How do theists justify the translations of the scriptures?

[Rev. Rye]

Dritch is oversimplifying things as usual. He is describing certain historic collections of manuscripts rather than the current known universe of manuscripts, which is all that textual criticism legitimately concerns itself with today. Some parts of scripture have attestation in hundreds of manuscripts, some (small) fragments as far back as the mid 2nd century. We can look at that sentence by sentence and classify all the differences in the manuscripts. And there are MANY discrepancies; it's just that they're not very consequential.

In the 2 to 3 centuries prior to Westcott and Hort (1890 or so) many translations of the Bible were based on the Textus Receptus. After W&H, we had various discoveries including the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc., but most 20th century translations are based on W&H and this draws on a much larger corpus of known manuscripts than the TR. Yet, the resulting translations have not caused some sort of theological crisis. A handful of verses have shifted a bit in meaning, and that's about it. This, more than anything else, suggests to me that one can have reasonable confidence that currently available manuscripts reflect substantially what the originals did, even assuming for the sake of argument that there are discrete original manuscripts rather than a gradual committing of a prior oral tradition to writing.

Again, though, it's all for naught, as the substantive content of all these manuscripts is fabulist nonsense with all sorts of internal contradictions, anyway. I rejected late 20th century evangelical Christian dogma based on it not being even a poor explanation or prediction of lived experience -- not on the basis that its urtext was from a faulty or questionable source. Bullshit is bullshit, regardless of how it evolved to be bullshit and -- importantly -- on how the bullshit interpretation of the bullshit evolved.

Well, that and he's just copy-pasting Wikipedia without looking into whether or not the passage he pasted even supports his claim of 1900 years of written consistency. He didn't even mention my point about the Johannine Comma  as an example of late-origin texts being adopted into the Bible. Hell, he even got the bit about the 21st Century King James Version wrong, since he claims it's a translation based on a different set of texts than the original KJV, when it's nothing of the sort. To quote the 21CKJV's overview page:

The 21st Century King James Version (KJ21®) is neither a new translation nor a revision, but an updating of the King James Version (KJV) of A.D. 1611. While no attempt has been made to "improve" the timeless message or literary style of the KJV, words which are either obsolete or archaic, and are no longer understood by literate Bible readers, have been replaced by carefully selected current equivalents. Also updated spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and paragraphing have been used. These changes have been painstakingly made so as not to alter the meaning or beauty of the King James Version in any way. They simply make the KJ21® easier to read and understand.

Seriously, Drich couldn't have been more wrong about the 21CKJV if he tried.