I have almost finished reading 'Misquoting Jesus' by Bart D. Ehrman (Harper ,SanFrancisco, 2005, ISBN 13:978-0-06073817-4 or 10:0-06-073817-0). the subtitles is "The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why".
The author was originally educated (?) at a fundamentalist training school, passed from this to an evangelical college and finally became a legitimate scholar. The book is partly a story of his journey to a vocation that he obviously loves and also a basic introduction to the textual analysis used by Biblical scholars, as opposed to fundamentalist apologists.
Ehrman gives a few basic examples of how the text of earlier versions of the Bible have been recovered through literary detective work and comparison of manuscripts, quotations. He also goes through a brief history of the art of Biblical scholarship.
Interesting points so far include
-the story of the woman taken in adultery, one of the most popular today-let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc.- is a later addition.
-the 'Johannine Comma' a later addition to the Gospel of John that seems to justify the doctrine of the trinity was also an add-on.
-the King James version of the bible(1611) was essentially based on very faulty texts. The above two incidents and also the last 12 verses of Mark entered into the King James version via the fact that the Greek version that it was based on, that of Erasmus (1515) who had very few manuscripts to consult. One of those he did consult was forged to "settle" a dispute with other theologians as to the Johannine Comma. They essentially forged a copy with this insert after Erasmus had promised to include it in his edition if any such ms in Greek could be found.
-A comparative study of variants as to text by John Mill who in 1707 published an edition of the Greek New Testament which noted about 30,000 (!) variations amongst the 100 or so Greek manuscripts that he consulted. Ehrman later notes that there are presently more than 5,700 mss known, and the present estimates of variant readings range from 200,000 to 400,000.
-The Codex Sinaiticus is NOT housed in a monastery in the Sinai. It was swindled out of there via promises that its discoverer Von Tischendorf's patron, the Tsar of Russia, would reward the monastery. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution the new government sold this ms to the British Library where it is housed today.
More later on this book