Constantin von Tischendorf

Life

Tischendorf was born in 1815 in Lengenfeld, in the Kingdom of Saxony, the son of a physician. He began his studies at the University of Leipzig in 1834. There, influenced by the New Testament Greek grammarian J. G. B. Winer, he resolved to use the oldest manuscripts to recover a text of the New Testament as close as possible to the original. He received his doctorate in 1838 and qualified as a university lecturer in 1840. In 1845 he became an extraordinary professor (a rank below full professor) at the University of Leipzig. After returning from his third journey to the East in 1859, he was made a full professor, and the university established a special chair of biblical paleography for him. In 1865 he received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England. He died in Leipzig in 1874.

Work and Achievements

Deciphering the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus

A palimpsest is a parchment book whose original writing has been erased and overwritten with another text. From October 1840 to January 1843, Tischendorf worked at the National Library in Paris, studying the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a fifth-century Greek manuscript of the Bible. He deciphered the erased biblical text beneath the later writing and published it in 1843–1845, a feat that earned him an international reputation.

Discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus

• 1844: He made his first visit to St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. On this occasion he obtained 43 leaves of the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) and deposited them in the University of Leipzig library. In 1846 he published these leaves as the Codex Friderico-Augustanus, named in honor of King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, but he did not disclose where they had been found in order to protect the remaining portions.
• 1853: His second visit produced no new results.
• 1859: He made a third visit with the support of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, who regarded himself as the protector of the Orthodox Church. On February 4 the monastery steward showed him a bundle of manuscript leaves containing part of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament. With the monastery's permission, he took the manuscript to Cairo and transcribed it with the help of colleagues. The manuscript subsequently passed to the tsar, and in 1862 a four-volume facsimile edition was published at the tsar's expense.

The Codex Sinaiticus is thought to have been produced in the mid-fourth century. It is the only Greek manuscript earlier than the ninth century that preserves the complete New Testament. In addition to the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, it contains the noncanonical Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas. In 1933 the Soviet government sold the manuscript to the British Museum.

Critical Editions of the Greek New Testament

Tischendorf published more manuscripts and critical editions of the Greek New Testament than anyone else of his time. A critical edition compares many manuscripts in order to establish the text closest to the original. His two-volume eighth edition, the editio octava critica maior (1869–1872), assembles an enormous collection of variant readings (readings that differ from one manuscript to another) and remains a standard reference work for New Testament scholars today.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is no record of Tischendorf having any direct connection with the Korean church; his influence is indirect. Together with other nineteenth-century critical texts, his text formed a basis for the Nestle Greek New Testament, which is widely used today in New Testament study and translation. The Korean Bible Society likewise presents the Codex Sinaiticus as one of the principal biblical manuscripts. Marginal notes in Korean Bibles such as "some manuscripts omit …" also reflect differences among ancient manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus. In the Bible translation debate, however, supporters of the King James Bible and the Textus Receptus criticize critical texts that give priority to older manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus, and they cite Tischendorf as a leading representative of that approach.

Assessment

Tischendorf is regarded as one of the scholars who laid the foundations of New Testament textual criticism. He is known to have sought to demonstrate the reliability of the New Testament text through ancient manuscripts, in opposition to the trend represented by F. C. Baur and others of the Tübingen School, who called the historicity of the Gospels into question.

The manner in which he acquired the manuscript, however, remains controversial. The story that in 1844 the monks were burning parchment leaves as kindling comes from Tischendorf's own account. Some scholars doubt this story in light of the monastery's long record of preserving thousands of manuscripts. In 1859 he took the manuscript after signing a pledge to return it, but in the end he presented it as a gift to the Russian tsar. For this reason he has been criticized for effectively removing the manuscript without returning it. His defenders argue that, through the mediation of the Russian government, the monks were persuaded to present the manuscript to the tsar. Since the twentieth century, additional leaves and fragments of the same manuscript have also been discovered at the monastery.