Okay, time to get pedantic.
Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman
The conventional number of Greek manuscripts of the NT is between 5000 and 6000. I wonder what Ehrman includes -- but don't wonder enough to make it likely that I'll look.
Yes, this is the case. However, since the errors are very strongly correlated, we don't get to reduce the error by a comparable amount.
But that in turn means you shouldn't be talking about there being more errors than there are words in the NT. There are actually many fewer errors than that, but many of the errors are repeated in multiple manuscripts. My basic point remains: quoting the summed error over all mss is not a fair or useful representation of the error rate, any more than it would be for sequencing. (Sequencing errors are also not independent, by the way, but obviously for different reasons.)
Also bear in mind that this isn't 30,000 complete manuscripts, as many are merely fragments the size of a business card.
Yes, I'm reasonably familiar with the state of many NT mss.
Well, right, they were resolved in the development of textual criticism. This is why we know about the errors in the first place.
Sure. But, to make the thread briefly relevant to the forum, the findings of textual criticism have long since been accepted, even by most fundamentalists and creationists. There are exceptions (one of whom posts regularly here), but they are a fringe element.
My point is that still many translations repeat the errors merely out of tradition.
And this is the point I disagree with. Translators sometimes disagree about the best text, but no modern translation that I'm aware of keeps old textual readings out of tradition. Let us consider cases . . .
Examples would be the Johannine comma,
A clear and very late addition to the Greek, but not used in any modern translation, right?
essentially all references to the divine nature of Jesus
A considerable overstatement, but discussing that would be a very long tangent.
I assume you mean the addition of "`o theos" to the that verse. Based on the textual evidence, it's likely a scribal addition, quite plausibly added for theological reasons. I can't find a modern translation that includes it, however. Do you know of any?
or Luke 3:22 which was changed from "Today I have begotten you" to counter the adoptionists, or the addition of the institution in Luke 22:19.
Most contemporary translations don't correct these changes, simply because most contemporary textual critics don't think they really were scribal changes. In both of these cases, the "original" text is represented by only one Greek manuscript, Codex Bezae. Both also appear in some Syriac and Old Latin translations, both of which represent (like Bezae) the so-called Western textual tradition. Other manuscripts of the Western type, and all mss of the eastern types, have the words of institutions and omit the full quotation from Psalm 2. Purely in terms of textual phylogenies, the proposed corrections are unlikely.There are various arguments that can be made in for and against the proposed changes, but it is certainly not just a matter of translators following traditional readings rather than the findings of textual critics.
In the case of Luke 22, the translators are if anything being trendy rather than traditional. Omitting the institution in Luke 22 was the standard recommendation of textual critics for about 75 years, based on Hort's argument in favor of doing so. (The passage is one of Hort's "Western non-interpolations", which were a set of reading where he favored the Western text, rather than his usual practice of preferring the Alexandrian text.) Thus it is omitted from the Revised Standard Version, translated early in the 20th century. Following the discovery of ms p75, which established the antiquity of the Alexandrian textual tradition, and with the support of noted textual critic Kurt Aland, the scholarly consensus shifted against the shorter reading. Translators have simply followed their lead. Blaming them hardly seems fair.
