Categories of New Testament manuscripts text (i.e. the four Gospels combined into a single narrative). Categories of New Testament manuscripts New Testament manuscripts in Greek are categorized into five groups, according to a scheme introduced in 1981 by Kurt and Barbara Aland in "The text of the New Testament". The categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the various text-types. Generally speaking, earlier Alexandrian manuscripts are category I, while later Byzantine manuscripts are category V. Aland's method involved considering 1000 passages where the Byzantine text differs from non-Byzantine text. The Alands did not select their 1000 readings from all of the NT books;
New Testament including works composed well into Late Antiquity, are relegated to the so-called New Testament apocrypha. Although not considered to be inspired by God, these "apocryphal" works may be helpful in the study of the New Testament in that they were produced in the same ancient context and often using the same language as those books that would eventually form the New Testament. Some of these later works are dependent (either directly or indirectly) upon books that would later come to be in the New Testament or upon the ideas expressed in them. There is even an example of a pseudepigraphical