This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman's standard account of New Testament textual transmission sets out the actual method scholars use to weigh one witness against another, considering a manuscript's age, its documented geographic origin, its apparent care in copying and its relationship to other known witnesses, rather than treating every surviving copy as equally reliable evidence for a text's original wording.
That method matters for a textual witness entry because it means a witness's importance is not simply a matter of how old it is, a later, carefully copied manuscript can sometimes preserve an earlier reading more faithfully than an older, more carelessly produced one, and an entry records a witness's actual documented standing among specialists rather than assuming age alone settles the question.
A textual witness entry therefore records what specialists have actually concluded about a given witness's reliability and its relationship to other witnesses, where that scholarly assessment is documented, treating a witness's value as itself a checkable, argued conclusion rather than a fact obvious on its face. A textual witness entry records that assessed standing precisely because it is the difference between a witness scholars actually rely on and one they treat mainly as a historical curiosity.