Larry,
you asked,
And speaking of the first 4 centuries would it be fair to say that because the Byzantine history for those centuries is lacking it wouldn't be fair to judge from those centuries? In other words, do we have the right to make judgments on manuscripts without having a full spectrum of the history?
That's a good question. There is a gap in our knowledge -- in the data available -- and folks make different assumptions concerning it. But I would say you are right, it is not sound (a better word to me than "fair") to posit judgments on a text-form during a period in which we have little data on it, especially in light of that text-form blossoming into the
vast majority from a certain point on. Hort himself said,
A theoretical presumption indeed remains that a majority of extant documents is more likely to represent a majority of ancestral documents at each stage of transmission than vice versa. (Vol 2, p. 45, of his Intro accompanying the edition of his Greek NT)
But what he gave with one hand he took away with the other, asserting an abnormality in the transmission of the text -- the alleged Antiochian recension -- which evidently existed only in his imagination, no historical proofs ever coming to light.
If you consider the arguments of both Pickering and Robinson (noted in a previous post) you can see how they deal with this period of time. Jakob Van Bruggen, in his book,
The Ancient Text of the New Testament also discusses it.