There used to be an online version of Streeter's The Four Gospels, which covers the MSS situation as it stood in the 1920s fairly well, but it seems to have vanished.
The whole idea of "original text" doesn't correspond to anything simple in bibliography/codicology. (The notional original represented as O in a Lachmannian diagram is a conceptual convenience.) Even with printed texts close to the author there are problems, even when a single MS underlies the printed version. With long traditions and large corpuses of MSS like the NT, Virgil, or Homer, it's granted to be a notional thing -- but we still have a good confidence that we know at a fairly detailed level what the original was like, just not at a 100 percent word-for-word level (well, modulo Homeric oral formulaic composition and the possibility of wildly varying pre-Alexandrian versions).
The AV editors, who included linguists like Lancelot Andrewes, did not confine their attention to translations, but referred back to the originals when drawing on them and updated based on their own readings. They produced a very close translation of the Textus Receptus. As you note above, there are many differences between the TR and what you'd find in today's Nestle-Aland version, but none having a doctrinal impact, and any likely variances between the modern text and the notional originals of the NT books are hugely likely to be of the same nature.
We can reconstruct fairly well the major versions of the NT as they stood in, say, the second century. As you note above, none of the variations have any doctrinal impact. (For the OT, it's generally hard to get back behind the Masoretic Text (which is a bit like gettinga pre-Alexandrian version of Homer) although the Dead Sea Scrolls have raised the credibility of some of the Septuagintal readings somewhat by showing that some of the differences reflect different underlying Hebrew texts.)
Also, since the 16th century RCs have identified the definitive version of the "word of god" to be the Vulgate, not any English translation.
There are some extreme nuts who argue that the Textus Receptus is exactly the inspired word of God because they want to make the same claim for the AV, but they are a fringe of a fringe. Otherwise, for anyone serious today, scholars use the original texts and everyone else uses a modern translation which makes some reference to recent biblical textual scholarship. (Least said about the NRSV, though, which drives me up the wall because it reads like a paraphrase when I compare it with the Greek, the better.)
The whole idea of "original text" doesn't correspond to anything simple in bibliography/codicology. (The notional original represented as O in a Lachmannian diagram is a conceptual convenience.) Even with printed texts close to the author there are problems, even when a single MS underlies the printed version. With long traditions and large corpuses of MSS like the NT, Virgil, or Homer, it's granted to be a notional thing -- but we still have a good confidence that we know at a fairly detailed level what the original was like, just not at a 100 percent word-for-word level (well, modulo Homeric oral formulaic composition and the possibility of wildly varying pre-Alexandrian versions).
The AV editors, who included linguists like Lancelot Andrewes, did not confine their attention to translations, but referred back to the originals when drawing on them and updated based on their own readings. They produced a very close translation of the Textus Receptus. As you note above, there are many differences between the TR and what you'd find in today's Nestle-Aland version, but none having a doctrinal impact, and any likely variances between the modern text and the notional originals of the NT books are hugely likely to be of the same nature.
We can reconstruct fairly well the major versions of the NT as they stood in, say, the second century. As you note above, none of the variations have any doctrinal impact. (For the OT, it's generally hard to get back behind the Masoretic Text (which is a bit like gettinga pre-Alexandrian version of Homer) although the Dead Sea Scrolls have raised the credibility of some of the Septuagintal readings somewhat by showing that some of the differences reflect different underlying Hebrew texts.)
Also, since the 16th century RCs have identified the definitive version of the "word of god" to be the Vulgate, not any English translation.
There are some extreme nuts who argue that the Textus Receptus is exactly the inspired word of God because they want to make the same claim for the AV, but they are a fringe of a fringe. Otherwise, for anyone serious today, scholars use the original texts and everyone else uses a modern translation which makes some reference to recent biblical textual scholarship. (Least said about the NRSV, though, which drives me up the wall because it reads like a paraphrase when I compare it with the Greek, the better.)
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