Working With Codex Alexandrinus Translations
The Codex Alexandrinus is a fifth-century Greek manuscript containing most of the Greek Bible. It sits in the British Library. You won't find a clean English translation of it because it's a Greek manuscript, not an English document. What exists are modern translations of its text, and the Greek itself has been digitized and published in critical editions. If you're looking for something specific to work with, I'll walk through what's actually available and how to handle it. The primary resource is the Greek text as edited in the Nestle-Aland standard editions. The British Library has a high-resolution digital facsimile online at bl.uk/manuscripts/full_display.aspx?ref=Royal_MS_1_D_V. That's the manuscript image. For the text, you'd want the Gospels text from Tischendorf's 1860 edition, which was the first serious editor to produce a full transcript of the codex. More recent scholarship uses the critical texts in NA28 and the UBS5. I ran into a specific problem a while back when comparing the Alexandrine text of Acts 15:20 against modern English Bibles. The codex reads differently in a couple of key phrases compared to the Majority Text and even the Textus Receptus. The English translations that stick to TR (like KJV) render it one way, while translations using the Nestle-Aland text follow a different rendering. The issue was that I needed to track exactly where the Alexandrine variant diverged, and most online resources just flagged it as a textual variant without showing the actual Greek wording in context. The workaround was to pull Tischendorf's edition, open the manuscript images side by side, and check the original Greek characters. It took longer, but it caught a case where a secondary source had misread a letter due to manuscript damage in that section.
The major English translations that incorporate Alexandrian text are the NRSV, NIV, ESV, and NASB. They generally follow the Nestle-Aland/UBS text, which heavily privileges Alexandrian manuscripts including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, with Alexandrinus as a supporting witness. The King James Version follows the Textus Receptus, which is a much later textual tradition. If your project requires faithfulness to the Alexandrinus specifically, none of the modern translations are doing that directly. They're using a composite critical text. There's also the Orthodox Bible Society's translation work, which sometimes gives more prominence to Alexandrian witnesses. And the New Testament in the Original Language website (novotestament.com or similar academic portals) has the Greek text with manuscript sigla that let you see which manuscript supports each reading. That's probably the most useful tool for seeing Alexandrinus variants in real time. The main limitation is that the Codex Alexandrinus is incomplete. The first three leaves of Genesis are missing. The Gospels have lacunae in places. The Pauline epistles are partially damaged. This means any "complete" English translation will necessarily fill gaps from other manuscripts or leave them blank. You won't get a fully self-contained Alexandrinus text for the entire Bible. If you need the complete New Testament in English based on Alexandrian-text-priority manuscripts, you'd look at translations like the Berean Standard Bible or the NET Bible, which include extensive textual notes. But those still aren't pure Alexandrinus translations.
For serious scholarly work, I'd recommend Tischendorf's facsimile edition combined with the Greek text from NA28, using the apparatus to see Alexandrinus readings where they differ from the major witnesses. It's slow, and it requires reading Greek, but there's no shortcut around that if you actually need to engage with the manuscript rather than just reading a modern translation that happens to agree with it most of the time.
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