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To answer your first question, we should not simply accept Sinaiticus as the source of the truth for the New Testament. It has great weight in debates from its age, but age is not the final arbiter in textual considerations. Codex Sinaiticus was made in the 4th century on parchment using capital letters (a manuscript in all capitals is called an "uncial"). ...

I wrote a paper on James 2:14-26 a few years back. Here's a link. TRANSLATION 14: What (is) the benefit, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? That faith is not able to save them (is it)? 15: Suppose a brother or a sister is naked and lacking of daily bread, 16: and someone from you (pl.) says to them, “Go ...

The Old Testament is primarily in Biblical Hebrew (the term given to the Semitic language that the Bible was written in from which modern Hebrew descends) with some Aramaic in various places (Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26; Jeremiah 10:11; Daniel 2:46-7:28; and two words in Genesis 31:47). The New Testament is in Koine (common) 1st-century Greek. Classical Greek is ...

The source texts for the NT include various Greek manuscripts and sometimes the Latin Vulgate. The source texts for the OT include the Masoretic text (Aleppo Codex, Leningrad Codex), as well as the Latin Vulgate, Greek Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls. Translators of new English translations often use some or all of those source texts when producing a new ...

Can do either, obviously. If they edit an existing translation, this is called a "rescension" (The Living Bible was one, a paraphrase of the KJV). However, most of the time, they use Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic text. As an example, The New Living Translation does this. But they don't stop with just one manuscript. They compare different manuscripts of a ...

Although Frank has a great answer above, I thought I'd add a couple of things. The question of the proximity of a text to the original depends on a number of factors, age being an important one, but certainly not the only one. To think about this, it is necessary to think about the process of manuscript manufacture in the early years of the church. ...

The preface on their site includes the list of translators and editors down toward the bottom: Pentateuch: Richard E. Averbeck, Ph.D. (Dropsie College) Robert B. Chisholm, Th.D. (Dallas Theological Seminary) Dorian Coover-Cox, Ph.D. (Dallas Theological Seminary) Eugene H. Merrill, Ph.D. (Columbia University) Allen P. Ross, Ph.D. (Cambridge University) ...

For a detailed discussion of this, I recommend A History of New Testament Lexicography by John A. L. Lee. It specifically explores how translators have relied heavily on lexicons, which in turn rely heavily on earlier translations and other lexicons.

The key to understanding this very difficult verse in James, and therefore for providing a proposed clarifying translation, is found in Genesis 15:6, which alludes to Abraham's faith as the basis of righteousness. When we compare the citations of Genesis 15:6 to other places in the Bible where this verse is quoted, then we will be better able to understand ...