J.P. Holding a Christian Apologist from Tektonics.org gives a brief summary of a more conservative view:
Here is a presentation on the same subject by Dr. James White:
James White critques Bart Erhman in his book "Misquoting Jesus":
James White debates Bart Erhman
Dr. Daniel Wallace debates Bart Erhman:
(Daniel Wallace provides a rebuttal to "Misquoting Jesus" over here)
Dr. Craig Evans debates Bart Erhman:
My Own Thoughts
Essentially scholarship is divided on this point, where as Bart Erhman is representing a more modern liberal critical view endorsed by many scholars in the field, Daniel Wallace is representing the traditional view which is also endorsed by multiple modern day scholars, and of course representative of Erhman's teacher Bruce Metzger.
I happen to think that both maybe right. Erhman is right to say the New Testament text we have access to through textual criticism may not be the earliest in existence (that is limited to the autographs!) but rather we only possess the earliest available form that we know of (through textual criticism). The reason we may not possess and/or reconstruct the earliest form of the NT is because there was time for redaction by committees and/or churches, communities and/or individual scribes to make certain changes, arrangements after the autographs were written, especially since we know about bad scribal copying practices. Yet if the texts of the New Testament have been through changes? What then? How can we say we know what the New Testament before these changes looked like?
Wallace maybe right in saying the New Testament we do have is the 'orthodox' and correct text to have and possess since this text could of been redacted and collated and codified by those disciples of the Apostles or the remaining Apostles/Eye Witnesses themselves, if that is the case, then you have the last surviving eye witnesses or those who knew them (second and third generations) endorsing and ratifying the final version of the New Testament (or something like the New Testament).
They may not have specified a fixed canon, but rather a range of twenty or so epistles and related to the men of the church to rely on the canonical criterion and trusted in the providence and guidance of the holy spirit for the body of the church in the years to come to establish the fullness of the canon. Therefore if we have members of the Church who knew those who knew the Apostles, then we have descendants of the Apostles able to corroborate the oral teachings of the Apostles with the written works of the Apostles, and possibly able to compare copies of say John with earlier copies of John and still endorse the final text of John under the authority of the early Church community and other such New Testament Gospels and Epistles.
It is therefore by no means clear that we don't have the earliest version of the New Testament available or something very close to it, we cannot know whether we can precisely reconstruct it or something close to it. But we can imagine a quite likely scenario where overseers or those in authority in the church refused to let the tradition be significantly altered or changed, since the Church had passed down sacred oral and written traditions from those within the live times or close to the live times of the very Apostles so highly revered.
Considering then also, the reverence Jews and Christians gave to sacred scripture we may have grounds to believe they were extraordinarily selective, cautious and careful with the New Testament text, and the earliest form of the New Testament could certainly be one hundred percentage what the most earliest Christians gave their own personal stamp of approval, even if it were not completely identical, who says those elders/bishops/presbyters or those in charge may not have endorsed a final NT which was not word for word the earlier NT?
Simply put, it would be anachronistic to charge those in authority in the Church with the same standards of news reporting we adhere to today, so if anything the 'meaning behind the message' and whether it reflected the words of those involved in the events was the most important conception, meaning they may very well have approved of a copy of the NT that was not completely identical to all MSS prior to it.
Disclaimer
What I have written above is of course this is all being very generous to Bart Erhman's position, that we are simply not reconstructing the original NT. It's quite unfair to say the NT we reconstruct via textual criticism does not represent the autographs, while the copies of Homer's Illiad we have do represent the original Homer's Illiad. Erhman seems to be noteriously inconsistent with his conclussions aswell, since if he really does think the New Testament we possess cannot be known to be highly relflective or true to what the original authors wrote in their own original autographs, then how does Erhman know that Jesus or Paul even existed? The entire New Testament could simply be a production or complete redaction of Greek speaking Christians who made the entire story up (with some help from surrounding nations/cultures).
For Erhman therefore to look for historical nuggets of information could be a complete waste of time, since differences between the synoptics may exist not because of multiple historical sources going back to a core strand, but because the redactor or committee put them there, or perhaps Mark doesn't reflect the original Mark at all? Erhman couldn't tell us anything. Essentially Erhman has to be agnostic not just about his belief in the existence of God, but agnostic about the existence of any historical reliability in the New Testament, and agnostic about any verse that may or may not have existed in the autograph. This is probably why this position is referred to as extreme/radical/fringe skepticism. If we can't know what the New Testament looked like before the first century, then don't make claims about historical persons and events in the first century!
I have also been generous to White and Wallace and that ilk of the ultra-conservative camp in assuming along with them that the disciples in general had something to do with the perspective books assigned to them, and therefore the church communities are in living memory and are real living descendants of a special revered spiritual head, an apostolic ancestor in recent pass. This position delegates more authority to the Church who may have overseen much of the process of canonization (how much exactly, I'm not for sure, but we can know certain things).
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