Daniel Wallace defends the view that the New Testament manuscript tradition is messy but remarkably recoverable: there are many variants, yet the original wording can usually be reconstructed with strong confidence. That is a serious scholarly claim, but it proves less than some Christians think and more than some Muslims casually assume.
What Wallace is actually arguing
Wallace, a leading evangelical textual critic, is not saying that biblical manuscripts are identical, or that scribes never changed anything. He openly accepts that there are hundreds of thousands of variants among New Testament manuscripts. His point is that the large number is partly caused by the large number of manuscripts: the more copies one has, the more small differences one can count.
His strongest case is this: most variants are spelling, word order, slips of the pen, or readings that are easily dismissed. Among the remaining variants, only a small number are both "meaningful" and "viable." Famous examples like the longer ending of Mark, the story of the woman taken in adultery, and the Trinitarian wording in 1 John 5:7 are openly discussed in modern critical editions and many Bible footnotes. Wallace argues that no central Christian doctrine depends only on a disputed textual variant.
The fair Muslim reply
A Muslim should not answer this with slogans. Wallace's point has real force against the crude claim that "we know nothing about the New Testament text." Textual critics can often identify later additions and recover earlier readings with impressive care.
But the claim has limits. Recovering the earliest reachable Greek text is not the same as proving that this text is the exact revelation given to Jesus, peace be upon him. Manuscript criticism works with surviving copies. It cannot, by itself, settle questions about authorship, anonymous composition, translation from Jesus' language, oral transmission, theological editing before the earliest manuscripts, or the gap between Jesus' preaching and later written Gospels.
This is why the Quran's criticism is more careful than people often notice. It does not say every word in earlier scriptures vanished, nor that they contain no truth. It says they included guidance, but also that human beings altered, concealed, and disputed parts of what they had received.
And We revealed to you the Book in truth, confirming what was before it of the Scripture and as a criterion over it.
Quran 5:48
What this establishes - and what it does not
Wallace's argument establishes that the New Testament is not textually hopeless. It also establishes that modern scholars can often distinguish earlier readings from later scribal expansions. That should be acknowledged.
It does not establish that the four canonical Gospels are direct transcripts of Jesus' revelation. It does not establish that every theological claim built from the New Testament goes back to Jesus himself. It does not remove the problem of major disputed passages, nor the fact that some beloved verses entered the tradition later. And it certainly does not prove that the Bible has the same kind of preservation Muslims claim for the Quran: public mass memorization, liturgical recitation, and a single Arabic text preserved as revelation.
So the plain answer is: Wallace defends a high-confidence reconstruction of the New Testament text despite many manuscript variants. Muslims can grant that much without granting biblical inerrancy, the canon, or the claim that the present New Testament is identical to the Injil revealed by Allah.