Instead, in a few places, they have discovered that the earlier manuscripts did not contain phrases or sentences that are included in the later manuscripts. For example, the doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:13b ("For thine is the kingdom...") was apparently added by scribes when they copied Matthew. There are about twenty isolated verses in the NT as found in the KJV that most scholars think were later additions:
Matt. 6:13b; 17:21; 18:11; 23:14;
Mark 7:16; 9:44, 46; 11:26; 15:28;
Luke 17:36; 23:17;
John 5:4;
Acts 8:37; 15:34; 24:7; 28:29;
Rom. 16:24;
1 John 5:7b-8a
In addition, two passages of 12 verses each are generally regarded as added to the Gospels by copyists:
Mark 16:9-20;
John 7:53-8:11
Thus, roughly 40 verses of the KJV NT, out of 7,957 verses, are now regarded by most scholars as later additions—about one-half of one percent - i.e 0.5%
Meanwhile, scholars have not found any sentences in earlier or more complete manuscripts that are missing from the KJV, but that are regarded as belonging to the original NT writings. This applies to skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman as much as it does to evangelical scholars like Daniel Wallace. There isn't even any argument on this point. This means that the common belief that material was taken out of the NT by scribes or priests and lost is not supportable by the evidence.
There are variants that affect the meaning of various verses. In the vast majority of instances, such variants that do affect meaning do so in doctrinally inconsequential ways. But there are variants that affect whether a particular verse teaches a core doctrine or not, though in the end, the teaching of the NT as a whole is still the same. That is because every core doctrine is taught in multiple places
For example, 1 John 5:7b-8a sounds like an affirmation of the Trinity, but it's one of those 40 or so verses that were added later. However, excluding that verse does not remove the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible; it just means that particular statement should be ignored when formulating doctrine. We have plenty of other verses that are relevant and for which there is no doctrinally significant variant.
Another example might be Acts 20:28, where some manuscripts have "church of the Lord" instead of "church of God," ; saying "church of the Lord" is not as obviously an affirmation of the deity of Christ for most readers. In actuality, both "Lord" and "God" are titles of deity, so in a sense it doesn't matter.
Here’s what Ehrman says in an interview found in the appendix of Misquoting Jesus (p. 252):
Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian, and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
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