King James and Textus Receptus Only

 I finished reading James White's book "The King James Only Controversy." 

 It is a very thorough book on the claims of superiority and even inspiration of the King James Translation and/ or the "Textus Receptus"--the Greek New Testament text from which the KJV is translated.  He addresses whether there were conspiratorial schemes behind the modern translations to alter Scripture which use different Greek manuscripts.  

This book is more extensive than D. A. Carson's book.  

 I have used the New King James for over 40 years--which the King James Only folks (or Textus Receptus only) would reject as they do these other translations using different Greek manuscripts.  

I actually hold to what is the "Eclectic Text" view, and have for many years, as opposed to the "Majority Text" view. (The Textus Receptus is an elective text itself, drawing from various sources.) The Majority text or the "Byzantine Text" is closer to the Textus Receptus--but not identical-- than the Greek text used by the majority of modern translations like the New American Standard or New International Version.  But I believe that individual readings predate any text type we have today, whether those from Byzantine type text or what is called the "Alexandrian" or "Critical" text.  

There may be cases where the Byzantine Text is superior and cases where the Alexandrian is better-and probably in most cases. 

 The Byzantine Text has more Greek copies because of the circumstances where Greek was continued to be used, while the Alexandrian has less witness because Greek was replaced with Latin, and maybe due to persecution in the West, there was the destruction of surviving Greek manuscripts.   

Obviously, God did not give us a completed New Testament (or the Old Testament) written in some indestructible material or protected by a force field somewhere.   

I believe free-will with human weakness/ failure figures into the way this situation is with reference to the manuscripts and the variants. I do believe that through textual criticism we can come close to what the original manuscripts were according to the final product intended by their authors.