First, I will clarify that I have already heard this argument of yours before, and I've seen the twists it has to take in the process. I'll summarize your argument, as I understand and anticipate it, just to save some time. It's been a few years since I visited this but it should have the general jist of things:
1) The founding premise is that you wish to say "the bible never calls Jesus God" and you can try to evade most of them by claiming most everyplace is "Jesus is speaking on behalf of God" but you have some pesky verses that say precisely that Jesus is God without any potential for wiggle room. The answer? Attack the text itself in those select locations.
2) The solution lies in that if you look long and hard enough, you can find a damaged or defective manuscript. These are very few in number: the last I checked I think they numbered at a grand total of four. Four versus how many now? Attention is diverted away from their tiny number with a heated ongoing argument about a fifth, over whether a line was actually added to strengthen a fading light mark or whether the documentation lied and it was added anew.
3) This minority flawed reading could be the results of age upon the documents, or it is possible that someone made a flawed copy on purpose. Early on Marcion "the heretic" was known for his propensity for "editing the scripture with a penknife" and the New World Translation also inserts the word "Jehovah in the New Testament without claiming even one piece of manuscript evidence, so anything remains a possibility.
4) Proponents of the flawed minority manuscript neglect to mention that their resulting reading is flawed, grammatically or in not making normal sense. "Great is the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh...." (majority text) makes sense because the mystery of God then explains about God. The flawed text that you prefer wouldn't make sense, "Indeed, the sacred secret of this godly devotion is admittedly great: 'He was made manifest in the flesh, ... " But who would "He" refer to? It would still be the subject of the previous verse, "God" (verse 15) and
5) Just to clarify, since you haven't defined this here, we are talking about whether a dash mark appears above one Greek letter, differentiating between whether the word is a pronoun "He" or designating the word for God, "Theos." Your argument also depends on the assumption that the original text was flawed, and a mass conspiracy long long ago endeavored to take this edit the word "He" out of our Bibles. It's actually far more likely that a light hand made a faded line or a tired copyist missed a single mark in these tiny few minority instances that you find so golden.
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