It is a common trend for Christian apologists to assert that the NT is more reliable as a historical source than other ancient sources because they were written so much closer to the original events and copied faithfully to modern day, opposed to ancient sources such as Arrian who lived more than two hundred years after Alexander and had very little copies made.

I tried searching for an objective biblical scholar's opinion on this, but kept being referred to Christian websites. So is there any truth to this? I feel like if there was, historians would take the New Testament much more seriously than they have in the past.