“WE HAVE ONLY
ERROR-RIDDEN COPIES.”
Ehrman is correct again. The scribes
did make mistakes in their copying. A simple attempt at copying a single page
by hand will easily convince anyone of how easy it is to make scribal mistakes.
Basically, they made two kinds of mistakes
·
Unintentional
(faulty eyesight, faulty hearing, errors of the mind, errors of judgment)
·
Intentional
(spelling and grammar, harmonizing, explain history and geography, doctrinal—very
few)
However, it is totally misleading to
claim that the copies are “error-ridden.” Ehrman even tries to give a count of
these mistakes with his often-repeated statement—“with only 138,000 words in
the NT, there are as many as 400,000 or more variants in the MT manuscript tradition.”
(Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 89) Such claims and counts are misleading at
best and only serve to shock those who are unaware. In realty, most of such
numbers are just estimations. Also, most of the mistakes in the NT manuscripts
are unintentional and insignificant. Overall, approximately 94 percent of
the text is totally reliable. It is only the remaining 5-6 percent that is in
question. (Abidan Paul Shah, “The Current Debate Over the Original Text of
the New Testament,” in Can We Recover the Original Text of the New
Testament? ed. Abidan Paul Shah and David Alan Black [Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and
Stock, 2023], 9-10, emphasis in bold added)
Further Reading:
Refuting Christina Darlington's Claim the Bible has Been Preserved with 99.5% Accuracy
Modern (Evangelical Protestant) New Testament Scholarship vs. Christina Darlington
