the 1001 errors. This is the inconsistency over the time of Jesus' crucifixion. John 19:14 suggests Jesus' crucifixion was sometime after the sixth hour, while Mark 15:25 says it was at the third hour. Christians try and explain away this contradiction by saying that John

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