generations of careful copying from a very ancient one and could preserve an early reading. • Prefer the reading that has multiple attestation. If a reading occurs only in an isolated manuscript, there is less likelihood that such a singular reading preserves the Ausgangstext. Normally you would expect the best and oldest reading to be in more than one or two witnesses. At the same time, the prolific copying of the NT in the Middle Ages resulted in many hundreds of copies of the later Byzantine type