how much more—question or statement?

Solution 1:

It's contextual, and in the context you gave, the lack of a question mark indicates that the author is asking a rhetorical question.

To further support this, here are links to style guides from several universities saying to use a period for a rhetorical question: Illinois, Arkansas, Lewis,Old Dominion.

The style guide I use suggests that this is poor grammar, but, if the author went to any of those universities he would have learned to punctuate this way.

Solution 2:

I interpret the sentence as exclamatory rather than as a question. A simpler example would be:

• How much more true are these words today than when they were written.

This could also be constructed as:

• How much more true these words are today than when they were written.

According to the Cambridge Grammar Of The English Language (p920) the inversion seen in the first example above "is available as an option in exclamatives, though it is relatively infrequent and characteristic of a fairly literary style".

Solution 3:

'How' can be used as a non-question word meaning 'to a certain extent or degree' (the only reference for this usage I've found is the OED which is either off-line or behind a pay-wall).

How interesting the question is. ('the question is very interesting')

How curious. (not 'How curious?' but 'This is very curious.')

This is not a rhetorical question, it is a statement that the question is very interesting. The syntax is interesting because it is not a true variant on 'very' (to which it is very similar). You can't say 'The question is how interesting.'

This seems to be the usage intended by the authors in both quotes, that it is the case that 'it is indeed much more true of ...'. But then I would then note that it is preferred but not mandatory that the syntax should be 'how much more it is true of...'.

The usage sounds slightly stilted and 19th c. (like the usage of 'indeed') but is still used. Contrary to my feelings, there are quite a few uses of "how much more true" in both British and American English, which by inspection of those instances, show them as non-rhetorical statements, meaning 'it is that much more true'.

Solution 4:

This author seems to think that a period or a question mark can be used:

Conveniently, this comes from a secular "technical example," not a "religious text."