This is an excellent scholarly article, from a reliable source, a conservative Christian website. I highly recommend everyone read it, even if you only get to the graph comparison, which show that literally, the Byzantine text did not exist before the 4th century, that early church father’s had their texts “revised” as late as the 9th century to correspond to the Majority Text, that the TR doesn’t even agree with the Majority Text in many places, but more importantly, the textual variants make so little difference to doctrine, that the whole issue is overblown! (Oh, the footnotes in the article are also excellent - worth a read!)
As far as footnotes, the issue is NOT modern footnotes. Those are clearly marked, the bottom of the page is the preferred place, and yes, comments are often made as to the arguments in the particular quotes.
The footnotes that affect the text are in the Byzantine texts, where a scribe makes a comment in the margin. It could be short or long, but it is always extraneous to the text. And, these manuscripts actually exist, where for the first time, something was added to a particular verses, usually in the margin.
Those type of footnotes are common, and it is easy to identify they are not part of the text. The problem arose, because the next generation of scribes would then copy that margin note into the actual text. And so would the next generation, and all the sucessive notes. So, by the 9th century, there were a lot of notes which had been comments on the sides, now part of the actual texts.
A lot of these are to make a text have high Christiology. So Mark, who alwatys referred to Jesus by his name, “Jesus” has many attempts to make it say “The Lord Jesus” or “The Lord Jesus Christ.” The longer ending of Mark is rife with this mistake.
I am not an expert on textual criticism. I have read the intro to Kostenberger’s 2nd year Greek text, “Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament.” Also, FF Bruce’s “The Canon of Scripture” has some information on textual criticism. Mostly, I rely on my commentaries, which are whole books on various books of the Bible. The New International Commentary on the Greek New Testament” is one of the best sources, but the series is not yet finished, so then I got to other commentaries. Textual issues are dealt with in these commentaries.
Really, the people with their KJVOnlyism are quite laughable. They know nothing of the original languages, nothing of textual criticism, have never read a real commentary, and yet, they stoutly maintain that any other Biblical translation is not pure or corrupted. I think if they even read the article Ariel posted, they would shake their heads and wonder how they could believe that the KJV was the only version. Well, I guess the revert to some kind of “only inspired text” nonsense, because from a manuscript evidence point of view, they don’t have a leg to stand on.
As for how bad the Alexandrian texts are, it was the Bishop of Alexandria, Athenasius, who first stood against the Arian heresy, brought it to a council, where it was decided that Jesus was both God and man. So, some good doctrine coming out of Alexandria, at a time when the Byzantine text didn’t even exist.