I’ve have almost completed reading Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (see this thread http://discourse.textkit.com/t/the-new-testament-a-historical-introduction-to-the-early-christian-writings/17292/5). I think I’ll write a review of sorts later on, but I thought I’d mention it to you. I have been asking questions of the same sort as you myself and I must say that I have found many, many answers in this book, which I sincerely recommend. I don’t have the competence to judge the substance matter myself, but I don’t really have any reason to doubt that it’s serious in its scholarship. My main reservation is that the book, according to the preface, is written primarily for nineteen or twenty year old college students, and for that reason it’s sort of assumes that the reader is very naive, explaining everything in very plain English and at length. But if you can stand that, all important questions - the historical context of different books of the NT, how they relate to, how they differ from, and how they contradict each other, the forms of Christianity that didn’t survive (“heresies”), etc., all is addressed with eye-opening clarity.