Review of Chapter 3 (ii) of "Misquoting Jesus".

In chapter 3 of this book "Misquoting Jesus" under the heading "accidental changes" and "intentional changes"

Bart lists down a number of examples for each kind of changes in the New Testament manuscripts.

However the interesting thing is this whole book to dedicated to prove that we don't know what the original manuscripts said because of all the changes in the texts by the scribes and so today the Bible we have in our hands is no where close to what the Apostles originally wrote.

Now my question is if we really don't know What the originals said.

Then how can the textual critics like Bart know that something is wrong.

C.S Lewis in his book Mere Christianity said this:

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

I understand we can identify and correct the accidental mistakes by reading the rest of the text or reading it in a context.

However the intentional changes are hard to identify as the ones who are changing it are careful enough not to leave any trail behind.

But Bart here himself showed us how the textual critics have identified the errors (both accidental and Intentional) and not only identified but reconstructed the correct narration.

And in the light of this correct narration that they have reconstructed they are able to identify the errors and not only identify the errors but classify them as well.

Now in the light of the quote mentioned above by C.S Lewis if what we have in the manuscript are thousands and thousands of errors amounting to 300000-400000 variants.

If the text of the New Testament is so badly corrupted then how can these Textual Critics determine which is the error.

The reason we know something is crooked, is because we have the knowledge of what  good is.

Without the knowledge of good we would never know what is bad.

So Bart wrote this entire book only to prove himself wrong.

PS: I cross examined each kind of error mentioned by Bart both accidental and intentional and none of these errors have any major impact on the text that we have today. Instead these errors helps us reconstruct the original more accurately.