to associate textual clusters with geographical locations. One can then speculate that the “southern” part of the great cloud should be associated with Palestine, and begin to remember something said long ago by B. H. Streeter:
If we look at the map we see at once that the Churches whose early texts we have attempted to identify stand in a circle round the Eastern Mediterranean — Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, (Ephesus), Italy-Gaul, and Carthage. The remarkable thing is that the texts we have examined form, as it were, a graded series. Each member of the series has many readings peculiar to itself, but each is related to its next-door neighbour far more closely than to remoter members of the series... Antecedently we should rather expect the text of any particular locality to be, up to a point, intermediate between those of localities geographically contiguous with it on either side. But the exactness of correspondence between the geographical propinquity and the resemblance of text exceeds anything we should have anticipated.
 Whereas his work on the synoptic problem remains foundational, Streeter's theory of local texts seems to have fallen by the wayside. As Metzger and Ehrman say,
Today, there are few critics who follow Streeter's method in all of its particulars. Most recognize that the Caesarean text, for example, cannot be firmly established ... and that, in fact, apart from the text of Alexandria, it is difficult to find clearly demarcated textual families associated with the various major sees of early Christendom.
 Does Streeter's theory of local texts deserve to be shelved? Even though his postulated “Caesarean” text-type seems to have disintegrated, his expectation of an association between textual complexion and geographical locality seems to be supported by the MDS maps.
 These maps have some puzzling features, however. For instance, why is the Ethiopic in the “north-eastern” region? Why is the Armenian in the “secondary Alexandrian” cluster? And what about P46 and B? The location of the Ethiopic is not too hard to explain once it is remembered that there were historical connections between the Syrian and Ethiopian churches. The location of the Armenian suggests that it was revised against a secondary Alexandrian model. Streeter anticipated this, although he thought the revisers' model was a “Caesarean” rather than “Alexandrian” text. Speaking of the fifty Bibles commissioned by Constantine from Eusebius, whose texts might be expected to be like those current in Caesarea at the time, he wrote:
Thus many of the fifty copies originally made for Constantinople, more of less corrected to the standard [i.e. Byzantine] text, would get into the provinces... I venture the suggestion that one of these discarded MSS. was used by St. Mesrop and St. Sahak to revise the Armenian version.
 Could it be that the “secondary Alexandrian” cluster contains witnesses descended from Constantine's fifty? Such a monumental event in textual history as the production of those fifty might be expected to have left a mark on the tradition, and the MDS map may be revealing its echoes here.
 Until now nothing has been said about the textual locations of P46 and B (Codex Vaticanus), the first being our oldest and the second, so some would say, best witness to the “original” text. Looking at the particular projection shown in the preceding MDS map would suggest that B should be associated with a location far to the east of any Christian population centre that flourished in the first two centuries after Christ. Furthermore, P46 would be associated with Palestine or Syria. Surely something is wrong! Taking another two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional map resolves these difficulties:
 Now a geographical interpretation would place the texts of P46 and B in their own locality to the west of the rest: P46 might even be associated with Italy and B could be interpreted as a text with Italian and African ancestry. The Old Latin and Vulgate texts would be associated with the western side of the north-eastern region. Asia Minor fits th