Although there are many minuscules, most of them come from the 9th century on; a few, however, shed significant light on earlier readings, representing otherwise not well attested texts or textual “families.” In the early 20th century, the English scholar Kirsopp Lake (hence, Lake group) discovered a textual family of manuscripts known as Family 1:1, 118, 131, and 209 (from the 12th to 14th centuries) that have a text type similar to that of Θ, a 3rd–4th-century Caesarean type. At the end of the 19th century, W.H. Ferrar, a classical scholar at Dublin University (hence, the Ferrar group), found that manuscripts 13, 69, 124, and 346—and some minuscules discovered later (from the 11th to 15th centuries)—also seemed to be witnesses to the Caesarean text type. Manuscript 33, the “Queen of the Cursives,” is a 9th–10th-century manuscript now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris; it contains the whole New Testament except Revelation and is a reliable witness to the Alexandrian text (similar to B) but, in Acts and the Pauline Letters, shows influence of the Byzantine text type.

Lectionaries range from the 5th to the 6th century on; some early ones are uncials, though many are minuscules. Scholarly work with lectionary texts is only at its beginning, but the textual types of lectionaries may preserve a textual tradition that antedates its compilation and serves to give examples of the various text forms.

Papyri

The earliest New Testament manuscript witnesses (2nd–8th centuries) are papyri mainly found preserved in fragments in the dry sands of Egypt. Only in the latter decades of the 20th century have the relatively recently discovered New Testament papyri been published. Of those cataloged to date, there are about 76 New Testament manuscripts with fragments of various parts of the New Testament, more than half of them being from the 2nd to 4th centuries. All the witnesses prior to 400 are of Egyptian provenance, and their primitive text types, though mainly Alexandrian, establish that many text types existed and developed side by side. One of the most significant papyrus finds is p⁵², from c. 130 to 140, the earliest extant manuscript of any part of the New Testament. P⁵² consists of a fragment having on one side John 18:31–33 and on the other John 18:37–38, indicating that it was a codex, of which the text type may be Alexandrian. It is now in the John Rylands Library at Manchester.

In the early 1930s, British mining engineer A. Chester Beatty acquired three 3rd-century papyri from Egypt; they were published in 1934–37. Known as p⁴⁵, p⁴⁶, and p⁴⁷, they are, for the most part, in his private library in Dublin.

P⁴⁵, Beatty Biblical Papyrus I (and some leaves in Vienna), contains 30 leaves of an early- or mid-3rd-century codex of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. Each Gospel is of a different text type, and, although the leaves are mutilated, the Alexandrian text appears to predominate (particularly in Acts, in which a short non-Western text prevails); the whole may be thought of as pre-Caesarean.

P⁴⁶, Beatty Biblical Papyrus II (and Papyrus 222 at the University of Michigan), consists of 86 leaves of an early-3rd-century (c. 200) codex quire containing the Pauline Letters in the following order: Romans, Hebrews, I and II Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and I Thessalonians. Although some of the leaves are quite mutilated, the text type of p⁴⁶ appears to be Alexandrian. P⁴⁷, Beatty Biblical Papyrus III, is from the late 3rd century. It contains Rev. 9:10–17:2. It is the oldest, but not the best, text of Revelation and agrees with A, C, and ℵ.

Other early significant papyri are p⁶⁶, p⁴⁸, p⁷², p⁷⁵, and p⁷⁴. P⁶⁶, also known as Papyrus Bodmer II, contains in 146 leaves (some having lacunae) almost all of the Gospel According to John, including chapter 21. This codex, written before 200, is thus merely one century removed from the time of the autograph, the original text. Its text, like that of p⁴⁵, is mixed, but it has elements of an early Alexandrian text. P⁶⁶ and the other Bodmer papyri, which Martin Bodmer, a Swiss private collector, acquired from Egypt, were published 1956–61. They are in the private Bodmer library at Cologny, near Geneva. P⁴⁸ is a late-3rd-century text of Acts now in a library in Florence. It contains Acts 23:11–17, 23–29 and illustrates a Greek form of the Western text in Egypt in the 3rd century. The papyri of p⁷², Papyri Bodmer VII and VIII, are also from the 3rd century. VII contains a manuscript of Jude in a mixed text, and VIII contains I and II Peter. In I Peter the Greek was written by a scribe whose native language was Coptic; there are many examples of misspellings and itacisms that when corrected leave a text similar to the Alexandrian witnesses. The papyri of p⁷⁵, Papyri Bodmer XIV and XV, are 2nd–3rd-century codices containing most of Luke and of John, with John connected to Luke on the same page (unlike the Western order of the Gospels). The text coincides most with B but also has affinities with p⁶⁶ and p⁴⁵ as a predecessor of Alexandrian form.

P⁷⁴, Bodmer Papyrus XVII, is a 6th–7th-century text of Acts and the Catholic Letters. Acts show affinities with ℵ and A and no parallels with the Western text.

These and other papyri witness to the state of the early text of the New Testament in Egypt, indicating that no one text dominated and that text types of different origin flourished side by side.