When someone says, “Hey, how come verse 4 isn’t in my Bible?” what would a relatively simple(#1), gracious(#2), reply that helps build people’s trust in their Bibles(#4), look like?

You are absolutely right about #3 also, but I don’t need help with that one. So let’s assume it’s the right time and place, what would your answer look like?

In my mind, it shouldn’t take longer than 2 minutes to reply. Any more than that, and it starts to work against being simple, gracious and trust-building.

I have tried to do as you suggest here several different times. I think you are right on. I’m hoping you might be able to help me improve.

How would you do this? Can you give me an example how you do it as you describe it above in a few sentences to a lay person?

I think my approach has probably been too long-winded!

Any supposed textual criticism that consists of weakening our trust in the texts — in any text that has reached us from antiquity — is corrupt. That is a perversion of what tc is for.

When we get a learned man like Bart Ehrman try to tell us that we can’t be sure that we even have the bible — as if a text extant in 5,000 mss is somehow less reliable than most classical texts, extant in 1 copy — we can only shake our heads and murmur “obscurantism”.

Textual criticism is a technical discipline, a minor discipline. Imagine we are stood in a dark shed with a window which is flawed. The job of the text critic is to fix the flaws in the glass, so we can look through the glass into the window. But if instead he tells us that we just cannot be sure — despite the obvious evidence of trees and grass! — then we need to fire him and get one who can do the job a text critic is hired for; to fix the glass, to heal the text, and allow us to look at the garden.