In the absence of a really good library, getting Accordance has helped me get back into theological geekery in a big way. One of the modules I got with it was the NET Bible, or "New English Translation". As a straight translation for reading I'm not all that fond of it, but the notes that come with it are solid gold. I'll just give you the notes from Mark 1:1 as an example:
sn By the time Mark wrote, the word gospel had become a technical term referring to the preaching about Jesus Christ and God’s saving power accomplished through him for all who believe (cf. Rom 1:16).
tn The genitive in the phrase τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (tou euangeliou Iesou Christou, “the gospel of Jesus Christ”) could be translated as either a subjective genitive (“the gospel which Jesus brings [or proclaims]”) or an objective genitive (“the gospel about Jesus Christ”). Either is grammatically possible. This is possibly an instance of a plenary genitive (see ExSyn 119–21; M. Zerwick, Biblical Greek, §§36–39). If so, an interplay between the two concepts is intended: The gospel which Jesus proclaims is in fact the gospel about himself.
tc ℵ* Θ 28 l 2211 pc sams Or lack υἱοῦ θεοῦ (huiou theou, “son of God”), while virtually all the rest of the witnesses have the words (A f1,13 33 M also have τοῦ [tou] before θεοῦ), so the evidence seems to argue for the authenticity of the words. Most likely, the words were omitted by accident in some witnesses, since the last four words of v. 1, in uncial script, would have looked like this: ιυ̅χ̅ρ̅υ̅υ̅υ̅θ̅υ̅. With all the successive upsilons an accidental deletion is likely. Further, the inclusion of υἱοῦ θεοῦ here finds its complement in 15:39, where the centurion claims that Jesus was υἱὸς θεοῦ (huios theou, “son of God”). Even though ℵ is in general one of the best NT mss, its testimony is not quite as preeminent in this situation. There are several other instances in which it breaks up chains of genitives ending in ου (cf., e.g., Acts 28:31; Col 2:2; Heb 12:2; Rev 12:14; 15:7; 22:1), showing that there is a significantly higher possibility of accidental scribal omission in a case like this. This christological inclusio parallels both Matthew (“Immanuel…God with us” in 1:23/“I am with you” in 28:20) and John (“the Word was God” in 1:1/“My Lord and my God” in 20:28), probably reflecting nascent christological development and articulation.
sn The first verse of Mark’s Gospel appears to function as a title: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is not certain, however, whether Mark intended it to refer to the entire Gospel, to the ministry of John the Baptist, or through the use of the term beginning (ἀρχή, arche) to allude to Genesis 1:1 (in the Greek Bible, LXX). The most likely option is that the statement as a whole is an allusion to Genesis 1:1 and that Mark is saying that with the “good news” of the coming of Christ, God is commencing a “new beginning.”
So the first thing to say about the notes is that there are a lot of them, and they're very detailed. Four to a verse is not uncommon. They're divided between study notes, which are explanations about what the text means; translators notes, which go into detail about why they chose to translate things in a particular way; and textual notes, which explain the differences between different manuscripts. There's plenty in there to keep a Greek geek like me happy.
For instance, in the notes above we see perhaps the most significant textual variant in the New Testament: does Mark 1:1 say that Jesus is the son of God or not? We don't have an original copy of Mark's Gospel, so frankly, we don't know. I suspect it doesn't, to be honest, given that the whole theme of Mark is that Jesus is the son of God but this supposed is a surprise. It would be a bit silly to give away the surprise at the start. As the notes say, ℵ (which is a manuscript called "Codex Sinaiticus", one of the oldest full copies of the New Testament we have) is a very good manuscript, and it's more likely (in my view) that "the son of God" wasn't there initially but was added later to give the work more weight, rather than being there initially but being weakened later. One of the principles of textual criticism is that we generally take the more theologically unpleasant reading, because that's more likely to be "corrected" by well-meaning scribes later. But at the end of the day, it's a judgment call. We weigh up the evidence, and we decide what the Bible probably said.
How much this is a problem depends on your understanding of Scripture. If the very words of Scripture are the very words of God, then you're going to have quite a problem with humans sitting down and deciding what the words of God probably are. As I mentioned the other day, those with a Qu'ranic understanding of Scripture will get really freaked out by this, and sure enough, I came across Muslim apologists saying that since we have a scientific and critical approach to manuscript evaluation, we can't say for sure that anything is the word of God and therefore all bets are off. To be honest, this is a good argument against those who believe in a literal inspiration of Scripture: the original Scripture can be literally inspired if you like, but we don't have the original Scripture, so that doesn't help us, really. (And then there are the crazies, which proves the principle that people have to find something to anathematise other people over.)
John 5:4 is a fantastic case in point:
For an angel of the Lord went down and stirred up the water at certain times. Whoever first stepped in after the stirring of the water was healed from whatever disease which he suffered.
Is that the word of God? It's the word of God according to manuscripts C3 Θ Ψ 078 f1, 13 M. It's not the word of God according to manuscripts p66, 75 ℵ B C* T pc co. How would you like to make the call?
As I've said, whether or not you think this is a good thing depends on your view of Scripture. I think it is a good thing, that we are able to evaluate multiple sources for the texts that have come down to us. There's an integrity there. Acknowledging the existence of variants, and dealing with them as a present reality, is much, much preferable to denying them and suppressing them in an authoritarian manner, even burning all the variants. (Which, let's face it, has happened in at least one major world religion, and tends to be a trademark of sectarian Christian groups as well.) We have to speak a lot more tentatively about Scripture if we can't even agree on what it says. We speak in terms of probabilities, which is a lot more honest a way to handle it.
A hard (what I've been calling "Qu'ranic") view of Scripture sees multiple variations as a weakness, because you have to "choose" which one God really said. That is the unfortunate consequence of going down the road of inerrancy and infallibility and all those other categories which the Bible does not appropriate to itself. But you don't have to do down that road. A flexible view of Scripture sees multiple variations as a strength. And I would argue that a flexible view is actually more in keeping with Biblical tradition itself. We have four Gospels because we know it's a bad idea to single-source a news story; there will be differences between those Gospels, but that's the nature of testimony. Textual criticism is just a logical extension of that: we're not single-sourcing a Gospel, and there will be differences between our sources of an individual Gospel, but that's the nature of human manuscript transmission.
But I think it's a good thing for another reason; it causes us to go back to what's important. The vast, vast majority of the textual variants of the New Testament are unimportant. In Mark 1:4, it really doesn't make any difference whether John the Baptist was in the wilderness, (Sinaiticus and others) or John was baptising in the wilderness (Alexandrinus and others) or John was in the wilderness baptising (Cantabrigiensis and others). Does it change what the text is saying? It doesn't matter whether John's gospel was written "that you may come to believe" or "that you may continue to believe". The net effect is the same.
Even Mark 1:1, which I can see people getting freaked out about, doesn't change the story one bit. It doesn't matter whether or not it says right there that Jesus is the son of God or not. The rest of the book is going to go on and demonstrate it, and if you don't believe the rest of the book, then having it in the title isn't going to help. Paradoxically, the indecidability of textual criticism, with its minute study of the individual words, forces us to take our eyes off the original words and look at big picture of the story.
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