In a comment on Ehrmans blog under this article, he explicitly says the following:
I think what Professor Metzger was saying was that he himself was confident that he knew with relative certainty the wording of 99.5% of the NT. He cannot have been saying that we actually certainly have that 99.5%, because unless you have the original to compare our text to, you can’t establish a percentage of agreement. It might be 99.7% accurate, or 99.1% or 83.5% or 72.9% — you can’t tell without having the thing itself for comparison. https://ehrmanblog.org/do-we-know-the-original-words-of-the-nt/
- We don’t have the originals of any of the New Testament books, so we can’t compare our reconstructions to them. Since we don’t know the originals, we don’t know how much our reconstructions differ from them. We can go even further and challenge the notion of the ‘original’ of any New Testament book. In the book Gospels before the Book, Matthew Larsen argues that the gospel of Mark originally circulated as an unfinished, open, and fluid collection of notes. There are similar claims about many other books of the New Testament. For example, some scholars have argued that the gospel of John was written in stages, or that it used an earlier Signs Gospel. See, for example, Robert Fortna: The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor.
- This can hardly be true given that Acts alone exists in two main textual recensions (Kenyon’s The Western Text in the Gospels and Acts, p. 26) says that the Western text is 8.5% longer.
- Ehrman believes “no”: https://youtu.be/WRHjZCKRIu4?si=dMJtY_3mFVyfjCGM