May 27th, 2026

By Mina Monier

The ‘Walled-Up’ Library and GA 81

In October 2017, less than two months before my PhD defence, I travelled back to Egypt in an attempt to locate manuscripts for a postdoctoral grant proposal. The primary catalyst for this search was a manuscript now held in the British Library (Add MS 20003), known to scholars as Gregory-Aland (GA) 81. It is hailed as the single best minuscule witness to the Book of Acts.[1] But if it is so significant, where is the rest of it?

Historically, the manuscript was held in the Patriarchal Library of the (Greek Orthodox) Patriarchate of Alexandria, though under a shelfmark different from the one found in Aland’s Kurzgefasste Liste. It was certainly a lead worth exploring. However, upon arriving in Alexandria, I encountered a challenging environment. Despite my academic credentials, prior correspondence, and the fact that I am a member of this church, the library was unwelcoming. The prospect of accessing manuscripts was shrouded in a bitterness and suspicion that clearly required an explanation.

When I inquired about this attitude, I was told that the library carries a deep-seated memory of abuses committed by European researchers. This institutional anxiety was evident even in the Patriarch’s recent decisions; he had resisted offers to restore endangered manuscripts in European laboratories, waiting instead until funding was secured to perform the restoration in Egypt, administered by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

I did not need to look further than the case of GA 81 itself to understand the source of this distrust. In his published reports, the famous German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf described his visit to this same library when it was still located at the patriarchal residence in Cairo. He famously labelled it the ‘walled-up library’  because he found it difficult to access and clashed with the Patriarch.[2]

Tischendorf’s writings disparage the monks of both the Patriarchate and the Cairo metochion of St Catherine’s Monastery as ignorant and naïve monks who had never heard the term ‘textual criticism’ and whose only interest in manuscripts was their financial value. Conversely, Tischendorf proclaimed his own mission as a noble quest to ‘save’ manuscripts to reconstruct the original Apostolic text, a concept he claimed the monks were incapable of comprehending.[3]

After gaining access to the collection through diplomatic pressure exerted by Austrian and German allies, Tischendorf ‘discovered’ GA 81. His sharp eyes immediately recognised its value, noting that it ‘marvellously excels beyond all manuscripts of Acts written around the same time; for it approaches the text of the most famous codices A, B, and C to such a degree that it has no equal among the so-called minuscule codices’.[4]

Today, this precious section of the codex is in London. The acquisition data held by the British Library completes a troubling picture: the Library claims Tischendorf ‘bought it’ in 1853 in Alexandria.[5] Yet, the Patriarchal Library was not in Alexandria at that time, nor were its holdings open to the market. Furthermore, more than half of the original codex remains in the Patriarchate’s possession today. Did he just buy a bit of it?

Tischendorf’s true agenda becomes clear in the British Library’s records, which state the manuscript was ‘purchased from Constantin von Tischendorf, 9 December 1854’.[6] It is no coincidence that the portion sold was the exact section Tischendorf had praised in the highest possible terms. Taken together, these details suggest only one plausible, if grim, scenario: Tischendorf likely excised this portion of the codex and acquired it (to put it mildly) through illicit means before selling it to the then British Museum, for a presumably hefty price. This story explains the enduring, bitter memory that continues to shape the Patriarchal Library’s attitude towards Western researchers today.

The ‘Curse’ of Codex Alexandrinus

This story is one of many stories that left scars in the collective memory of this ancient library. Unfortunately, it was not the worst scar, though. While it took three more visits to open the library and access the manuscripts, including the resting part of GA 81 there,[7] one story was hoovering all over the place most of the time: the story of Codex Alexandrinus, one of the “great four” that shaped the text of the New Testament in successive apparatuses. The codex was known to have been held in the library when the Patriarch of Alexandria Cyril Lucaris became the patriarch of Constantinople, in 1620 CE. He, then, presented it as a gift to King Charles I, along with other Alexandrian manuscripts he took the liberty to take with him to Constantinople when he left Alexandria. Since then, the codex was held in the British Museum (and later the British Library). But how did this story go in the consciousness of the Alexandrian library?

During my visit, I had a chance to access the early and rare issues of the library’s internal publications, as well as its official periodical Εκκλησιαστικός Φάρος (the Ecclesiastical Lighthouse).  One particular pamphlet prepared by Professor Theodore Moschonas, the then library curator, was of particular interest. Although the library’s recorded history (and even holdings) goes back to the fourth century, it was agreed to celebrate its inception in the year 952, when the patriarch Eutyches moved it to the then new Egyptian capital Cairo, and established it as a grandiose institution consulted by scholars of different religious backgrounds. Therefore, the patriarchate celebrated the library’s first millennium year in 1952, and commissioned Moschonas to write an authorised timeline of its history in the working languages of Egypt at this time: French, Greek, and Arabic. Yet, Moschonas also added an English version for international readers. Reading the text in the four languages, I was struck by the additional notes Moschonas incorporated in the English text, which were not attested in the other three editions. In his reference to the appointment of Lucaris as a patriarch of Constantinople, he stated that Lucaris took away with him the codex, along with other manuscripts. Then he added, only in English, a bracketed note: “a thing he ought not to have done.” When he referred to the Codex being presented to the British King, he added a sardonic note, only in English: “for personal reasons.” Then he concluded that passage with another gloss that features in English only: “Both donor and receiver had an evil death because there is a curse in the Codex prohibiting ‘it being taken away from Alexandria’.”[8] Moschonas here was referring to the death of King Charles I, and Lucaris; for the former was beheaded and the latter was strangled to death and his body was thrown in the Bosphorus. What he meant by the curse was an endowment (waqf) statement written in Arabic by the 14^th century patriarch Athanasius III who threatened anyone taking it out of the library with excommunication.

Moschonas’ intervention reflects the bitterness this library has been carrying after its patriarch, whom Moschonas repeatedly reminds us that he was a Cretan (i.e. foreigner), backstabbed his own trusted inheritance. However, the fact that he chose to add them to the English edition exhibits the intention to direct the message to the anglophone reader in particular, to disrupt the established narrative of the Codex Alexandrinus as a benevolent, diplomatic gift.

As I studied the provenance and history of the codex, I came to realise that the detachment of the codex from Egypt was not just physical, but intellectual.[9]

For much of the twentieth century, the dominant scholarly narrative sought to detach the Codex Alexandrinus from Egypt entirely, relocating its origin to Constantinople. This theory was largely driven by a textual riddle: researchers struggled to reconcile the manuscript’s Egyptian home with the ‘Byzantine’ complexion of its Gospel text. To solve this puzzle, scholarship effectively neutralised the manuscript’s own documentary record. The Arabic marginalia—the very notes that record how the book was handled and stewarded for centuries—were dismissed as irrelevant background noise. Yet, when we stop treating the manuscript as a mere data point and start reading it as a multi-dimensional object, the mystery evaporates. These Arabic liturgical notes reveal a lectionary system unique to the Coptic Church, firmly anchoring the codex in its native Egyptian milieu. By privileging modern text-types over the manuscript’s own historical evidence, nineteenth and twentieth-century scholarship did not just get the geography wrong; it performed an act of intellectual de-contextualisation that silenced the voices of the Egyptian communities who preserved the text.

Lesson

These intertwined stories of GA 81 and Codex Alexandrinus reveal that the Patriarchal Library of Alexandria is not merely a repository of manuscripts, but a wounded institution whose memory has been shaped by extraction, betrayal, and scholarly de-contextualisation. GA 81 embodies the physical rupture of a codex praised, severed, and sold; Codex Alexandrinus embodies both the removal of a treasured manuscript and the later intellectual effort to detach it from its Egyptian life. In both cases, the language of discovery, purchase, and textual classification obscured the claims of the community that preserved these books. The suspicion of the Patriarchal Library of Alexandria is not an obstacle to scholarship; it is itself historical evidence, born from repeated acts of physical and intellectual dispossession. On a methodological level, to read Codex Alexandrinus without its Arabic and Coptic evidence, or GA 81 without its Alexandrian rupture, is to hear only part of the witness.

The lesson is therefore twofold: manuscripts must not be treated only as witnesses to ancient texts, but also as witnesses to their own histories of use, custody, loss, and memory. To study them responsibly is to listen not only to their readings, but also to their scars, and the institutions that grieve them. Only then can textual scholarship move beyond extraction and begin to recover the fuller voices of the manuscripts it claims to serve.

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[1] Caspar R. Gregory, Textkritik des Neuen Testaments, vol.1 (Leipzig: J. C. Heinrich’she Buchhandlung, 1900), 269. See its category in K. Aland, and B. Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eardmans Publishing Company), 129. David Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), 290.

[2] Constantin von Tischendorf, Travels in the East, ET: W. E. Shukard (London: Spottiswoode and Shaw, 1847), 30-34.

[3] Ibid. 30, 33.

[4] Constantin von Tischendorf, Anecdota sacra et profana ex Oriente et Occidente allata (Leipzig: Giesecke & Devrient, 1855), 8.

[5] See information on its online British Library catalogue entry < https://searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/032-002169410&gt;

[6] Ibid.

[7] H A G Houghton, and Mina Monier, “Greek Manuscripts in Alexandria,” The Journal of Theological Studies, 71.1( 2020): 119–133. See also for the visits to the Nitrian Deserts in the same trip, see Mina Monier, Joan E Taylor, “Tatian’s Diatessaron: The Arabic Version, the Dura Europos Fragment, and the Women Witnesses,” The Journal of Theological Studies, 72.1 (2021):192–230.

[8] T. Moschonas, “A Short History of the Library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria,” Δελτιον Της Πτριαρχικης Βιοβλιοθηκης Αλεξανδρειας,8.3-4 (1955): 79-87, at 81.

[9] M. Monier, “The History of Codex Alexandrinus,” NovT 67.4 (2025): 501-526.