THIS MIGHT SURPRISE YOU
The answer
The New Testament textual scholar Bart Ehrman popularized the comparison. Estimates run into the hundreds of thousands, though the total depends on how you count. The overwhelming majority are spelling and word-order differences and copying slips; a smaller set changes meaning; and only a small fraction of those are serious candidates for the original wording.
Why it’s interesting
What the number *means* is exactly where scholars part ways: Ehrman stresses how much was in motion, while others (like Daniel Wallace) stress that the abundance of manuscripts is what lets us reconstruct the text with confidence. Same data, honestly different emphases.
Open question
You can know the Bible.
Not just the stories, but the history, authorship, and scholarship behind it.