I read a book by Bart D. Ehrman a few months back entitled Peter, Paul & Mary Magalene, which discussed how these three were understood in the scriptures. We don't know too much about them actually, even with the epistles of Paul, and much of the book involved "scriptures" that did not reach the Holy Bible we know. There were many other writings in the first few centuries, a few that influenced the Da Vinci Code, which Ehrman discussed in another book I referenced a little while back (listened to it on CD). Elaine Pagels, for instance, has written a lot about Gnostic gospels. In fact, in another lifetime, I actually saw Pagels give a talk that probably touched upon the subject in some fashion.
The New Testament as we know it was not officially accepted until the 4th Century, but this does not mean that it was an arbitrary collection. Though Revelations and II Peter, for instance, were controversial until fairly late, the core -- including the four gospels -- was accepted in the 2nd Century by people who we can probably consider the fairly mainstream Christians. And, many of the other gospels clearly were late, or pretty mystical -- as was your average gnostic work. Still, you have a few questionable choices, and it's mostly a given that only some "Pauline" epistles were actually written (or dictated, see Rom. 16:22) by the historical Paul. The choices made and the complexities therein are pretty interesting.
The book at issue here, Misquoting Jesus, however is concerned with the books that do form the New Testament. A word about analysis of the Bible (I have the Revised Standard Version in front of me) ... it is truly a detective story. I have an Oxford Companion to the Bible and it is a useful resource for various topics. The charm often is its citations of a few verses, which the usual reader would probably just ignore. But, then, a close look suggests that useful information -- perhaps about how people lived their daily lives and so forth or some matter of belief -- is obtained. It's like if you ask someone something, and they -- in passing -- say something rather important. Imagine if you read the books in their original language!
The true Muslim feels you have to read or recite the Koran in Arabic. This is deemed by some as a bit much, but it turns out to be not just a matter of worrying about God's language or such. Consider the Jewish scriptures, what we deem the "Old Testament." Many at the time of Jesus used the Greek translation, which in fact was a common citation in the New Testament when it cites the Jewish scripture. Problem is that sometimes their interpretation of this text was based on the Greek translation, which at times might be misleading. Check out the various versions of the Bible ... they actually can be pretty different in tone and flavor. Imagine how Greek vs. Hebrew might be considering how sometimes it is hard to translate one language to the other and get a true flavor of its meaning.
Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus provides another problem -- we often don't have the original text. Or, we have various versions, all of which -- even putting aside simple grammatical errors and such -- simply cannot be true. And, some of these versions change basic points -- like if Jesus gets angry at various points in Mark, or if certain verses (note that until pretty late, we didn't have verses ... the text was on run on sentence ... no wonder so few people were literate those days!) clearly reaffirmed the concept of the trinity. We would never know this from simply reading various versions of the Bible, even if in many cases the work notes that such and such verse is sometimes written differently.
For instance, it is believed by many (most?) scholars that Rom. 16:7 speaks of a Paul follower named "Junia," a woman, not "Junias," which is not a name known to be used at the time. My RSV has "Junias," deemed by many to be a change influenced by those who thought women did not have a role as "apostles" even if "Phoebe" was earlier cited as a "deaconess" (Rom. 16:1). Given the controversy, particularly a problem for some feminist scholars, it would be useful if my Bible at least mentioned the controversy. And, many other verses -- only some noted as not totally clear -- were changed over the years because of error or conscious alteration. In fact, the famous Jesus stops the stoning of an adulteress story is generally accepted as a late add-on, not originally in John.
The fact that there was no "official" Bible until the 4th Century affected this whole process. This allowed the reproduction of previous works to be even more haphazard than it normally would be in these pre-printing days. Likewise, the amateur nature of the enterprise -- though even people like the Roman philosopher Seneca complained about scribal error -- complicated things further. This set up various versions and the ones that ultimately were chosen, hundreds of years after they were first written, was also something of an arbitrary process. In fact, until rather recently, even the Greek (the original language of the NT) printed version was of questionable veracity, the sources used growing more out of what was immediately available at the time than because it was actually the best source available.
Ehrman's scholarship led him to change his whole belief structure -- starting off as a fundamentalist, he eventually realized that it is a bit dubious to say that the words of the NT was inspired by God -- we don't even HAVE the actual words of the original in many cases. It actually turned out to be a very human enterprise, down to the citation of Mark of an Old Testament event involving David ... the problem being he cites a fact wrong! One would think it wouldn't be TOO hard to check that. Of course, the gospels differ on various important facts, even if many try to create their own gospel by taking a little from each. This doesn't work -- even taking away the differences in tone of various versions of the money-changers account, for instance, John has it occurring at a totally different time.
The perils of biblical literalism is easily seen when it involves amateurs trying to interpret -- often with modern prejudices -- suspect English translations of ancient texts, texts we aren't fully clear are accurate in their original language in various cases. This does not -- on its own -- suggest we should toss out the baby Jesus with the bathwater. The perils of determining holy messages via human messengers happens all the time. If nothing else, it does at least provides us with some humility, and requires a certain "living" mind-set that also pops up in interpreting the Constitution. True enough that there we at least know the words, though at times one or the other phrase might have meant something somewhat different than many now understand it to mean, but the general principle basically holds.
Ehrman's work here was a bit more technical than the others cited, but it remains a quite readable account in a reasonable two hundred odd page nugget. He has other more scholarly works, but does a great service being about to use his expertise as a scholar to discuss things in a way the amateur would understand as well. Given the importance of the Bible -- more than many other things -- to said educated civilian sort, this is particularly useful here.