What is the Alexandrian Text?

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostles wrote the twenty-seven books of the New Testament in the decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection. In the following centuries, Christians hand-copied these books and gave them to churches around Europe and Africa. 5,000 of these still exist. Some of these documents contain only a few verses of the New Testament, while others are near-complete copies. Biblical scholars have identified a group of early New Testament texts that appear to have been translated in Alexandria, Egypt. Experts on the Bible have named this important collection the Alexandrian Text.

Out of the thousands of documents, the Alexandrian Text only includes a few dozen manuscripts. Some writings of the early church fathers also included passages from the Alexandrian Text. Many of these documents date to the second and third centuries AD. One text, which contains a few verses of the Gospel of John, was written around 125 AD. Modern scholars value the Alexandrian text because of its early date. The original New Testament books that Paul, John, Luke, and others wrote no longer exist. Ancient papyrus rarely lasts 2,000 years. The desert of Egypt, however, helped preserve early copies of the Bible. Thus, many of the earliest New Testament manuscripts in existence are Alexandrian Texts from the third century AD.

Another reason scholars like the Alexandrian text is that each document uses the same style. Other ancient copies of the Bible, such as the Byzantine and Western Texts, show more differences in their translations. They also prove that later scholars made minor adjustments to those texts. For example, several New Testament books, like Romans and Galatians, ended with the word “Amen.” In later copies of the documents, scholars added “Amen” to the ending of almost every book of the New Testament. By looking at the Alexandrian text, scholars can see which books had this ending originally and which did not.

Also, for several centuries after the time of Jesus, people wrote in all capital letters with no spaces between words. The Alexandrian Text exhibits this style. Writing in all capital letters with no spaces can be difficult for modern people to read. New Testament experts, however, can understand it without difficulty. This style made mistakes more common when ancient scribes copied the Bible. The Alexandrian Text allows modern people to see where early scribes made errors in their copies of the Bible.

The Alexandrian Text includes several nearly complete copies of the New Testament. Three of them were made in the early fourth century AD. One of these was discovered in 1844 and has helped improve the accuracy of modern Bible translations.

Some Christians are troubled to learn that Paul’s original copy of Romans or the Gospel of Matthew no longer exists. However, the Alexandrian Text and the thousands of other ancient copies of the Bible allow modern scholars to reconstruct the original text. By comparing different copies of the New Testament to one another, experts can understand the original wording of each Bible verse. When scholars compared copies of the Bible in the Alexandrian Text from the second century and the fourth century AD, they found the documents were very similar.

Ancient scribes translated the Bible with remarkable accuracy. By comparing the early copies of the Bible, modern scholars can reproduce 99.99 percent of the original words in the New Testament. The remaining one-hundredth of one percent do not affect any Christian doctrine. Because of its early date, the Alexandrian Text plays an important role in our understanding of the Bible.