Codex Bezae is a manuscript that has generally managed to provoke strong emotions. Bentley, with the Cantabrigian fervour which has not escaped the notice of Ernst Bammel, called it 'our Beza's'. Its script has been called crude, its spelling and accuracy lamentable. The scribe has been seen as a person with too much ink in his well, the transmitter – indeed the creator – of a text which he has no business to promulgate as authentic, the Chatterton or Macpherson of the New Testament. The impression is that we have to do with a mendacious and conceivably also heretical person. The Alands, in an attempt to destroy the myth, have been equally excessive in writing that 'what the nineteenth/twentieth century has made of it is incredible'. Since text-critical emotions here run so high, one who writes at length upon the manuscript may easily feel suspected of a natural bias in favour of its text. At the very beginning, therefore, a few statements of intent and opinion, upon matters that will not form a major part of what follows, are in order.

Although some years of frequent communion have given me a peculiar affection, which would often seek to exculpate, for this manuscript, the fact is that the longer I have studied it, the more I have become convinced that its many unique readings only very rarely deserve serious consideration if one is trying to establish the best available text.