Book excerpt: The text-critical study of the Apostolos (all of the New Testament apart from the Gospels) of the fourth-century Greek Father Athanasius of Alexandria has two aims in view: one analytical and one methodological. An initial review of Athanasius' life and writings and a survey of the Alexandrian text-type precede an analysis of Athanasius' text to determine its classification within the major New Testament text-types, and particularly its suspected Alexandrian character. The book also compares the results of methods traditionally used on the texts of the Fathers with the use of an alternative and advanced method, multivariate analysis. Unlike quantitative and group profile analyses, multivariate analysis utilizes not just a single dimension but the full dimensionality of the source data.