The period before AD 200 is exactly where we have the fewest manuscripts, and it is when most theological editing would have happened. Late abundance can’t fix early scarcity.

This is Ehrman’s strongest point and it deserves a straight answer. First, the early period is not blank: there are papyri from around 200, quotations in second-century writers such as Justin and Irenaeus, and early translations, all showing the same text. Second, the theory requires a coordinated change before any surviving copy was made, across communities that were often at odds with one another and had no central authority to enforce an edit. Where early editing did happen (the long ending of Mark, for instance), it left fingerprints in the manuscript tradition that scholars have found. The absence of such fingerprints for the core text is evidence, not merely absence of evidence.