Briefly, the split of opinion between Westcott-Hort and Textus Receptus camps was based on the question, "Wherever there are variations between manuscript copies of the new Testament, do we take the majority of textual readings as the genuine readings, or, rather, do we look at the oldest manuscripts and assume that the majority, where different, represent centuries of accumulated errors of copying and/or deliberate "editing" (read, manipulation) of the text?"
The discovery of the 4th century Uncials (manuscripts written in upper case -- all capitals -- with no spaces between words) contributed to the controversy. As a result of the discovery of these manuscripts, and the birth of the 'science' of Textual criticism, the idea was pushed long and hard that our 'Received' text, and the King James Bible that was translated from it, are full of verses that are additions to the original Greek of the NT, added by overzealous ecclesiastical editing by the Church over the centuries. With the dissatisfaction spawned by these events, a flood of new revisions and translations of the Bible began.
This is the era that saw the first major revision of the King James ("Authorized") version, known as the British Revised Version of the Holy Scriptures (1881). Shortly after this came the American Standard Version of 1901, the Revised Standard Version of 1946, and the New Revised Standard Version of 1989. Outside this family of KJV revisions we also have such familiar 20th century versions as the Jerusalem Bible, the New American Bible, the New American Standard Version, the New International Version, the New English Bible, and many others.
Traditionalists and fundamentalists panicked and scorned the new "perversions". The charge was made that a suspicious number of the "deleted" or "changed" readings of the Critical Text affected the doctrine of the Deity of Christ and that advocating such a text would open the door to non-trinitarian "cults" like Jehovah's Witnesses with their New World Translation; indeed, Watchower literature points out that some of the "Trinitarian" proof-texts formerly used by Christians were now considered null and void, relics of a corrupt ecclesiastical text whose tarnish has been stripped and polished anew by the critical labors of Westcott and Hort and their heirs. Others remain unfazed, holding to the position that the Critical Text does no damage at all to the doctrine of Christ's Godhood and the Trinity, other than to clean out spurious readings that try to "prove too much" the trinitarian viewpoint.
"Then a new generation arose which knew not Westcott and Hort..."
With the publication of the New King James Version in 1979, we see a paradigm shift: The New Testament on which the NKJV is based, is not the Critical Text that any self-respecting scholar of the last one hundred years would have taken for granted, but the Byzantine Majority text instead -- nearly the same as the old Textus Receptus that scholarship had blown out of the water 100 years ago.
What's going on?
The pendulum has begun to swing back the other way, that's what.
Since the 1980s the tide has been shifting in the opposite direction from its trend for the last hundred years. A growing number of scholars and Bible readers have come to favor what is known as the Byzantine Majority Text. It is not the same as the Textus Receptus of the 1500's, but much closer to it than the Critical text (represented by Westcott-Hort, Nestle, and the United Bible Societies/UBS). A new generation of scholars -- names like Pickering, Pierpont, Robinson, Hodges and Farstadt -- have challenged the base assumptions of the Westcott-Hort legacy and have advocated a return to a majority-of-readings approach.
At this website I have made available HTML versions of the Greek Bible -- the LXX (Septuagint) Old Testament and the Byzantine Majority New Testament. Whether the trend continues in this direction remains to be seen. Meanwhile, since I lean toward the opinion that the Majority/Textus Receptus text family is the more correct one, since I do not believe solely in the sterile, transient 'science' of Higher Criticism, but also believe that the Holy Spirit guides the Church as a whole through the centuries until the Lord's return, and realize that the doctrine of the Inspiration of the Scriptures is ultimately affected by this controversy, I make available to you the public domain Pierpont-Robinson version of the Majority text.
As I mention at the Home Page and on the LXX page, I like the Koptos font for its ancient uncial manuscript look. You can download it here. If you don't like it, download a copy of whatever biblical book you're currently looking at, and get into the HTML source code and change the Koptos font to something else, such as SGreek. The only annoyance you will have to put up with is that the final sigma of the Greek words does not change to its final form, since I encoded the texts to conform with the uncial Koptos orthography, in which the Greek letter Sigma looks like our English capital "C".
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