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Kurt and Barbara Aland claim, "In the book of Revelation the textual scene and its history differs greatly from the rest of the New Testament.” 63 This is due to two factors. First, Revelation has far fewer Greek manuscript witnesses than any other New Testament book. Revelation originally circulated independently of the rest of the New Testament, and the nature of the book, combined with suspicions about it in the East, where the bulk of Greek manuscripts were produced, cut down the number of copies made. Extant are only five papyrus manuscripts, the longest containing eight chapters (p 47, from the third century), and eleven uncials, only six of which contain any substantial portion of text, and only three of which contain the whole book (Sinaiticus [a], from the fourth century; Alexandrinus [A], from the fifth century, and 046, from the tenth century). The textual critic, then, has much less evidence on which to base decisions. At least the contemporary critic has more to go by than did Erasmus, who, in his first edition, for lack of any Greek manuscript evidence for some verses in the Revelation, translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek! 64 A second factor that makes the text of Revelation unique is the value of the witnesses that are available. While in most of the New Testament, Sinaiticus (a) is considered to have a text superior to that found in Alexandrinus (A), the situation is reversed in Revelation: Alexandrinus, in combination with Ephraemi (C) (where it is extant), is considered the best text available. 65 Dependence on these uncials is all the more important because one of the most-respected uncials for the New Testament text, Vaticanus (B), does not include Revelation. The combination of few witnesses and variant text types requires that textual decisions in Revelation be based on methods appropriate to its own peculiar text situation. 66