On New Year’s Day 1627 a Greek Bible was carried into the presence of King Charles I and handed over by a man who had travelled thousands of miles to give it away: Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople, who had taken the book out of Alexandria and inherited it from a line of patriarchs before him. The book was the Codex Alexandrinus, and it is still the oldest substantially complete Greek Bible in existence. It is also among the most travelled objects of its kind ever recorded, passing from a fortress cell in Alexandria to the Ottoman capital, across the Channel, into the keeping of English royal librarians, out to Oxford on loan, through a fire in Westminster, and finally into a national collection in London.
A Gift from Constantinople to a King in London
The earliest certain placement of the codex, as the codicologist Pierce Beeler puts it in his study of the manuscript’s physical history, is 1627, when it was given as a gift to King Charles I of England by Cyril Lucar, who had held the see of Alexandria as Cyril III from 1602 to 1621 and then the throne of Constantinople as Ecumenical Patriarch from 1621 to 1638. The name Alexandrinus, as Beeler notes, derives from the popular belief that the codex belonged to the Alexandrian library of the ancient patriarchs.
How it reached England was the work of Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador at Constantinople. Beeler describes a mutually advantageous relationship: Roe aided the patriarch against the machinations of the Latin Church at a time when the Orthodox establishment suffered from corruption under Ottoman rule, and in return the patriarch was pressed to supply England with ancient books and works of art. Among those works the codex was to have been given to King James I in 1625. But for reasons not revealed in Roe’s own letters, the transfer was delayed. It was presented instead to Charles I on New Year’s Day 1627.
The British Library’s own catalogue of the first volume records the sequence in more administrative detail. Lucaris offered the manuscript to Roe as a New Year’s gift for James I, and the Library cites the evidence: a letter from Roe to the Earl of Arundel dated 1625, printed in The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, edited by S. Richardson in 1740, although Grokipedia’s entry on the codex dates the offer to 1624 and records that the manuscript travelled in Roe’s company with a small Greek New Testament, minuscule 49. Roe received the codex in 1627 as a gift for the king, and Charles I received it in that same year. James I had died in March 1625, which is why the offer had to be transferred.
What Charles I actually received was bound for him. The Library describes the binding as post-1600 gold-tooled leather carrying the royal arms of England and the initials CR. The board and leather of the codex that stands on the shelf today in London are therefore not the original fifth-century sewing, but a Jacobean binding made to receive a present from a Greek patriarch to an English king, which is itself a small summary of the book’s history: a fifth-century Egyptian object re-made in seventeenth-century England to house a diplomatic gift.
The codex also carries notes in the margins and on the flyleaves that tell us how its owners understood it. On folio 2r there is a Latin note in Cyril Lucaris’s own hand stating that the manuscript was written by Thecla shortly after the Council of Nicaea in 325. On folio 4v an Arabic note says much the same, that the book was written by Thecla the Martyr, and is dated to the early seventeenth century. On folio 1r a Latin note of the last quarter of the seventeenth century records that the codex was given to the patriarchal cell, in a transcription the Library renders as ‘donum datum cubiculo Patriarchali anno 814 Mrtyrum’. These are three claims, made at three different moments by three different people, that the oldest Greek Bible in the world had been copied within a generation or two of the church’s founding council. None is demonstrably true. All show how fiercely the book was valued, and how far back its owners were willing to push its origin.
The Patriarch himself did not survive the decade following the gift. Beeler records that a high-ranking Ottoman officer named Bairam persuaded Sultan Murad to have Lucar killed as an enemy of the state. On 27 June 1638 a group of Janizaries took him out onto the Bosphorus, strangled him with a bowstring, stripped him and dumped his body in the water. His friends buried what washed ashore; his enemies dug the corpse up and returned it to the water, and it washed ashore a second time. The book, at least, had already left the jurisdiction of the men who ordered his killing.
It is worth pausing over how little England possessed at this moment. The codex arrived roughly twenty years before the London Polyglot Bible of 1657, and the royal librarian who had conceived that Polyglot, Patrick Young, would go on to become the man who mislaid the codex. The gift of 1627 was not merely a curiosity. It placed a Greek Bible of unquestioned antiquity in the hands of men who were about to spend twenty years printing the scriptures in six languages, and who needed exactly such a witness to test their conjectures against.
Four Volumes, Three Hands and a Long Column of Numbers
The codex is now four bound volumes in the Royal Library, shelved as Royal MS 1 D V to VIII. The Library’s catalogue gives the extent of each: 279 folios for the first, 238 for the second, 118 for the third and 144 for the fourth, which carries the New Testament. That adds up to 779 leaves. Older literature, including the description in the Claremont collection, gives 773, the difference accounting for a few flyleaves and stubs; the reconstruction of the original fifth-century codex before its losses is larger still, and Aziz Atiya, writing an older encyclopaedia notice, put the estimate as high as 882 leaves.
Each leaf measures 320 by 280 millimetres, roughly twelve and a half by nine inches, with a written block of about 240 by 205 millimetres inside that. The text is laid out in two columns of generally fifty or fifty-one lines, each line holding between twenty and twenty-five letters. The support is parchment. The script is uncial, the majuscule book hand of the early Byzantine period, written without spaces between words and with word division marked only by the standard contraction of sacred names. Punctuation was added by the original scribes rather than by a later hand, and accents and breathings appear only sporadically. The letters are small for a book of this size, averaging between two and two and a half millimetres in height.
Edward Maunde Thompson’s palaeographical judgement, quoted by Beeler, is worth repeating because it describes the care of the work: the writing is more carefully finished than that of Codex Sinaiticus, the letters are rather wide, the horizontal strokes are very fine, and there is a general tendency to thicken or club the extremities of certain letters, such as gamma, tau, epsilon and sigma. This is a book made by people who expected it to be handled for a very long time.
How many hands made it is a question on which the scholarship has moved. C. G. Woide, in his edition of the Greek New Testament of 1786, asserted two scribes; Edward Maunde Thompson, supervising the first facsimile between 1879 and 1881, identified two scribes in the Gospels, with the hand changing at the beginning of Luke’s text. F. G. Kenyon, producing the reduced facsimile between 1909 and 1957, postulated two scribal hands for the Old Testament and three more for the New Testament, five in all. Milne and Skeat, in the appendix to Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus of 1938, disagreed with Kenyon about the number of scribes and concluded, from the tailpiece designs and the palaeography, that only two hands were involved in the production of the entire codex. Beeler’s own survey of the evidence finds two hands at work in the Gospels, the first copying Matthew and Mark and the list of chapter headings for Luke, the second copying Luke and John, with a third hand at work in Revelation and the Old Testament copied separately. Atiya put the possibilities more bluntly as three scribes or possibly one scribe and two correctors. The safe summary is that the number of hands is still argued over, that the codex was certainly a collaborative production, and that the identifications have been revised at least three times in two centuries.
The structure of the book is more informative than its scripts. The British Library records that the gatherings were originally made up of eight leaves, each quire numbered at the top of its first page, but that the codex was re-bound in modern times in gatherings of six. Those numbers, the quire signatures, are original to the fifth century and they survive, and they are what allow the losses to be located precisely rather than guessed at.
Three separate systems of numbering were also applied to the leaves, and the third of them is the reason the codex can be tracked at all. Greek numerals stand at the head of each folio. A fourteenth-century Arabic numbering was added in the lower outer corner of the verso, and was then cut away during a rebinding. A third set, in relatively modern ink, was added by Patrick Young, Charles I’s librarian. That last series is an English fingerprint written into the fifth-century book, and it anchors the codex to the English royal library at exactly the point where the written record and the physical object begin to corroborate one another.
Modern bindings have not been kind to the codex. When the British Library came to photograph the volumes, the opening of the manuscript was found to have been compromised by the last rebinding, because layers of stiff paper and weak fabric had been attached to the back of the book block and had pressed the gatherings shut. As the British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog put it, the cover had to be removed, the block gently cleaned of unsuitable materials, the pressure on the folds released, and new archival reinforcement applied to the spine before the pages could be opened flat enough to image. The bindings of old books are frequently like iron, and this one was made of iron.
What the binding took and what it kept is a list that has been drawn up with care. The Library’s contents list for the four volumes, drawn from Warner and Gilson’s catalogue, records the lost leaves: one after folio 171 of the first volume, carrying 1 Kings 12:20 to 14:9; nine after folio 25 of the third volume, carrying Psalms 49:20 to 79:10; twenty-five at the beginning of the fourth volume, carrying the list of chapter headings for Matthew and the whole of Matthew 1 to 25:6; two after folio 46, carrying John 6:50 to 8:52; three after folio 100, carrying 2 Corinthians 4:13 to 12:6; one after folio 142, carrying 1 Clement 57:6 to 63:4; and with them the Psalms of Solomon and the remainder of 2 Clement. Something over forty leaves in all, and in some cases they are not merely gone but, as Beeler points out, there is sometimes no trace at all that a quire number once existed where one is now expected.
One point of confusion is worth clearing up here, because it recurs in popular accounts. The Book of Job is not among the losses. The Göttingen catalogue of the Septuagint places Job at folios 49r to 64v of the third volume, where it is complete. The nine leaves that went missing from that volume carry the second half of the Psalter, and since Job begins at folio 49, the Psalms must run directly ahead of it. It is the Psalter that is broken, in the region of Psalms 49 to 79, while Job itself survives complete in sixteen unbroken folios. The first volume to lose the codex’s Matthew is also the volume that lost a chunk of Samuel, and the fourth lost part of John and part of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. The damage is scattered, which is itself characteristic of books that have been read, carried and re-bound rather than abandoned.
After the New Testament comes something rarer. The codex carries the Epistle of Clement of Rome, and the beginning of a second epistle attributed to Clement, appended to the biblical text after the Apocalypse. Patrick Young, the royal librarian whose ink still numbers the leaves, published the text of the Epistles of Clement from this codex in 1633, and its leaves were the subject of one of the earliest photographic facsimiles ever made from any manuscript, William Cureton’s of 1856.
Alexandria, Constantinople and the Smoke of the Library
Before Constantinople there was Alexandria, and the evidence for that is an inscription rather than a document. The Library’s catalogue records that Athanasius III, Patriarch of Alexandria from 1276 to 1316, brought the codex to Alexandria between 1305 and 1315, probably from Constantinople, where the patriarch had primarily resided until 1305. On folio 5r he left a note in Arabic: ‘Bound to the Patriarchal Cell in the Fortress of Alexandria. Whoever removes it thence shall be excommunicated and cut off. Written by Athanasius the humble.’
The note is a piece of medieval security policy with a theological threat attached, and it tells us something remarkable about how such books were guarded. The Library observes that a very similar inscription in the same hand appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Roe 13, which contains the commentaries of Hesychius and John Chrysostom on the Psalms and was written on Mount Galesios, near Ephesus, in 1284/85 at the request of Galaktion the Blind. The same hand, the same warning, the same century. Whatever Athanasius was doing in the 1280s and 1290s, he was in the habit of binding valuable manuscripts into cells with anathemas attached.
The library of Alexandria in that period was not the library of the Ptolemies. But it had a reputation, and by the seventeenth century that reputation had hardened into a story that the English could not stop repeating. In a letter to Matthew Delamott of 16 June 1678, kept as Bodleian Library MS Smith 60, folio 130, the Oxford orientalist Thomas Smith set out the received view: that the Greek Old Testament then in circulation was not the version of Ptolemy’s library, because that copy had been destroyed by the fire which consumed the great treasure of learning deposited in Alexandria, or lost by time. Smith himself took the other side, arguing that the copy of Ptolemy’s library was after all the very copy now in circulation, and that the dissonance between the printed Greek and the original text was due partly to the negligence of librarians in the frequent copying of manuscripts and partly to the boldness of interpolators who had added or subtracted what they thought fit. The letter is a reminder that the history of this codex is inseparable from the history of English arguments about the reliability of the Septuagint, and that those arguments were being conducted with the codex in England and in Oxford throughout the period.
It is worth being exact about what the Old Testament portion of the codex actually is. It is not the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. It is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made in the third and second centuries BC, the version in which the Greek-speaking church first received the scriptures. That distinction matters more for this codex than for most, because the Alexandrian Septuagint is one of the earliest witnesses we have to the state of the Hebrew text itself. In the historical books the Greek translation frequently reflects a form of the underlying Hebrew that is older than the standardised medieval Hebrew, and in a number of places it preserves readings for which no Hebrew counterpart exists at all. Where the Byzantines had a revised and smoother text, this manuscript preserves a different and often earlier one.
The catalogue of the Vetus Testamentum Graecum maintained at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, which follows Rahlfs’s printed edition, gives the codex’s entry under the siglum Ra A. It dates the manuscript to the fifth century, assigns its provenance to Alexandria, and records its Septuagint text-type as varying, which is to say that it does not belong to a single uniform recension. With the Washingtonianus and the Sinaitic Septuagint, it forms part of the base text for the printed Rahlfs and Hanhart edition, so that the readings of Alexandrinus are among the readings every serious Septuagint scholar consults by default. Its Trismegistos identifier is 62318, and in the New Testament the same codex carries the Gregory-Aland number 02, which is why it appears in the Institute for New Testament Textual Research’s list of manuscripts and in the online listings of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
The New Testament text of the codex has a reputation that needs qualifying, and Grokipedia’s entry on the codex sets the position out plainly enough. It is a representative of the Byzantine text-type in the Gospels, where it is the oldest example of that type; the rest of the New Testament books are of the Alexandrian type, with some Western readings mixed in. Aland accordingly placed it in Category III for the Gospels and in Category I for the rest of the New Testament, and critics have long recognised that different parts of the codex are not of equal textual value. The contrast is real and it is not accidental: a scribe working from a good exemplar at the height of the Alexandrian school would produce an Alexandrian text, and a later copyist working in the Byzantine sphere would produce a Byzantine one. The codex’s two halves disagree, and the disagreement is one of the reasons the codex has been so valuable to Western scholarship, since it makes visible a moment when the two streams of the Greek text had not yet merged.
Oxford Borrows the Book, and Westminster Catches Fire
Long before the fire, there was the loan. One of the principal objects of the Oxford University Press, re-founded by John Fell, was to establish what the true text of the Septuagint was, and the codex was to be the foundation of the project. Fell’s prospectus of 1672 announced it in terms that make the scale of the ambition clear: ‘We purpose to Print, if we may be encouraged: 1. The greek Bible in a royal folio, to w[hi]ch purpose we have procured the use of the Alexandrian Ms. out of his Ma[jes]ties: library, with others of good note from diuerse Places & have of our own seueral copies of venerable Antiquity nevre yet collated.’ The Alexandrian manuscript was thus borrowed from the King’s own library for the purposes of the edition, and the plan was to collate it against other manuscripts from many libraries, some of them never collated before.
The project produced one book and then died. Thomas Gale printed the Psalms at Oxford in 1678 in a text taken directly from the Alexandrinus, its title announcing the source in a way no one has been shy about repeating. Beyond that, shortage of money stopped the work. Nicholas Keene’s study of English scholarship and the Greek text of the Old Testament between 1620 and 1720 describes what might have followed: had the edition been accomplished, it would surely have attempted to enthrone the Codex Alexandrinus as the pre-eminent manuscript witness to the Old Testament. Instead the press issued the Psalter and the enterprise lapsed, and the codex went back to London, its great projected role deferred for the better part of two centuries.
Smith’s letter of June 1678 falls in the middle of this effort and is its most telling document, because it shows what the codex was being asked to do. The printed Greek Old Testaments in circulation, Smith wrote, were confessedly corrupt in a thousand places, and men like Bishop Ussher pretended that the Greek translation was of a later date and not the copy deposited in the Library of Ptolemy at Alexandria. Smith thought the opposite was abundantly more probable. He was in effect arguing that a manuscript of the fifth century, borrowed from the King’s library at Oxford, could be used to adjudicate a dispute that had run since the sixteenth century between Protestant and Catholic scholars about the antiquity and integrity of the Greek version. The codex was not treated as an object of antiquarian interest. It was treated as a weapon in a theological argument.
There had already been one alarming episode with the book in English hands. Patrick Young, the royal librarian who had initiated the Polyglot and who numbered the folios in his own ink, borrowed the codex along with other biblical manuscripts after his retirement. Arundell Esdaile, in his history of the British Museum’s library, records that they were only recovered in 1664, from his executors, and then only after legal proceedings. A codex of this value, once removed from the royal collection by the man himself responsible for it, had to be sued back into the nation’s hands. That is the pattern of the object’s English history: a book repeatedly treated as a private asset of scholars and librarians who had every reason to value it and every reason to keep it, and repeatedly returned to the collection only after argument.
The fire came in 1731, and it was the Cotton library that burned. In the early morning of 23 October a fire broke out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, where the Royal Library and the Cotton library had been kept together since the lease on their previous quarters at Essex House had run out, on the judgment that Ashburnham House was much safer from fire. The damage to the Royal Library was minor. The damage to the Cotton collection was not: nearly a quarter of it was destroyed or seriously damaged, including the Cotton Genesis, of which only fragments remained. According to Esdaile’s account, Richard Bentley, whose son had succeeded him in the keepership, was on the spot, and he and the deputy keeper, David Casley, were active in the salvage, throwing volumes out of the windows. The Cotton Genesis reappeared in fragments much later at Baptist College, Bristol, and was deposited back on permanent loan in the Museum.
Who carried the Alexandrinus out of the burning house is a smaller puzzle but a telling one, and the accounts differ. The widely repeated version credits Bentley, the Royal Librarian, with saving the codex. The Museum’s own history emphasises Casley, Bentley’s deputy, as the man who actually got it out. What the night cost was the Cotton collection, and the bindings of the rescued volumes took some harm from being thrown out of the windows, which is a reminder that a good deal of confidence in the library’s own arrangements went up in the smoke.
Afterwards the collections were put in the New Dormitory of the Westminster Scholars, and then, when that was taken into use, in the Old Dormitory, where they remained for more than twenty years. In 1753 they were reported on as dusty but dry and in the care of Mrs Casley, whose husband had grown old and feeble, and it was the fire that had prompted Casley to spend two years producing his catalogue of the royal manuscripts, published in 1734. The old dormitory of a Westminster school was a strange, cold, unwatched place to keep the oldest Greek Bible in the world. It was, however, a royal one, and in 1753 the country found a better use for it.
The Museum, the Facsimiles and the Copy That Travelled in Place of the Book
An Act of Parliament in 1753 established the British Museum, and the Cotton library passed to the new Trust in the same year. The other great manuscript foundation of the Museum came from the Harleys: the Library’s catalogue for Harley MS 1775 records that Edward Harley bequeathed the collection to his widow Henrietta, Countess of Oxford, and thereafter to their daughter Margaret, Duchess of Portland, and that the manuscripts were sold by the two women in 1753 to the nation for £10,000, a fraction of their contemporary value. That was the transaction that made the Museum possible, and it was completed four years later when George II presented the Old Royal Library, printed books and manuscripts alike, collected by his predecessors from Edward IV downwards. The Codex Alexandrinus came in with the gift, and the British Library’s catalogue of it says so plainly: presented to the British Museum by George II in 1757 as part of the Old Royal Library.
What changed was not the book but the traffic in it. Esdaile observed that the codex remained in what he called dangerously constant demand, generally out of mere curiosity, right up to the end of the eighteenth century and the publication of the type-facsimile editions of the New and Old Testaments, and that the early Principal Librarians seem not to have thought of discouraging it. This was the age of the scholarly visitor, and a fifth-century uncial was the thing to see. The manuscript left its shelf as often as it returned to it, which was never a good thing for a book of eight hundred leaves sewn on quires and with a fragile spine.
The real revolution was that of the facsimile, and it came in stages. Henry Hervey Baber produced a printed facsimile of the Old Testament in the 1820s, set in type cut to imitate the uncial hand; the New Testament had been done in facsimile nearly forty years before that by C. G. Woide. William Cureton photographed the leaves of 1 Clement in 1856. Between 1879 and 1883 the British Museum issued a full-size autotype facsimile in four volumes, the fourth and last of them carrying the New Testament in 1879, the work begun by Sir Edward Bond and completed after him by Maunde Thompson. F. G. Kenyon wrote the descriptive volume that accompanied the series, Facsimiles of Biblical Manuscripts, in 1900, and a reduced photographic facsimile followed, the New Testament and the Epistle of Clement in 1909 and the four volumes of the Old Testament in 1915.
It is easy to underestimate how revolutionary that was. Before photography, a scholar in Leipzig who wanted to verify a variant reading in Alexandrinus had to travel to London, ask to see the volume, wait for it to be brought out and opened, and copy out what he needed by eye. After 1909, the codex was in every research library in Europe, in a form that could be consulted, collated and cited without any of that. The facsimile did for the study of the manuscript what the printing press had done for the text itself, and it did it a century after the argument the codex had been brought to settle.
The physical object has had a second modern life. The British Library digitised the codex, and in the process had to undo the very binding whose spine linings were blocking the pages; the work was described on the Library’s medieval manuscripts blog and reported at the time by the manuscript blogger Roger Pearse. Imaging the codex meant dismantling it and putting it back together, which is the ordinary condition of old books in the digital age and the reason conservators ask that researchers use the facsimiles rather than the originals. The codex also acquired a second identity as a numbered item in the international lists of manuscripts, GA 02 in the Gregory-Aland system and 62318 in Trismegistos, which is what allows a reading from it to be cited precisely rather than by adjective. After 1973, when the great foundation collections moved from the British Museum to the British Library, as Grokipedia’s entry on the Royal manuscripts records, the codex moved with them, and it now sits in London as Royal MS 1 D V to VIII, four volumes in the Royal Library, available to readers by appointment.
The Gaps, the Dating and the Case Against a Superlative
It is tempting to end with a superlative, and the superlatives are wrong. The Codex Alexandrinus is not the oldest Greek Bible. Grokipedia’s entries on the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus give the comparisons that matter. The Sinaiticus, found by Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s in 1844 and dated to the middle of the fourth century, contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, although only part of its Old Testament survives; it is also the only ancient New Testament manuscript written in four columns to the page that has survived. The Vaticanus, assigned to the middle of the fourth century, is as old or older, and it is emphatically not complete: the original hand lacks 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Revelation, the missing end of Hebrews and all of Revelation having been supplied by a fifteenth-century minuscule hand now catalogued separately as minuscule 1957. What Alexandrinus is, precisely, is the oldest substantially complete Greek Bible, the oldest manuscript that carries the Septuagint together with the whole of the New Testament, and one of the four great uncial codices that stand at the foundation of New Testament textual criticism, along with Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and the Ephraemi Rescriptus. Its dating is generally placed in the fifth century, and the Göttingen catalogue writes it simply as s. V; that it was made in Egypt, and that Alexandria was the scene of its production, rests on the provenance of the patriarch’s inscription rather than on any colophon, and the association with the Alexandrian school of scribes in the second quarter of the fifth century, when Cyril of Alexandria was writing, is a scholarly inference rather than a documented fact.
The gaps matter for a second reason beyond what they cost. The codex as it now stands is a fifth-century book that has been repeatedly reduced. Some of the losses are ancient, the results of centuries of use and of an early monastic library’s decisions about what to keep. Some are modern, the price of rebinding. The twenty-five leaves missing from the front of Matthew and the nine missing from the Psalter are gaps in the object that no amount of collation can fill, and they mean that Alexandrinus, for all its completeness, is incomplete in exactly the places where a codex of this kind is hardest to replace.
Nor is the codex’s value uniform. The temptation to call it the most important witness for Western textual criticism is right for the New Testament outside the Gospels, where it stands with Vaticanus and the Ephraemi as a pillar of the Alexandrian type, and for the Septuagint, where it stands in the front rank of the witnesses from which the printed Rahlfs and Hanhart edition was constructed. In the Gospels, where its text is of the Byzantine type, its value lies rather in showing how early and how well attested that type already was in the fifth century than in supplying readings against it. The Septuagint portion is where it has no single substitute, and the two parts of the book therefore have rather different standing in the history of the text.
What the codex finally records is not only a text. Its quire signatures, its three systems of numbering, its cut-away foliation, its Jacobean binding with the royal arms, the Arabic and Latin notes of patriarchs and scholars on its flyleaves, the names of the men who mislaid it and sued for it and threw volumes out of a burning window to save it: these are the marks of a book that was never treated as a text alone. The scribal corrections in the margins, the punctuation added by the copyists as they went, the chapter lists running as heads above the Gospel pages, the Eusebian canons and Ammonian sections in the margins, the appended letter of Clement with its own separate life inside the volume, all of it adds up to the same point. Alexandrinus is the oldest substantially complete Greek Bible because it was made to be used, corrected, argued over and carried, and it survived because every generation that held it decided it was worth the trouble. The longest journey in the history of manuscripts is measured not in miles but in the number of people who refused to let the book go.
References
- Royal MS 1 D V (Codex Alexandrinus, Volume 1: Old Testament, part 1) – British Library, Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue
- Royal MS 1 D VIII (Codex Alexandrinus, Volume 4: New Testament) – British Library, Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue
- Harley MS 1775 (Harley Gospels), including the account of the 1753 sale of the Harleian manuscripts – British Library, Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue
- Ra A: Septuaginta Vetus Testamentum Graecum, ed. Alfred Rahlfs – Göttingen Academy of Sciences, Septuaginta Vetus Testamentum Graecum project
- Codex Alexandrinus: The Story of a Medieval Bible, chapters 1 to 3 – Pierce Beeler, Brill, 2020
- Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus – H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat, with Douglas Cockerell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938
- New Wine and an Old Bottle: The British Museum Library – Arundell Esdaile, London: R. Hale, 1946
- Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, with Nicholas Keene, ‘English Scholarship and the Greek Text of the Old Testament, 1620-1720’ – Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (eds), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006
- Codex Alexandrinus – Aziz S. Atiya, Claremont Colleges Digital Library
- GA 02: Codex Alexandrinus, manuscript description and foliation – Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
- Codex Alexandrinus – Grokipedia
- Codex Sinaiticus – Grokipedia
- Codex Vaticanus – Grokipedia
- Royal manuscripts, British Library – Grokipedia
- The Codex Alexandrinus (Royal MS 1 D V-VIII) in reduced photographic facsimile – F. G. Kenyon, British Museum, 1909
- Codex Alexandrinus, full-size autotype facsimile, 4 vols – British Museum, 1883
- Unbinding the Codex Alexandrinus to photograph it – Roger Pearse, quoting the British Library medieval manuscripts blog, 2012