Categories of New Testament manuscripts

Ok kiddo, so you know how when we write things down, we can either do it by hand or use a computer? Well, a long time ago, people didn't have computers, so they wrote things down by hand.

Now, the New Testament is a really important book for some people, and over the years, lots of people have written it down in different ways. So, we have lots of copies of the New Testament that have been written by hand, and we call each of these copies a "manuscript".

But not all manuscripts are the same. We can put them into different categories, based on things like when they were written, how old they are, what language they are in, and how many mistakes there are in them.

There are four main categories of New Testament manuscripts:

1. Papyri - These are the oldest manuscripts, and they were written on a special kind of paper called papyrus. They were written in Greek, which was the language that the New Testament was originally written in.

2. Uncials - These are manuscripts that were written using capital letters, and they were written on parchment, which is a kind of animal skin.

3. Minuscules - These are manuscripts that were written using lowercase letters, and they were also written on parchment.

4. Lectionaries - These are manuscripts that were written to be read aloud in church, and they contain parts of the New Testament arranged in a special order.

So there you have it, little one. New Testament manuscripts are copies of the New Testament that were written down by hand a long time ago, and there are different categories of these manuscripts based on things like when they were written, what language they are in, and how they were used.