Yes, and I spoke to Pastor about this last night, and he got out the Greek NT; interestingly, the phraise "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing" is missing from many early Greek texts; so he told me that most scholars agree that Christ may not even have said those words.
So you have raised an interesting point in that Universalism, which you correctly identify as unorthodox, because to say all must be saved is a monergistic statement which ignores the point that God, being infinitely loving, cannot and will not force us to love Him, indeed, coerced or forced love is not love, and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware I think makes a compelling point when he says the one thing God cannot do is force us to love Him, is not imposed if we adopt either the Roman Catholic scholastic doctrine of Invincible Ignorance or a less formal model wherein we consider the possibility of people being saved owing to the special mercy of God if they truly desire it and were in a situation where owing to other conditions the normal approach to faith was not entirely accessible to them.
This does not threaten the centrality of faith or justification through faith, because these remain the appointed means for our salvation, when we respond to this faith by joining the church or remaining within the church into which we were baptized and grafted on. Instead, the idea of invincible ignorance, which in modern times we could apply, for example, to the Sentinelese and other uncontacted or uncontactable tribes (which in the case of the Sentinelese, fall into the latter group, because aside from the fact that the Sentinelese will murder people who land on their island, which tragically befell a Christian missionary, owing to their xenophobia, the Indian government will not allow for proper missionary access for fear of pathogens we have the Sentinelese will not, leading to extermination, however, the fact that they will not accommodate missionaries who would be willing to undergo the most rigorous biological screening and containment processes has the effect of denying the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island access to the Gospel under ordinary conditions, since India has basically turned their island into a nightmarish human zoo, in my opinion, precluding contact which could be extremely beneficial, and furthermore, I would argue, by denying, say, an extremely well funded Christian mission with top tier medical personnel and advanced pathologists and immunologists working to ensure the safety of the islanders, and with the missionaries over time working to immunize the Sentinelese against the pathogens that exist in our world, have created a scenario where in the future, someone will inevitably illegally access the island, stay there successfully, and infect the population, who will then die.
This horrible situation however is not beyond the provenance of God’s love, because if we recall what our Lord, Christ Pantocrator, said, “I will have mercy on who I will have mercy,” if we base a doctrine around this concept, such as invincible ignorance, or the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox soteriology which is careful to not exclude special or extraordinary acts of salvation-enabling by our Lord, since we see these in the New Testament, for example, the Good Thief and St. Paul. These special situations do not exclude, in what we see in the Good Thief and in St. Paul, a voluntary faith response.
Now, regarding the specific issue of textual criticism you mention, the specific text I think is not particularly problematic, and I myself am leery of knocking out sections of the New Testament based on the minority, Alexandrian text type, which I think is slightly overrated, in that the Byzantine text we see being used as the basis for the Peshitta, and even the Coptic Bibles. But if we were to do such a thing, there are shakier chapters in the Gospels from a textual criticism perspective, such as the Adultery Pericope and Mark 16:9-16. The former is very important doctrinally; the latter has in recent years been problematic insofar as it is the main prooftext relied on by the eccentric Snake Handling Pentecostals of Appalachia, whose worship I regard as cacodoxy (incorrect worship or glorification of God)
per se, in that it is dangerous to the participants, unheard of in the entire history of the church, neither decent nor in order as required by St. Paul, and at the same time, I would lament to note that there are other texts in the canonical Gospels and elsewhere which could be misused by the Snake Handlers.
But I really do appreciate where you are coming from on this point, because universalism is a serious error, and at the same time, I think it is important to understand how doctrines and traditional beliefs such as Invincible Ignorance, or indeed, the Harrowing of Hell, need not be seen as monergistic violations of free will that imply a selective and capricious imposed salvation on some or a universalism on all, which is an even more problematic perspective, insofar as Calvinism is at least scriptural, whereas Universalism has serious problems that most of us can agree comprise general incompatibility with the eschatological declarations of Christ Pantocrator in the New Testament.
However, because Universalism has a particular appeal to some which can be overpowering, based on a sense of horror about the idea of Hell and a failure to understand the true nature of what we might call firery Gehenna or the lake of fire or the wrath of God, an inability to understand how some will reject God, tragically, one will see what I can only characterize as a subversion of traditional doctrines like the Harrowing of Hell, Invincible Ignorance and so on as a “staging ground” of sorts for the universalist project, as well as a conflation of the ancient concept of Apocatastasis, the idea of a restoration of all things, which we see in St. Gregory of Nyssa and in Origen, who was much loved by the Cappadocians, and later, in many Assyrian church fathers, such as the great monastic St. Isaac the Syrian, the last Assyrian saint to also be venerated by Chalcedonians and Oriental Orthodox, and also the author of the Book of the Bee, Mar Solomon of Akhat, the 13th century Bishop of Basra, among other texts.
As an interesting aside, there is an active Universalist controversy occurring within the Eastern Orthodox church involving a minority opinion led academically by the likes of Dr. David Bentley Hart, who I respect for his brilliant skewering of Richard Dawkins, in his book The Atheist Delusion, but I find myself wishing he had limited himself to external polemics rather than dabbling in the dangerous cobwebs of discarded soteriological models which were eventually set aside by even the Assyrian Church of the East.