I am very familiar with Ehrman's position and claims. I keep several of his debate transcripts on file.
I originally wrote a point-by-point response, but it ended up being way too long in part because I covered the same ground more than once. So instead Ive decided to write responses to points that address at one time several of your responses in a hopefully comprehensive yet concise (and understandable) fashion.
The first matter is probably the easiest: Ehrman. You mentioned in your post various things that seemed to indicate you did not read carefully what I quoted and cited from him, so we might benefit if you went over my quotation of his academic, not popular, works.
This leads directly into a related but much broader issue: the difference between popular media (books, televised debates, blogs, etc.) and academic publications. We need go no farther than Ehrman himself. I quoted from an academic work by him in my previous post. We can contrast this with
Misquoting Jesus, which is a popular work, and in which we find: : "Scholars differ significantly in their estimates- some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 and more!"
followed by the very misleading comment "There are more variants among are manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament."
If you go back to the quote I used originally, we find something similar, only it is placed in context. Indeed, Ehrman specifically states, "As one might expect, however, these raw numbers are somewhat deceptive".
Whether a publicized debate, an article in some magazine, a book intended for the general reader, or a blog post, there necessarily exists a divide between these and what we find in specialist literature (peer-reviewed journals, monographs, volumes edited by specialists containing papers by specialists on some topic like NT textual criticism, published conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations, etc.). The reason for the divide is clear. It is hard, in a public debate, to give an extensive critique of the Alands' classifications or fragments of Heracleon in extant manuscripts of Origen's text, let alone get into the detail required for a specific textual critical issue as in e.g., Walker, W. O. (2007). 1 Corinthians 15: 29-34 as a non-Pauline interpolation.
The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69(1), 84-103.
Apart from anything else, even when such sources are written in English they usually quote extensively from Hebrew, Greek, & Latin sources (not to mention German and French) often without translating as it is assumed the reader is familiar with these languages.
I have included some titles I have (the central inclusion criterion being whether I could copy my citation of them from my use of them in other posts)
Metzger, B. M., & Brock, S. P. (1977).
The early versions of the New Testament: their origin, transmission, and limitations. Clarendon Press.
Aland, K., & Aland, B. (1989).
Der Text des Neuen Testaments: Einführung in die wissenschaftlichen Ausgaben sowie in Theorie und Praxis der modernen Textkritik Deutsche Bibelges
Ehrman, B. D. (1993).
The Orthodox corruption of scripture: The effect of early Christological controversies on the text of the New Testament. Oxford University Press.
Epp, E. J., & Fee, G. D. (1993).
Studies in the theory and method of New Testament textual criticism (Vol. 45 of
Studies and Documents). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
Ehrman, B. D., & Holmes, M. W. (Eds.). (1995).
The text of the New Testament in contemporary research: essays on the status quaestionis (Vol. 42 of
Studies and Documents). Brill.
Metzger, B. (2001).
The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Baker Academic.
Elliott, J. K. (2000).
A bibliography of Greek New Testament manuscripts (2nd Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Washburn, D. L. (2003).
A catalog of biblical passages in the dead sea scrolls (Vol. 2 of
Textual-Critical Studies). Brill.
Schenker, A. (Ed.). (2003).
The Earliest Text of the Hebrew Bible: The Relationship Between the Masoretic Text and the Hebrew Base of the Septuagint Reconsidered (No. 52 of
Septuagint and Cognate Studies Series). Brill
Metzger, B. M. & Ehrman, B.D. (2005).
The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption & Restoration (4th Ed.). Oxford University Press.
Hempel, C., & Lieu, J. M. (Eds.). (2006)
Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb. Brill
Kraus, T. J. (2007).
Ad fontes- Original Manuscripts and Their Signicance for Studying Early Christianity. Selected Essays (Vol. 3 of
Texts and Editions for New Testament Study). Brill.
Parker, D. C. (2008).
An introduction to the New Testament manuscripts and their texts. Cambridge University Press.
And to get an idea about what I mean when I refer to conference proceedings, one example would be the
The Princeton Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls/I]
which is behind the three volume set: The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls .
This is by no means a complete list of the book-size academic works I have on textual criticism of the bible and related topics, but it is nothing compared to the number of journal articles (where the bulk of scholarship is published). The point of such publication media is to be able to e.g., spend a few hundred pages on what would be treated in a few pages or less in a book intended for the non-specialist reader. For example:
Labahn, M. (2007). A kind of magic: understanding magic in the New Testament and its religious environment (Vol. 306 of European Studies on Christian Origins) Library of New Testament Studies.
Heres a monograph on a topic that a mainstream book might cover in a few pages. Better still:
Alexander, L. (1993). The Preface to Luke's Gospel: Literary convention and social context in Luke 1.1-4 and Acts 1.1 (Vol. 78 of Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series)
The above monograph spends 200+ pages dealing with a few lines in Luke and 1 line in Acts. In other words, it isnt just something a popular book might mention as an aside, its actually hundreds of pages devoted to the significance of a few lines.
My main point is that all the comments you made about watching debates, about German scholarship being critical, about what even Ehrman and those like him believe, and so on, is all made from an evaluation of scholarship without the scholarship. Several volumes I have include papers from scholars in English, German, and French and the reader is expected to know these as well as Hebrew and Greek (and sometimes other languages).
Another issue is the idea that we can know the relationship between the number of manuscripts we have and what we can say about errors. Variance is generally used in the context of statistics and more specifically as a probability function involving either a summation (in the discrete case) or improper integral (in the continuous case) of deviations from the mean. Here, variance is discrete, but our function is unlikely to be linear. This is perhaps best illustrated by treating it as a difference equation similar to the logistic model.
No two manuscripts are exactly alike. More importantly, they are dissimilar in different places. If we had 10 manuscripts and they all had variants in one place (a word in one line), then we have 10 variants. If, however, each manuscript varied from the others in a different location, then then manuscript 1 differs from the other 9 in 9 different places, manuscript 2 differs from the others in 9 different places, and so on. Letting N represent the number of manuscripts, we can model variance by iterating manuscripts starting with N=1 and using a scalar for each N that gives us the total words and a parameter that expresses with each iteration the magnitude of variance. The more places in which variants exists, the greater the magnitude (partially) independently of the total N manuscripts.
One reason nobody bothers with this kind of thing, and in fact why nobody knows the actual number of variants, is because it really doesnt matter. We dont use most of our manuscripts in modern editions as textual criticism is much more advanced than that. However, it is absolutely not the case that Ehrman or most textual critics think that there exist no or almost no doctrinal issues resulting from variations. Ehrman dedicated an entire monograph to this. Hes not alone.
One doesn't even need to read the various journal papers, monographs, etc., on textual criticism to understand this- the textual critical apparatus to one's Greek NT suffices. In fact, there is an accompanying work to the UBS' Greek NT A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Metzger which contains the details on every instance in the UBS' Greek NT critical apparatus.
Finally, regarding legends, the ways in which fields as diverse as anthropology and medieval millenarianism (but in particular orality research) have revealed the ways in which legends of people as far back as we have evidence of grew around them while they yet lived is voluminous. However, perhaps nothing is as easily convincing as a 20th century example: Haile Selassie. Legends about this messianic claimant not only existed while he lived, but did so in an era well-documented by cameras, journalists interviewing eyewitnesses, recorded testimony, etc.
