Roman Catholic apologist Robert Sungenis, in
An exhaustive investigation into
a standard Protestant Greek text of the New Testament (Nestle-Aland Novum
Testamentum Graece (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelstiftung, 1979) reveals that
of the 7,948 total verses from Matthew to Revelation, 6,176 verses contain
textual variants. In other words, 78% of the New Testament verses are to some
extent corrupted. The variations range from simple letters which change a word
or its tense, to whole sentences which are either missing or significantly
different. (Robert A. Sungenis, “Protestant Objections and Catholic Answers,”
in Not By Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of
Sola Scriptura, ed. Robert A. Sungenis [Goleta, Calif.: Queenship Publishing,
1997], 250 n. 58)
This morning, I decided to check out this figure in an
updated critical edition of the Bible. I used the following resource I have on Logos
Bible Software:
Nestle-Aland: NTG Apparatus Criticus, ed. Barbara
Aland et al., 28. revidierte Auflage (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
2012)
With the exception of the inscriptions to the books, I
counted each verse that had a variant noted in this work and manually counted.
While there may be some discrepancies, I don’t believe there is any substantial
error. The final tallies, from my own count, can be found in the following spreadsheet
here.
My count was 6,041, a rate of approximately 76%.