Codex Alexandrinus

Codex Alexandrinus is a fifth-century Greek Bible, bound now in four volumes, written two columns to the page on parchment that has grown thin with age. In places the iron in the ink has eaten through the skin, so a letter written on one side shows on the other, and conservators have had to work around damage that the writing itself caused.

Its contents are generous. The complete Greek Old Testament is there, including the books that Protestant canons later set aside, followed by the New Testament and then the two Epistles of Clement, early Christian letters that no canon retained. Its own table of contents lists the Psalms of Solomon at the end, but those leaves are gone, so the index records a book the manuscript no longer holds.

The feature that has occupied scholars most is that its text is not consistent. In the Gospels it reads with the Byzantine tradition, the family that later became standard across the Greek-speaking church. In Acts, the Epistles and Revelation it reads with the Alexandrian, the family that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus represent. One book, two allegiances. The usual explanation is that its scribes copied from different exemplars for different parts, which is a plain enough answer and also a reminder that a manuscript is an assembly rather than a single act.

The codex reached England as a diplomatic present. Cyril Lucaris, Greek Patriarch of Alexandria and afterwards of Constantinople, meant it for James I and sent it through Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to the Ottoman court. James died before it arrived, and it was presented to Charles I in 1627 instead. Lucaris said he had brought it from Alexandria, and the name it has carried ever since rests on that statement rather than on any independent record.

Its later custody is straightforward. It went into the Royal Library, and when George II gave that library to the newly founded British Museum in 1757 the codex went with it, as one of the foundation collections. It has stayed in London and is now in the British Library.

The date of its arrival is the fact most often repeated about it, and for a reason. The King James Bible had been finished in 1611. The translators worked from the printed Greek text available to them, which rested on late medieval manuscripts, and Alexandrinus, five centuries older than almost anything they had seen, landed in London sixteen years after they had put down their pens. It was the first of the great codices to be available to western scholarship, and the argument it began about how the New Testament text should be established has continued ever since.