I appreciate your review as a take that made me think.  It was a little different from my impression of the book (granted, I read it 3 or 4 years ago), though, and I never got the impression that Ehrman was attempting to make as grand a case as you seem to imply, at least directly.
My impression was that Ehrman, through illustrating a few examples where text was inserted entirely after the fact, and where accidental or deliberate transcription errors could change the meaning of a passage, hoped to argue not that these examples were sufficient to disprove the entire Bible, but that they were at least enough to sow doubts.  If we can see these differences between the manuscripts which survive, what of the ones that didn’t?  I don’t think I’d be wrong in assuming that the “winners” of the doctrinal debates would have had a bias toward destroying the more divergent texts, which would lead ultimately to more uniformity among the surviving texts.

The Urantia Book is pretty facinating.

I’d bet Mike Licona would say demons dictated it.

But we don’t even know who wrote The Urantia Book!

I guess it is bizarre enough for Stockhausen to have referenced it in acts 1 and 3 of Donnerstag (Licht).

Ben

I think Ehrman does overstate his case a few times in the book (as you pointed out luke), but I think within the context of the book as I read it they didn’t seem to be the thesis or detract from the actual information he was giving (often they seemed to be things set there so somebody could pull-quote it and cause controversy which would help sales).

We have perfect copies of The Urantia Book.

http://urantiabook.org/newbook/index.html

Lorkas: I have to disagree with you here, Luke. A large number of variant texts is a problem for certain doctrines: namely, those which claim that the Bible is the unchanging word of God.

For a rather bizarre example of this, see The Fakers by Danny Korem and Paul Meier. The first half of the book resembles a typical skeptical work, debunking such things as dowsing and ESP claims; except that each chapter ends with pious nonsense to that effect that it is unfortunate people believe in this stuff, because it blinds them to the real magic of God. In the latter part of the book, Korem makes his claim that the exceptional preservation of the text of the Torah over millenia indicates that God is overseeing the process.

Now, for Christians who admit human influence into the writing/reading of the Bible, I agree with you. Although, I do think it brings up certain questions, like: If God were real, and he wanted to communicate to us through the Bible, why would he allow so many errors to enter it? Does he want to communicate with us imperfectly? If he wants to communicate with us imperfectly, is it fair to base his judgment of us on whether or not we understood his communication to us?

These questions, I think, are problematic for certain doctrines, even if it isn’t a QED against Christianity.

Daffey: To get the number of variants, you have to combine the total number of words from all of the manuscripts – far more than 100,000 words. It’s a sleight of hand…

Um… if there were no variants, all those manuscripts would be identical. We would have N copies of 100,000 words.

Ehrman also expounded upon his position in a debate with James White (as summarized by John Loftus):

“One of the disputes between Ehrman and White had to do with the period of time before we find any manuscripts of the New Testament. They both acknowledged that between manuscripts there were many more variants in the earlier periods than in the later periods. From the 2nd century to the 4th century there were many more variants between texts than there were between the 4th century and the 9th century, for instance. Ehrman’s argument is that since this is so then we have every reason to think there were even greater variants before we find our first manuscript copies. Among the earliest untrained and sometimes illiterate scribes we would expect even greater manuscript variants. Based on this trend Ehrman argued we just don’t know what the original manuscripts said. James White argued instead that if indeed the earliest copies of the originals contained greater variants, then despite the trend we should see even greater variants among the actual manuscripts we have than we find in them. But we don’t, he argued.

“I think Ehrman answered White’s counter-argument elsewhere when he spoke of the probability that an original text could be copied and never used to copy from again. In this scenario a 2nd generation copy was copied just a few times over but the 3rd generation copy was copied extensively from then on. So even though we may not have as wide a number of variants as we might expect among the earliest manuscripts we actually have if this trend extended to the earliest scibes, it says nothing to counter the trend going back in time. The fact is that the evidence strongly suggests there would’ve been more variants between the earliest manuscripts the farther back in time we go. It’s just that we only have copies of copies of copies to go on and these copies may be all that survived. One can only wonder what the original texts said, Ehrman argues. We just don’t know. I agree.”

With that said, you’re correct. The number of variants doesn’t invalidate anything.