Evaluations of Text-types
Most textual critics of the New Testament favor the Alexandrian text-type as the closest representative of the autographs for many reasons. One reason is that Alexandrian manuscripts are the oldest we have found, and some of the earliest church fathers used readings found in the Alexandrian text. Another is that the Alexandrian readings are adjudged more often to be the ones that can best explain the origin of all the variant readings found in other text-types.
Nevertheless, there are some dissenting voices to this general consensus. A few textual critics, especially those in France, argue that the Western text-type, an old text from which the Old Latin versions of the New Testament are derived, is closer to the originals.
In the United States, some critics have a dissenting view that prefers the Byzantine text-type, such as Maurice Arthur Robinson and William Grover Pierpont. They assert that Egypt, almost alone, offers optimal climatic conditions favoring preservation of ancient manuscripts while, on the other hand, the papyri used in the east (Asia Minor and Greece) would not have survived due to the unfavourable climatic conditions. So, it is not surprising that if we were to find ancient Biblical manuscripts, they would come mostly from the Alexandrian geographical area and not from the Byzantine geographical area. The argument for the authoritative nature of the latter is that the much greater number of Byzantine manuscripts copied in later centuries, in detriment to the Alexandrian manuscripts, indicates a superior understanding by scribes of those being closer to the autographs. Eldon Jay Epp argued that the manuscripts circulated in the Roman world and many documents from other parts of the Roman Empire were found in Egypt since the late 19th century.
Alexandrian popular proponents counter that the Byzantine church was dominated by Arianism (which is in opposition to mainstream Trinitarian Christological dogma) around the time that we first see evidence of the Byzantine text emerging. However, most scholars generally agree that there is no evidence of systematic theological alteration in any of the text types.
The evidence of the papyri suggests that — in Egypt at least — very different manuscript readings co-existed in the same area in the early Christian period. So, whereas the early 3rd century papyrus P75 witnesses a text in Luke and John that is very close to that found a century later in the Codex Vaticanus, the nearly contemporary P66 has a much freer text of John; with many unique variants; and others that are now considered distinctive to the Western and Byzantine text-types, albeit that the bulk of readings are Alexandrian. Most modern text critics therefore do not regard any one text-type as deriving in direct succession from autograph manuscripts, but rather, as the fruit of local exercises to compile the best New Testament text from a manuscript tradition that already displayed wide variations.
Read more about this topic: Alexandrian Text-type