Do the hundreds of thousands of variants in New Testament manuscripts mean the Bible is corrupted?

Whosoever Will, A Mile of Witnesses: You will hear the numbers turned the other way. There are hundreds of thousands of variations in the manuscripts. It sounds devastating until you ask the person to read them. Most are nothing: a slip of the pen, a word order, a spelling. And here is what the objection hides: when one scribe miscopies a single letter and fifty later copies are made from his, that is not fifty errors. It is one error, repeated. The mountain shrinks to a molehill the moment you count honestly. There is no document in all of ancient history that can stand next to the Bible for accuracy of transmission. The very abundance that lets a skeptic tally “differences” is what makes the original reading recoverable in the first place. You cannot triangulate a text you have one copy of. You can triangulate one you have thousands of.

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Do the hundreds of thousands of variants in New Testament manuscripts mean the Bible is corrupted? → wsb.bible/answers/do-the-hundreds-of-thousands-of-variants-in-new-testament-manuscripts

This answer is the short form. The argument is made at length in A Mile of Witnesses: The Objection That Eats Itself.

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