Speaking of the Sutta-pitaka -- in scholarly circles there is huge disagreement over how much the Sutta-pitaka can be trusted to really be the words of the historical Buddha, and how much of it possibly was written later. And there may be about as many different opinions as there are scholars writing about it. Right now I just want to look at this issue in a very broad and general way.
To recap -- the Sutta-pitaka is the collection of the sermons of the historical Buddha and his disciples. According to Buddhist legend, after the Buddha's death in the 5th century BCE, the First Buddhist Council was convened, and at that council the disciple Ananda recited all of the sermons from memory. The other attendees endorsed Ananda's recitation, and a canon was born.
But instead of writing all this down, the monks and nuns memorized the sermons and chanted them, and in this way taught them to new generations of monks and nuns. In time there came to be several separate groups of monks and nuns scattered around Asia, memorizing and chanting in their own languages.
One of these factions was memorizing and chanting in the Pali language. Pali is a language closely related to Sanskrit, and back in the day it was spoken in northern India. But, somehow, the Pali language canon reached Sri Lanka. According to Sinhalese chronicles, it was brought to Sri Lanka by a son and daughter of Ashoka the Great, which would have happened sometime in the first half of the 3rd century BCE.
The chronicles also say the Pali Canon was written down on palm leaves about the year 20 BCE, give or take. However, we don't have copies of the Sutta-pitaka that are anywhere near that old. So even if we assume the chronicles are accurate -- maybe they are; maybe they aren't -- we can't know for certain if that first palm-lead edition was exactly the same as the Pali Sutta-pitaka we have today.
There's a school of thought that the Pali Sutta-pitaka as we know it today was substantially adapted by about the 5th century CE, which is a whole thousand years after the life of the Buddha, and until we find some archeological corroboration we can never know if what's in it is accurate.
Other scholars point to what we have of those other language traditions. Unfortunately, none survived intact in their original languages. What we have are fragments of Sanskrit recorded by various groups of early Buddhists in India. We also have early Chinese and Tibetan translations of now-missing Sanskrit texts. Patching together all these fragments gives us an alternate version of the Sutta-pitaka that, presumably, developed without contact with the Pali group. This version is called the Agamas.
There is considerable stuff in the Pali Sutta-pitaka that is missing from the Agamas, notably the entire Khuddaka Nikaya. But my understanding is that the corresponding versions of various suttas/sutras, while not identical, usually are in substantial agreement. That would not be true, the argument is, if the Sinhalese were just making stuff up.
I'm sure my crude explanation of this controversy will set any scholar's teeth on edge. Scholars themselves have much more finely tuned and detailed arguments to make for their positions. On the whole, though, whatever its provenance, the Sutta-pitaka has held up pretty well on its own merits.
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