He was born in Kirriemuir, Forfarshire to Janet Thomson, an unmarried girl. Janet declined to marry Alexander's father, John Whyte, who thereafter went to America. She did however give Alexander his father's surname. His mother joined the Free Church of Scotland at the Disruption of 1843. In 1848 he began an apprenticeship as a cobbler. In 1854 he took on a role as schoolteacher at Padanaram in Forfar and the following year moved to teach inAirlie. In Airlie the local minister taught him Latin and Greek, enabling him to apply for university He studied divinity at the University of Aberdeen and then at New College, Edinburgh graduating in 1866. This was in part funded by his estranged father. His half-sister, Elizabeth Whyte, came to join him from America to help him keep house. There she met his colleague, Rev Thomas Macadam, whom she married. Whyte entered the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland and after serving as colleague in Free St John's, Glasgow, removed to Edinburgh as colleague and successor to Rev Dr Robert Candlish at Free St George's. In 1909 he succeeded Dr Marcus Dods as principal, and professor of New Testament literature, at New College, Edinburgh. He was an active educator and author and published widely on subjects ranging from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to St. Teresa of Avila, John Law, and Jakob Böhme. He was also an ecumenicist, maintaining a cordial correspondence with Cardinal Newman and publishing a selection of his work. He became a member of the general committee of the recently-established Edinburgh Social Union in 1885. Whyte lived in a huge townhouse 7 Charlotte Square, in Edinburgh's First New Town. The house is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland and open to the public as The Georgian House, Edinburgh. He retired to Buckinghamshire around 1915 and died there. However he was returned to Edinburgh for burial. He is buried near the north-west corner of the first northern extension to Dean Cemetery. A memorial to Whyte in St George's Free Church in Edinburgh was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer.
Family
In 1881 he was married to Jane Elizabeth Barbour. Their son Robert Barbour Whyte was killed in the First World War.
