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Chester Beatty papyri (Fayum or Aphroditopolis, Egypt).

The "oldest" extant manuscripts (those from before the 5th century) which NA/UBS scholars rely on as reliable are all from Egypt, the place where Origen observed the corruption of manuscripts: This is not the case with any extant Alexandrian manuscript. For the antiquity of a manuscript to be of intrinsic value, that manuscript must be from before 200 AD when the corruptions were already evident. In other words, blindly preferring the "oldest" manuscripts does not ensure arriving at the correct readings.

Wallace says, "Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted-within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse" (Online article: Did the Original New Testament Manuscripts still exist in the Second Century?). Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. By an Alexandrian Church father's own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt.

(Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. ".the differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please." Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said: However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. These manuscripts come from Egypt and are witnesses of the Alexandrian text-type. However, the earliest manuscripts that provide distinguishable readings date to about 200 AD (e.g. The oldest New Testament manuscript fragment is P52, which dates to about 125 AD. Evidence becomes skewed the farther back we go Manuscripts in Alexandria were corrupt by 200 AD Third, the existence of modern critical texts ironically rebuts the presumption that only old manuscripts contain reliable readings. Second, there is no scientific correlation between the age of a manuscript and its number of copyist errors. First, the farther back in time we go, the more skewed and unrepresentative the evidence becomes. In the world of manuscripts, "older" does not mean "more reliable".