If we are not certain which manuscript reading is correct, how can we call the whole Bible inerrant?
A viewer says almost everything about the Catholic faith has fallen into place for him except one thing: since some passages have ambiguities across manuscripts and we cannot be one hundred percent certain which reading is correct, he asks whether we should say only ninety-nine percent of the Bible is inerrant rather than the whole Bible.
Answer
I have never said, and would be wrong to say, that we only have ninety-nine percent of the Bible; that is where you are going astray. We do have the whole Bible right in front of us. Take a typical variant: many Greek texts read Jesus Christ, another reads only Christ, and another only Jesus. There are three possibilities, and one of them has to be correct. When we examine the manuscripts, some texts are historically and empirically more reliable than others, so we can weigh which reading is likeliest, but even if we are not certain, we still know for sure that the reading is either Jesus Christ, Jesus, or Christ. That means the whole Bible is there before us; we are only unsure which of the available readings is the correct one. So you cannot conclude that we do not have the whole Bible. Your question assumes we lack the other possibilities, but we have them; it is simply a matter of getting to the correct one among readings that are all present.