...the original intent by the translators of the NKJV (italic portion added) was to do the new translations from the majority text, what ultimately happened in the midst of the commercial endeavor was to merely change the English text by modernizing a number of archaic words which makes it little more than a Scofield without notes.
This comes from "The Biblical Position on the KJV Controversy" written by the Elders of Grace Community Church (John MacArthur, Jr's church). I have a more complete version of his article, hopefully in electronic version that I can share if you are interested.
Scrivener, circa 1894, was able to find excellant agreement between the KJV text basis and the textus receptus that is essentially a subset of the majority text. His work shows that about 50% of the KJV text derives from Theodore Beza's 5th and 8th edition of 1598. 25% can be attributed to Robert Estienne (Stephanus) 3rd edition 1550/51 and portions from the Complutension Polyglot 1514-1520 (Spain).
If you remove the redundancy of the MT (majority text), you have the TR (textus receptus) to an agreement of 98%. The same cannot be said for the Uncial mss. (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), they agree about 85% but they did not enter the KJV nor the NKJV.
Tischendorf did not discover the Sinaiticus Aleph uncial until about 1844. I am not sure on the Vaticanus B. However they have been reported to date to at least the 4th century, AD.
Some have tried to villefy these older manuscripts but I remain neutral, that is, I consider them an amazing find and their confirmation of the body of Greek text representing MT is amazingly accurate.
Kindly remember in all this that we are discussing faithful, sincere translations, not the original, inerrent autographs. The translations were made without resort to conflation nor eclectic translation methods.
