Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Lobegott Friedrich Konstantin Tischendorf
TISCHENDORF,[1] Lobegott Friedrich Konstantin (1815–1874), an eminent Biblical critic, the son of a physician, was born on 18th January 1815 at Lengenfeld, near Plauen, in the Saxon Voigtland. From the gymnasium at Plauen he passed in 1834 to the university of Leipsic, where he was mainly influenced by Winer, and began to take special interest in New Testament criticism. In 1840 he qualified as university lecturer in theology with a dissertation on the recensions of the New Testament text, the main part of which reappeared in the following year in the prolegomena to his first edition of the New Testament. The importance of these early textual studies was that they convinced him of the absolute necessity of new and exacter collations of MSS., and to this work he now gave himself. Above all he desired to go to Rome; but lack of help and money compelled him to turn first towards Paris, where he remained from October 1840 till January 1843, busy with the treasures of the great library, eking out his scanty means by making collations for other scholars, and producing for Didot several editions of the Greek New Testament, one of them exhibiting the form of the text corresponding most closely to the Vulgate. The great triumph of these laborious months was the decipherment of the palimpsest Codex Ephraemi Rescriptiis, of which the New Testament part was printed before he left Paris and the Old Testament in 1845. His success in dealing with a MS. much of which had been illegible to earlier collators brought him into note and gained public and private support for more extended critical expeditions. From Paris he had paid short visits to Holland (1841) and England (1842). In 1843 he visited Italy, and after a stay of thirteen months went on to Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, and the Levant, returning by Vienna and Munich.[2] From Sinai he brought a great treasure, forty-three leaves of what is now known as the Codex Sinaiticus (א). For the time he kept the place of discovery a secret, hoping to return and procure the rest of the book, and the fragments were published in 1846 as the Codex Friderico-Augustanus, a name given in honour of the king of Saxony. He now became professor in Leipsic and married (1845). His teaching was apparently not very remarkable; but his vacations were often occupied by fruitful critical journeys, and in 1853 and 1859 he made a second and a third voyage to the East. In the last of these, in which he had the active aid of the Russian Government, he at length got access to the remainder of the precious Sinaitic codex, and persuaded the monks to present it to the czar, at whose cost it was published in 1862. To gain for critical study a manuscript in point of age second only to the famous Vatican Bible was a splendid triumph, but Tischendorf a Eastern journeys were rich enough in other less sensational discoveries to deserve the highest praise.[3] Side by side with his industry in collecting and collating MSS., Tischendorf pursued a constant course of editorial labours, mainly on the New Testament, until he was broken down by over work in 1873. He died on 7th December 1874 at Leipsic.
The great edition, of which the text and apparatus appeared in 1869 and 1872,[4] was called by himself editio viii.; but this number is raised to twenty or twenty-one if mere reprints from stereotype plates and the minor editions of his great critical texts are included; posthumous prints bring up the total to forty-one. Four main recensions of Tischendorf's text may be distinguished, dating respectively from his editions of 1841, 1849, 1859(ed. vii.), 1869-72 (ed. viii.). The edition of 1849 may be regarded as historically the most important from the mass of new critical material it used; that of 1859 is distinguished from Tischendorf's other editions by coming nearer to the received text; in the eighth edition the testimony of the Sinaitic MS. received great (probably too great) weight. The readings of the Vatican MS. were given with more exactness and certainty than had been possible in the earlier editions, and the editor had also the advantage of using the published labours of Tregelles. Whatever judgment may be passed on Tischendorf's critical tact and power, the apparatus of this final edition will not soon be superseded, and sums up a vast series of most important services to Biblical study.
Much less important was Tischendorf's work on the Greek Old Testament. His edition of the Roman text, with the variants of the Alexandrian MS., the Codex Ephraemi, and the FridericoAugustanus, was of service when it appeared in 1850, but being stereotyped was not greatly improved in subsequent issues. Its imperfections, even within the limited field it covers, may be judged of by the aid of Kestle's appendix to the sixth issue (1880). Besides this may be mentioned editions of the New Testament Apocrypha (Acts of Apostles, 1851; Gospels, 1853, 2d ed. 1876; Apocalypses, 1866), and various minor writings, in part of an apologetic character, such as Warm wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? (1865) and Haben wir den echten Schrifltext der Evangelisten und Apostel? (1873).
- ↑ In 1869 he became Konstantin von Tischendorf, having been raised to a place in the hereditary nobility of Russia.
- ↑ See his Reise in den Orient, Leipsic, 1845-46.
- ↑ The MSS. brought to Europe on the first two journeys are catalogued in the Anecdota Sacra et Profana (Leipsic, 1855, enlarged 1861). See also the Monumenta Sacra Inedita (Leipsic, 1846), and Nova Collectio of the same (1855-69). The third volume of the Nova Coll. gives the results of his last Eastern journey.
- ↑ The prolegomena remained unfinished at his death, and are being supplied by C. R. Gregory.