No more “lead us not into temptation”

[ColdComfort]

Some of the posters here seem to argue that we don't have an accurate text of the original books of the New Testament as a result of the method of hand copying. As I remember from when I was reading some of this stuff that there are three manuscript traditions: Byzantine, Alexandrian and Western. These traditions do differ but in very minor ways. Bruce Metzger was one of the authors I read. I believe he's dead now but his conclusion was that the differences due to copyists errors did not prevent us from having an accurate text of the NT. Bart Erhman agrees. The vast majority of the differences, he says, amount to nothing and those differences that are significant, like the long ending to Mark, are well known to even lay people. Any good edition of the NT will have the differences in the footnotes so you can read them for yourself.