The Alexandrian Text

      This text family receives its name from the fact that it originated in Alexandria Egypt.  It was the work of such early church fathers and Clement and Origin.  Both of these men are held in high esteem by biblical scholars, but it should be noted that both of these men rejected a literal interpretation of the Bible, leaning instead toward an allegorical interpretation.  This simply means that they believed the Bible was a collection of spiritual stories designed to teach truth.  Much could be said about these men, but it is enough to know, for now, that they did not accept the Bible as it was literally written.  This fact alone makes the texts that they had a hand in creating suspect.

      This family of texts rests on about 45 manuscripts, many of which are very ancient, some dating back to around 330 AD.  The two primary texts in this family are called Sinaiticus (Codex Aleph) and Vaticanus (Codex B).  These are the oldest known manuscripts in existence.  Both date from the 4th Century.  Codex Aleph was discovered in the 1840's at a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai by a man named Count Constantin von Tischendorf. He saw several old leaves from ancient books in a pile to be used to start fires in the kitchen.  Upon inquiry, he discovered that they had an even older book in the monastery. The monks then showed him the manuscript known as Sinaiticus.  This ancient manuscript contains over 12,000 corrections and revisions by someone other that the original copyist.  It also contains several spurious books such as The Shepherd of Hermes, The Gospel of Thomas and the Didache.  All of these books have been rejected by the believing church for nearly 2,000 years.

      Codex B was discovered in the Vatican library in 1481. It too, dates from the 4th Century.  This manuscript is the one most relied on by modern Bible translators. This codex has been heavily corrected by Roman Catholic copyists.  By the way, the King James Translators knew of the existence of Codex B, but chose to avoid it.

      What is interesting is that these two manuscripts, which form the basis for all modern versions of the Bible,disagree with one another over 3,000 times in just the four Gospels alone!  There are 43 other manuscripts that support this textual family.  Remember, every new version of the Bible, with the exception of the NKJV (It gets its footnotes from the Alexandrian line of texts), was translated from Greek texts based on these manuscripts.  A whopping total of 45 manuscripts stand behind all the new versions of the Bible.

      These texts were taken, translated, collated and come to us today in the form of the Nestles-Aland 27^thGreek Text.  This text is considered the standard by most Bible scholars.  Yet, it still only rests on some 45 manuscripts!