renumber this "Direct Quotations:

Bart D. Ehrman: "There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." [Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why]
Bruce M. Metzger: "It is safe to say that there is not one sentence in the New Testament in which the manuscript tradition is wholly uniform." [The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration]


F. F. Bruce: "The original text of the New Testament documents has been corrupted by copyists in the course of copying." [The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?]


Richard Elliott Friedman: "But there are many passages that Bible scholars themselves believe are corrupted text." [Who Wrote the Bible?]


John W. Burgon: "The general result of bringing the whole of this overwhelming array of unnoticed evidence together is to establish the proportion of known materials for restoring the original text of the New Testament above ninety-nine in one hundred." [The Revision Revised]


David Trobisch: "There are substantial variations in the manuscripts over time, which suggests a certain degree of corruption." [A User's Guide to Westcott and Hort's New Testament Greek Text and Textual Criticism]


John William Miller: "All these additions and variations, not excluding biblical books entire, have made the original text of the Bible impossible to recover." [Dealing with Bible Problems]


G. D. Kilpatrick: "The history of the biblical text is the history of the corruption of an initial text." [The Text of the Old Testament]


Gary M. Burge: "Every single manuscript is different. There's not a single use of the NT in any manuscript that's the same as another manuscript." [The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth]


Hans-Josef Klauck: "We cannot reconstruct the original text perfectly due to corruption and variations." [The Religious Context of Early Christianity: A Guide to Graeco-Roman Religions]
Bart D. Ehrman: "There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." – Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.
Elaine Pagels: "The major and most disturbing fact that emerges from a study of the history of the New Testament text is that we have fewer than 10 percent of the manuscripts written during the first two centuries." – The Gnostic Gospels.
John Dominic Crossan: "Not only do we not have the originals of the Greek New Testament writings, but we don't have the first copies of the originals or even copies of the copies of the originals." – Who is Jesus?.
Marcus J. Borg: "We have a number of differences among the manuscripts we have, and the differences are not just in minor details." – Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.
Edward William Fudge: "The Bible, in the form in which we have it today, is not a perfect book. It is not even a near-perfect book. It contains many thousands of scribal errors, some of them major." – The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment.
Bruce Metzger: "Copyists were sometimes tempted to alter the text to make it say what they were convinced it ought to have said." – The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration.
F. F. Bruce: "There is clearly enough textual variation among the surviving New Testament manuscripts to encourage doubt as to whether the originals have been preserved in anything like their original form." – The Books and the Parchments: How We Got Our English Bible.
Walter Bauer: "Christianity was initially incredibly diverse, and the orthodox, unified New Testament emerged only gradually and unevenly." – Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.
Richard Elliott Friedman: "There has never been only one authorized or definitive version of the Bible." – Who Wrote the Bible?.
Neil Asher Silberman: "It is at the very least a useful fiction that the Old Testament, as it has come down to us through the centuries, is directly and unambiguously the 'word of God.'" – The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.