Codex Alexandrinus

What survives is about seven hundred and seventy leaves of vellum, bound in four volumes, three of the Old Testament and one of the New. The text is written in Greek majuscules, two columns to the page, without word division, with enlarged initials standing out into the margin at the start of paragraphs, and the hand has been dated to the fifth century. It is one of the four great uncial Bibles, alongside Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Ephraemi Rescriptus, and the only one of them held in London.

Its losses are specific and they matter. Most of Matthew is gone, the surviving text of that Gospel beginning partway through chapter twenty-five; a section of John is missing, as is a substantial part of 2 Corinthians. Leaves have been lost at the beginning and in places later.

What it contains beyond the canon is equally worth noting. The New Testament volume includes the first and second letters of Clement, copied as part of the book rather than as an appendix, which is direct evidence of what one fifth century community was reading as scripture or near it. The original table of contents also lists the Psalms of Solomon, on a leaf that has since been lost, so the codex once carried a text that no longer travels with any Bible. Prefatory material includes a letter of Athanasius on the Psalms.

Cyril Lucaris had been patriarch of Alexandria before he was patriarch of Constantinople, and he brought the codex with him. He offered it to James I of England through the ambassador Thomas Roe; James died before it arrived, and it was presented instead to Charles I in 1627. It passed with the Royal Library to the nation in the eighteenth century, went to the British Museum at its foundation, and is now in the British Library.

The date of arrival is worth pausing on. The Authorised Version had been published in 1611, so the translators never saw it. A manuscript that would have been among the most important witnesses available to them reached England sixteen years too late to affect a translation that shaped the English language.

Its value to textual criticism is peculiar and instructive. In the Gospels its text is broadly Byzantine, the tradition behind the later medieval majority of manuscripts and the earliest such witness of that quality. In Acts, the Epistles and Revelation it is Alexandrian, agreeing with the older tradition behind most modern critical editions. One book, copied by a small number of scribes, therefore carries two different text types in different parts, which is a standing reminder that a manuscript is a collection of exemplars rather than a single artefact of one tradition. For the Septuagint it is a primary witness throughout.