Bart Ehrman in his more lucid moments shows that he is aware of that the case for the corruption of the New Testament is overstated, and actually undermines many Muslims' use of his works:
"The first thing to say is the first thing that I almost always say, even though my conservative evangelical critics among the scholars refuse to notice that I have said it (repeatedly!) and pretend that I never have said it, which is this: the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of differences are immaterial, insignificant, and trivial. Many of them cannot even be represented by different translations of the (different) Greek texts into English. Probably the majority matter only in showing that Christian scribes centuries ago could spell no better than my students can today. And *they* didn’t have dictionaries! Let alone spell check.
So, it is true that the huge majority of variations don’t matter. But do *any* of them matter? Well, the answer to that question depends entirely on what it is that you think matters. For a lot of people – including, I’m assuming (but cannot be certain), the reader who asked the question – if none of the variants would require a radical change of any fundamental Christian doctrine, then, well, none of them ultimately matters. So unless there are variations that indicate that Jesus’ mother was *not* a virgin, or that say that he was *not* the Son of God, or that claim that he never *was* raised from the dead – well, unless there are variants like *that*, then the variants don’t matter.
That’s not at all my own view of the matter, as I’ll explain, but just to be clear and to answer the question directly: none of the variants that we have ultimately would make any Christian in the history of the universe come to think something opposite of what they already think about whatever doctrines are usually considered “major.” (Some of the variants may indeed support a theological view that Christians largely reject, but that would not affect anyone’s doctrines because doctrines are almost NEVER based on a single verse, but on lots of passages interpreted in particular ways that usually are not affected that much by the specific wording of one passage or another)." - Ehrman (source)
And:
"Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions - he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not - we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement - maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament." (Bart Ehrman, an interview found in the appendix of Misquoting Jesus, p. 252)
Thank you Dr Ehrman.
Nicely reported, mate !
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