Peter Gurry (PhD Cambridge) offers a balanced, evangelical review of Anthony Le Donne’s book What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? It’s worth a look.
Moreover, “the best explanation of many textual variants” in the Gospels is not “that there was no one original story” but that copying by hand is hard work. That explanation may be banal, but that does not make it less true. To be sure, some significant variants in the gospels may be due to the influence of oral tradition(s), but that hardly demonstrates that our copies of Matthew’s Gospel do not descend from an original manuscript.
