Meksi was born in 1770 in Labovë, a village near Gjirokastër, and pursued secondary studies in Ioannina, then an important Ottoman provincial center (now in Greece).
[2] His first employment was as a folk physician to the court of Ali Pasha, the Albanian ruler of the Pashalik of Yanina, a position he held until 1803.
Armed with a letter of recommendation from Ali Pasha, Meksi was admitted to the University of Naples in Italy, where he studied medicine under Dr. Nicola Acuto and practiced in a hospital administered by the parish of San Giovanni a Carbonara.
[7] Pinkerton, who in 1816 was the BFBS's representative in Moscow, had met that year with a community of Albanians in Vienna, then capital of the Austrian Empire.
[8] In a letter to his superiors at the BFBS, dated August 28, 1816, Pinkerton wrote that the Albanian nation occupied a large part of the ancient Illyria, that they spoke a language completely different from Slavic, Turkish, Greek, or Latin, and that for the Albanian Orthodox the mass was recited in Greek, a language that believers and even some of the priests did not understand.
[8] Pinkerton also relates in one of his letters to the BFBS that Meksi was well regarded by the Albanian community, the Greek Orthodox Church, and by Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople.
[13] Meanwhile, the New Testament had had a final revision performed by the Archimandrite of Euboea, Grigor Gjirokastriti, an Albanian who subsequently became Archbishop Gregory IV of Athens.
On the contrary, for the translation the British missionaries successfully appealed to Gregory V and enlisted the help of an Orthodox bishop, Gjirokastriti, for the final edition of the New Testament in Albanian.
[10] Meksi was a member of the Filiki Etaireia,[10] a secret society whose purpose was to overthrow Ottoman rule over the Balkans and to establish an independent Greek state.
He is also said to have taken part in the negotiations leading to an agreement proposed by Theodoros Kolokotronis that permitted the Albanians who were defending Tripolitsa to leave unharmed,[19] an arrangement that helped the Greeks to capture the town from the Turks.
[10] The first publication of a Bible translation from Greek to a modern Balkanic language,[20] it ran to 2,000 copies, a huge number for the time.