Cyrus, Bart has fixated and embellished on how bad the textual variances really are. His totals vary from 200,000 and above even though he does acknowledge many of these variances do not change the message the ancient authors transmitted to us. I don't understand how Bart did not know when he entered into Moody's Bible College, no Autographs existed? Most JWs know we don't have the original books of the Bible, where was Bart during his years of Fundamental Christianity? I own all his books because I don't fear reading critical things, something making me put my fingers in my ears and screaming is the "overlapping generation", "new light on the Rapture", "annointed in charge of the Sheep now, but Jesus has not authorized them until his Second Coming" either we are under their care or we are not? That's the doctrines and strange things that keep me up from sleeping, not Bart Erhmans books he writes on history, I don't have his latest book of Jesus. Has anyone read the book?
The textual variances Bart used his hammer and chisel on were not very earth shattering. Nothing in Bart's works ever caused me great discomfort because I was aware there consists large quanties of pieces of the Scriptures with obvious mistakes and scribal errors. Some errors we know were caused by religious bias and presuppositions, others were mistakes. What impressed me is we have access to the largest amount of fragments, parchments and whole books we can compare and see if he original thoughts were changed.
Bart never proved the message Jesus wanted his followers to know was diluted and corrupted over time. I read there is over a million fragments or more, and the priests and scholars before the 20th Century ran across many of these same road blocks and challenges Bart raised in his book. In Wallance's book he has a radio interview with Bruce Metzger around 1998 or 2001 (Not sure right now) and the qustion is posed because of Bart Erhman's book "Dr. Metzger, do you think we can rely on what the original authors of the Bible wanted us to know even though we are not privy to their autograph scrolls?" Metzger replied "Yes, I am near the end of my life and with great conviction after decades of researching this subject and the vast volume of Bible fragments, I am more convinced we have the spirit of the message of Jesus Christ and all those writers of various Gospels and letters by Paul and others" This was in Daniel B. Wallace's book "Misqouting Jesus" if my memory serves me right. I received grief when the circuit overseer found Bart Erhman and Daniel Wallaces book in my house, his Apostate Radar shot up quickly until my husband poured him several shots of Tequila and got his ass drunk! We Jehovah's Witnesses are micromanged on everything we read, if we were not to read any books and barely cover the watered down literature the Slave gives us, that would demonstrate pure faith.