There is no reason why Ehrman's statements should not correspond in many ways with the Watchtower theology.
The JW position allows for some Biblical errata and corruption which THE SOCIETY rushes in to fill with their brand of Light.
It is what copyists for three hundred years apparently did as well. Being 'helpful' by changing, inserting, amplifying and nursing along the written text with 'clarification.'
Bart Ehrman has written about this on his blog and in a book:
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From Ehrman's blog:
When I finished my dissertation on a technical area within textual criticism – it was an analysis of the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind, in an attempt to demonstrate what the manuscripts at his disposal in Alexandria Egypt must have been like – I very much wanted to continue to work in the field of textual criticism, but I wanted to do some research that had some broader applicability and wider interest to scholars who were not purely technicians in this one rather arcane subdiscipline within New Testament studies.
I had always been especially interested in the detective work involved in solving textual problems in the New Testament. Where there are important passages that have important variants among the various manuscripts, how do you decide which variants are “original”? I’ve always loved that kind of problem, maybe because I’ve always been such an inveterate debater, and arguing for a plausible solution to a textual conundrum involves, virtually every time, mounting a convincing argument in the face of other options taken by other scholars.
What I realized in thinking about the next project was that a number of the textual variations that I found to be really important involved issues connected to understandings of Christology – the Christian understandings of who Christ was. I’ve mentioned one such variant at length on the blog, the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus is portrayed as very human indeed, in two verses that were (in my judgment) probably not originally in the Gospel, but were added by later scribes.
After some intensive thought, I realized there were other variants that were also concerned with showing who Christ really was. And I started wondering: how many such variants *are* there exactly? I had no idea. And neither had anyone else. So I decided to try to find out. This was the beginning of my work that eventuated in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
How does one go about acquiring such information? You can’t…
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You can’t just start collating manuscripts, that is, reading through one manuscript at a time, line by line, word by word, looking for textual variants. That would take a hundred years, working full time. Luckily for scholars at this stage of things, earlier generations – going back now over 400 years – have gone through all of our most important manuscripts and done that kind of basic leg work for us (though lots and lots more is left to be done). Editions of the Greek New Testament that have been published since, well, since 1707, have cited most of the important textual variants known. And so a scholar can have access to the variants in the manuscripts without having to read through each manuscript, one at a time.
The first resource I turned to in order to satisfy my curiosity was the famous work by Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. This is a book that explains how the five-person committee who put together the standard Greek NT that is used by virtually everyone today made its decisions in the key passages. The value of it that book that all the really most monumental variants in the NT manuscript tradition are presented, with some recollections by Metzger himself about why the committee chose the variant reading that it did in each case, and why it judged the other variants to be alterations of the original text. The problem with the book is that only very few textual variants are discussed in.
It took only a couple of days to work carefully through the book with my questions in mind. It was a useful undertaking, because it gave me some ideas about some of the variant readings that I had not thought about in relationship to Christology. But it was only a start, a very rough start.
I realized that to do the project thoroughly would require an intimate familiarity with every relevant textual variant ever discovered to be of any significance (and many that were thought to be of no real significance). And so I had my work cut out for me. It took me several years. This is what I had to do.
The scholarly version of the Greek New Testament (called the Nestle-Aland version) contains thousands of variant readings that Metzger doesn’t mention. And it is nowhere near being “complete.” An older version of the Greek NT was produced by a German scholar named von Soden. His edition is very difficult to use, but it contains masses of variants and citations of evidence not found in the Nestle – Aland. And an edition from the 19th century by Constantin von Tischendorf (his 8th edition) also has masses of information not available in either of those other two.
I wanted as much information as I could get my paws on. And so I went through all three of these editions of the Greek New Testament, starting with Matthew 1:1 and going one verse at a time, slowly, ploddingly, looking at the apparatus of each of the three editions, looking at each and every textual variant cited for each and every verse. Of the entire New Testament. To the last verse of the book of Revelation. Any time one of the textual variants out of these many, many thousands had any relation at all that I could imagine to issues of Christology, I made a note of it.
Before long I started realizing that there were roughly speaking three kinds of variants: some were clearly related to Christological issues; some could be *argued* (sometimes at a bit of a stretch) to be related to Christological issues; and some – lots – were possibly, conceivably, maybe *remotely* related to Christological issues.
And so I made three lists. The first contained every textual variant I was pretty sure I would want to discuss in my book; the second contained ones I needed to think long and hard about before deciding; and the third contained ones that I had at least to *consider* including, but, well, probably not. At every point of textual variant that I noted, of course, I would have to argue which variant was the “original” and which was the later alteration. I’ll say more about that in the next note.
