Finally, in an email debate with proponents of Islam, Christian missionary and apparent apologist Jochen Katz was reported to say:I readily admit that there are many different variants of readings in the different manuscripts, 95% of which are copying errors, misspellings, missing a line or doubling a line while copying etc.  I am not denying any of this.  And I believe that with the basis of many thousands of manuscripts for comparison we can be very confident that the text is today faithfully restored andthe researchers in textual criticism assert that the actual literal text is restored to 99.8% leaving only a very few uncertainties.

But as I said, that isn't even my concern.  My concern is that Muslims accuse the Christians of corruption in content which is something completely different.  And not in minor things, but in the center of the faith and the Gospel. Did Jesus die on the cross? Is Jesus God?  and questions like this.  And there is NO evidence that the text has been changed anywhere as to meaning and content.  Yes, there have been some well-meaning scribes who wanted to correct some bad Greek grammar in a sentence and things like that, but there is no evidence for intentional corruption of CONTENT and that is what this debate is all about.[1]

Mr. Katz claims that “the researchers (plural) assert…” but he listed no researchers who made the assertion; not one.  Then he asserts that there is “no evidence” for any meaningful changes in the NT text.  Again, until he supports these claims, they are merely opinions and hot air.  For hours I searched websites and books in vain for some genuine scholarly testimony and support on this 90-99% accuracy rating but all I found were assertions and opinions by Christian apologists who have a need to assert total accuracy. Not one scholar that I could find claims that the Bible (or the NT) is 90-99% accurate and whatever inaccuracies there might be are insignificant.

Professor Holmes does not catalog or remark on these editions.[2]  His statement implies that other editions do exist out there, some of which may be “major” and some of which may be “minor” (according to, as it turns out, his decision). In addition, I suspect that Professor Holmes has never compared all the scattered available MSS and MS fragments as to their complementary error-correction he is suggesting, so it is likely that he does not really know whether anyone has “accurately” preserved the NT text or not.  If someone has indeed preserved a flawless NT Greek text, why are scholars working so hard to approximate the original autographs?  Why are books being written on NT textual criticism?  This does not make sense and when things people say do not make sense, I get suspicious.  You see, without the original autographs as a reference standard, the original writings cannot be determined to the degree of certainty that Professor Holmes is suggesting.  The number of complete or relatively complete NT MSS is about 60 in total and very few are from around the 4^th century.  Finally, Professor Holmes is quoting a study by others, not a study he personally conducted.

In checking my copy of the cited Aland and Aland, The Text of the New Testament, I see that, unlike Professor Holmes, the authors did not characterize the “seven editions” (pp.28-29) as “major editions.”  This characterization came from the Professor.  The referenced chart in Text (62.9 percent above) does not include orthographical (spelling of names, etc.) differences.  Neither are included verses where any one of the seven editions differs by a single word (p.29).  So, by dropping citations where a single word is different, along with spelling differences, the authors in Text came up with 62.9 percent agreement.  But can one word be significant if it is dropped or misspelled?  I think so.  If a person in serious trouble yelled, “Hop!  Hop!!  Hop!!!” instead of “Help! Help!! Help!!!,” do you suppose anyone would rush to his rescue?  A few missing letters can be a problem, too.  If a man asked, “Does your dig bile?” you would be mystified as to what he was asking, until someone edited his words to say, “Does your dog bite?”  By that time, however, the man would have been severely bitten by the rabid animal.  (Continued...)