How reliable are the documents?

How much variation is there between different manuscripts of the New Testament?

There are many variations between different 'families' of manuscripts of the New Testament. This is what we would expect of hand-copied documents.

However, in spite of what people sometimes claim, the differences between the manuscripts are small and insignificant (-often just minor matters of punctuation or grammar-), and do not in any way affect any significant matter of historical fact or the message of the Bible.