Certainly if you're a student and interested in these things, the best
starting place is courses at your school.  My collection is somewhat
ecclectic, and doesn't have much of use to someone trying to start.
But I can give you some pointers.  Generally what you want to start
are books called introduction to the NT and the OT.  You should find
these in your library under Bible, NT, Introductions, or something
like that.  You'll probably also find them in your bookstore for the
intro to OT and intro to NT courses.  These books are intended
precisely to give you a good overview of the areas that make up
Biblical scholarship, and generally include bibliographies.  You want
to get a fairly recent book, both because lots of material on early
Judaism is fairly recent, and because you want an up to date
bibliography.  For these reasons I'm reluctant to cite the one I used,
since it now a few decades old.  

Once you get beyond general introductions, there are a number of good
books on the Bible, but they all tend to be fairly specialized, so
you're probably better off following references in an introduction and
browsing the library rather than asking for specific recommendations
from me.  Some standard books on the NT are either Bultmann's "History
of the Synoptic Tradition" or a book of the same generation by
Dibelius', whose name I forget, Perrin's "Rediscovering the Teachings
of Jesus", and Jeremias' "Rediscovering the Parables".  The only
problem with this list is that it's primarily oriented towards the
traditional "literary criticism", which was state of the art when I
was in college.  You also want to look at something that will give you
a good idea of the state of the art in understanding Judaism.  My
primary source is Schoeps' book "Paul", but there may be more recent
things available.  (Davies' book "Paul and Rabbinical Judaism" is the
more standard recommendation in this area, but is a bit old by now.)
You really want something that will give you the results of the Dead
Sea Scrolls and other recent discoveries.  These days the old source
criticism that was in the books I listed has tended to be replaced by
literary criticism that follows newer methods used in English, etc.:
narrative criticism and other related things.  I'm not a good source
of recommendations for this: I can't make heads or tails out of any of
it.  But you should find some source of information for it.

As for textual criticism, there are several good introductions to the
subject (none of which I have read, by the way), including Metzger's
book "The Text of the NT" and Aland and Aland's book "The Text of the
NT", which has just been reissued in a second edition by Eerdman's.
(I'd probably take Aland and Aland, simply because it's more recent.)

Josh McDowell of course comes from a very different school of thought
than I do, as he is part of the evangelical community.  They believe
that the Bible is the Word of God.  This leads them to do a number of
things that I don't like, including taking forced readings of the text
in order to get around contradictions, meanwhile claiming that they
are interpreting it "literally".

My view is that the Bible *contains* the Word of God, i.e. that God
intervened in history, and the Bible contains records from witnesses
to that revelation.  But I don't see the Bible itself as a revelation
independent of that.  I regard the Bible as being generally reliable.
When you look at the history of Biblical interpretation, you find that
a lot of claimed errors are resolved later on when some new discovery
is made.  So you're always safer betting with it than against it.  But
I certainly don't think it is inerrant.

Among other things, it contains a variety of accounts of most of the
important events, and they don't always agree on all details.  This
doesn't bother me.  I don't expect witnesses to agree to the last
detail.  I feel safer with a source that gives me a good sampling of
the evidence, rather than manufacturing a single, coherent account.  I
also have little question that the people involved in preparing the
accounts were a bit more credulous regarding miracles than I would be.
However I certainly don't want to explain away everything that is
miraculous -- after all, the whole value of the Bible is that it
reports interventions of God in history, and such interventions
are by definition not natural events.

The other major caveat is that the Bible -- particular the NT letters
-- contains a lot of thought that involved working out the
implications of religion for life.  I admire the way Paul and others
applied Christianity, but I don't necessarily expect to do so the same
way they did.  I don't go as far in this as some.  I do not subscribe
to the early 20th Cent. liberal view that Jesus was just a plain
rabbi, and Paul turned him into a Greek Mystery Cult savior.  I do
believe that Paul correctly understood and preached Jesus' ideas.  He
is, after all, our earliest source of information on Jesus.  I think
Paul is a reliable source of information, and I admire his theological
work and his advice to the churches he corresponded with.  However I
do not see him as inerrant.  

As an exmaple of this, Paul's whole argument on why women should cover
their heads in I Cor 11 is based on a way of using the creation
account that simply doesn't seem sensible now.  And his final
rejoinder in 11:16 seems to me an admission that he really doesn't
have much of an argument.  However if you step back from his detailed
arguments and look at what he was doing, I think it is sensible.  On
the one hand, he did not see any need for the Church to be socially
revolutionary.  He advocated living with slavery, with the Roman
government, etc.  The true "scandal" of the church is the Gospel, and
it is counterproductive to divert people from that issue by adopting
novel social policy.  But underneath his acceptance of existing
institutions is the clear understanding that they are not ultimate.  I
Cor 11 is qualified in 11:11-12 by a warning that "in the Lord", we
are the same.  Similarly, slaves continue to be slaves and relations
in the family continue to be based on the authority of the father, but
every discussion of these things includes cautions that authority must
be execized with love, and that we are all responsible to God.  I
believe this was the correct approach to take at the time.  However
over time, as society accepted Christianity, social policy was bound
to change.  How can slavery really continue if we are serious about
the slave as a fellow child of God?  Similarly, our ideas of how
families operate, and of the role of women has changed.  Now society
is moving to a view of equality of men and women.  In this context, I
believe Paul would advocate the Church also accepting equality.  It's
one thing to accept a special status for women in a society where this
is the norm.  In a society that accepts equality, for the church to
deny it is precisely to create the sort of scandal that Paul's
policies avoided in their 1st Cent. context.  And what's worse, it's
a scandal "in the wrong direction": it promulgates the horrid idea
that Christianity has some special understanding of women that makes
them inferior.

Anyway, the point of this comment is not to argue about the role of
women, but to indicate the difference between my approach to the Bible
and the more conservative one.  I see the Bible as a report of what
God did, and a record of the thoughts of intelligent people who saw
God's actions and tried to work out implications for their lives.  But
while I admire Paul, I do not necessarily expect to come to the same
conclusions he did.  I'd like to make sure that I operate from the
same revelation he did, but I think after 19 centuries, we see where
the same principles he used may lead to somewhat more far-reaching
consequences than he saw at the time.  In contrast, conservatives
expect to come to the same conclusions he did.  

Generally I limit this to social issues.  I don't expect to come to
different doctrinal conclusions than Paul did, though I admit that
I've toyed with univeralism.  There's a strong universalist thread in
Paul.  Just as Adam's sin infected all mankind, Christ's sacrifice is
available to all.  In 1 Thess. he expects Christ eventually to rule
over all.  In Rom. he expects all Jews to convert eventually, and in
Rom 11:25-32 he hints that this is simply a special case of a general
principle: For God has made all people prisoners of disobedience, so
that he might show mercy to them all.  All of this would form a very
good basis for an argument that eventually God will find a way to save
everyone.  That doesn't deny the reality of judgement, something Paul
would never do.  But it says that somehow God will find a way.  While
I can make this argument from Paul's ideas, I am less sure that Paul
himself accepted it.  Certainly if II Thess.  is really Paul's, he did
not.  However a number of scholars believe that II Thess, like Tim and
Tit, are not really Paul's.  Anyway, I'm willing to at least consider
the possibility that even in the realm of theology, Paul might not
have seen the full consequences of some of this ideas.

The article on crucifixion was in Bible Review, about a year ago.  I'm
afraid I don't keep copies of it.