Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 09:35 (Jul 1852)
Article: Notices Of New Publications
Author: Anonymous

BSac 9:35 (July 1852) p. 623

Notices Of New Publications

I. Tischendorf’s Greek Testament1

This is in many respects the most valuable edition of the original text of the New Testament which has appeared since the time of Griesbach. But before describing it particularly, it may be well to give some account of the author’s previous labors.

Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf was born at Lengefeld in Voigtland, a district of Saxony, in 1815. In 1837 he published a dissertation, entitled “Doctrina Pauli Apostoli de vi Mortis Christi satisfactoria,” for which he received a prize; in 1838, a volume of poems called Maiknospen, or “May-buds “; and, in the following year, another prize essay on John 6:51–59. In 1840 he published a critical and exegetical dissertation on Matthew 19:16 et seq., and a small work on the history of the Flagellants, based on one written in French by Schneegans, entitled “Le grand Pélerinage des Flagellants à Strasbourg en 1349.”

Tischendorf’s first edition of the Greek Testament appeared at Leipsic in 1841; a convenient manual, exhibiting a text deviating more frequently than Griesbach’s from that of the Elzevirs, accompanied with the more important various readings and authorities. To this were prefixed about eighty pages of Prolegomena, containing, with other valuable matter, a confutation of Scholz’s doctrine respecting the superiority of the “Constantinopolitan “to the “Alexandrine” manuscripts, to the latter of which classes our most ancient copies belong. This edition, which appears to have been well received, was followed by two others printed at Paris in 1842, one of them presenting substantially the same text as the Leipsic edition, but without the Prolegomena and critical authorities; the other with a text conformed to the Latin Vulgate, in connection with which it was first printed as one of the volumes of Didot’s “Scriptorum Graecorum Bibliotheca.” The latter, of course, possesses no independent critical value.

In the preparation of these editions, Tischendorf was struck with the defectiveness of the existing collations of even our most ancient manuscripts of the New Testament — the uncial manuscripts, as they have been called, from being written in uncial or capital letters — although these, generally speaking, have been much more thoroughly examined than the great mass of more modern copies in cursive characters. With the exception, perhaps, of Mat-

BSac 9:35 (July 1852) p. 624

thaei, whose Moscow manuscripts were for the most part of inferior value, even the best collators of...