2 weeks ago

Couple comments I had on this episode: 1. Bart Ehrman has an agenda of destroying Christians’ faith. In one of his books (I think Misquoting Jesus) he points out that there are tens of thousands of textual variants in the New Testament, more variants than manuscripts. Not until a hundred pages later does he admit that the majority of these differences can’t even be translated into English. 2. The text referred to as the “Majority Text” is in fact the Byzantine textform, by far the most common. It’s important to note, the Byzantine Greek New Testament edited by Robinson and Pierpont does not simply count noses and go with the most common reading. Special preference is given to earlier manuscripts. This approach does result in the most common reading usually being preferred, but it is also a critical text. 3. Most of the Greek manuscripts we have are only portions of the New Testament or of one of the books. I don’t know the exact number of how many complete manuscripts we have, but there are not very many.