Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiggum_PI
The 99.5% comes from biblical scholars. They cross reference any discrepancies between manuscripts.
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Which biblical scholars? Do you have a source for that percentage?
The only time I've ever seen that 99.5% number used is by apologists saying that it came from Bruce Metzger, when Metzger said no such thing.
No one's ever done a complete comprehensive cross reference of all discrepancies across all manuscripts as far as I know.
Plus determining accuracy isn't just a "count the # of copies game". The quality of each manuscript must be determined, it's obvious that if you had 10 manuscripts, and 8 were copies of a bad manuscript while one was a good one saying the text was 90% pure was meaningless.. worse than meaningless, completely misleading. So just because 99.5% of the extant copies agree doesn't mean that's an accurate representation of the original, it just means that 99.5% of the copies agree.
And even if the 99.5% number is accurate that's still based on extant copies, which are centuries removed from the originals, which we don't have. And centuries of copying by hand will introduce errors, unintentional and intentional, small and large.
But that 99.5% number I doubt very much, since textual critics (the scholars who study such things) say that there are more differences among the manuscripts than there are words in the NT.