Bart Ehrman on textual integrity

There was a debate on this between Ehrman and Daniel Wallace. Here is what Ehrman said: 

To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, and of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.

Reply to Landon Hedrick

Could I be misinterpreting Price? Well, here's what he says.

[…] Since the autographa have not survived and nobody has laid eyes on them for 2,000 years, how could anybody possibly know what was in them – much less, which copies approximate most closely to them? Since there is nothing to which existing manuscripts can be compared, the very ideas of the original manuscripts and which manuscripts approximate most closely to them are useless ideas and should be abandoned. I can judge that a photo is a good likeness of you if and only if I have seen you and know what you look like. If I have not, then I am the last person on earth to ask. The situation is not improved by assuring me that there are thousands of photos of you. The fact is that I have never seen you, so tell million photos would not help. (98-99)

VR: I don't see how you get around it. He seems to be saying that it follows directly from the fact that we don't have the autographa, that we can have no good reason to believe that any of the copies are accurate, which leads to disastrous consequences in the Lincoln case. You can patch the argument up by saying that since the likenesses of Lincoln had to have been viewed by people who had seen him before he died, we have a connection to the original person that you don't have in the case of the NT manuscripts. But you're patching.  I didn't present the Lincoln case as proof that the we have a reliable text, (although I think that, for all practical purposes we do, for reasons given in Daniel Wallace's essay on Ehrman in Contending With Christianity's Critics), but simply that Price had produced a very weak argument against that claim. 

Pedantic? Maybe. But insofar as we are expected to trust Price as an authority on the Bible, I think such pedantry is worth engaging in.  

Hostility Bias

I want to separate two questions. My main claim is that even if we have reasons to believe that there is a substantial difference between the content of the original text and the earliest manuscripts, Price's argument for that is a nonstarter, since it seems to be arguing that whenever you have one copy or a million copies, and you can't get your hands on the original, you don't have any reason to believe that the copy resembles the original. That's what I took from his argument. What I take from that is that this is another instance where hostile critics of Scripture are so hostile that they will accept any argument that undermines anything an apologist might say, no matter how bad the argument. In other words, I am suggesting that skeptical scholars can. and often do, suffer from a hostility bias toward Scripture. That was the main point of my post. The only way to rebut that would be to argument that I was taking Price out of context, (since I did just lift the post out of Arizona Atheist's response to me), and that if you read the rest of what he says, he isn't really making the claim I am attributing to him. If there are other ways of argument for doubt about the manuscripts we have, that doesn't alter the claim I was making about Price. Ehrman's arguments, I take it, are better, though I don't buy them by any stretch of the imagination.

I think a lot of "movement atheists" put confidence in people like Price and Carrier on the grounds, presumably, that they are "outsiders" (and in Price's case, he's an exbeliever), and not subject to a Christian bias. Such confidence is, I believe, unjustified. It is also possible to be biased against Christianity, a concept that is hard for some people to digest.