TISCHENDORF
TISCHENDORF, LOBEGOTT FRIEDRICH KONSTANTIN VON (1815-1874). German biblical critic, underminer of the traditional text of the New Testament, opponent of the Reformation, the son of a physician, was born in January 1815 at Lengenfeld, near Plauen, in the Saxon Vogtland. From the gymnasium at Piauen he passed in 1834 to the University of Leipzig, a stronghold of Textual Criticism, where he was mainly influenced by J. G. B. Winer (1789-1858), and began to take special interest in New Testament criticism.
In 1838 he took the degree of doctor of philosophy, and then became master at a school near Leipzig. After a journey through southern Germany and Switzerland, and a visit to Strassburg, he returned to Leipzig, and set to work upon a critical study of the New Testament text, following the guidance of Karl Lachmann. 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. These early textual studies (greatly influenced by Lachmann and other Textual Critics), convinced him of the absolute necessity of new and exacter collations of MSS.
The reason for this is that Tischendorf was convinced early on, by his professors, that the Bible of Christianity (And Christianity Itself) were built upon massive frauds and great textual corruption. These conclusions were not the product of science nor research, but rather the conclusions being advanced by professors who were deliberately trying to overthrow the Protestant Reformation and separate the influence of God (and the Godly) from Society. Tischendorf accepted the lie that the Bible had to be false and that Christianity was hopelessly corrupted. Because of this premise (which was also shared a bit later by Westcott & Hort ), Tischendorf went hunting for Manuscripts.
But how would he find the Right Manuscripts of the Bible ? The Test was simple: If the Bible was currently using manuscripts which were "Corrupt" [a false premise which Tischendorf believed], then manuscripts that were DIFFERENT from the historical Biblical Manuscripts...were more likely to be "authentic". Armed with his false and errant premise freshly indoctrinated by Textual Critics, Tischendorf abandoned the Claims of Jesus Christ and Christianity in order to go and find "real" Christianity.
This is unfortunate, since it means that Tischendorf - because he was Not careful in whom he placed his trust and received information from - exchanged the Truth of God and the Bible, for a lie.
From October 1840 till January 1843 he was in Paris, busy with the treasures of the great library, seeking out his scanty means by making collations for other scholars, and producing for the publisher, F. 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 Syri Rescriptus, 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, owing to the fact that it had been rewritten with the works of Ephraem Syrus, bad been illegible to earlier collators, brought him into note and gained 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. From Sinai he brought a great treasure, forty-three leaves of what is now known as the very corrupt Codex Sinaiticus (which contradicts Codex Vaticanus in more than 2000 places). [It was Tischendorf who named the corrupt Greek manuscript he found "Codex Sinaiticus"].
This was a manuscript that had been rejected by the monks of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and was part of the family of manuscripts that Codex Vaticanus also comes from (even though both codices disagree frequently with each other).
He kept the place of discovery a secret, 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 extraordinarius in Leipzig, and married (1845). In the same year he began to publish an account of his travels in the East (2 vols., 1845-1846). In 1850 appeared his edition of the Codex Amiatinus;
In 1853 and 1859, with the help of the Roman Catholic Church, and aided by its supporters and the personal interest of the Pope (The same Pope who would launch Vatican I) 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 obtained access to the remainder of the precious Sinaitic codex
Under very disputed circumstances, he persuaded the monks to present it to the tsar, at whose cost it was published in 1862 (in four folio volumes). In 1869 he was given the style of " von " Tischendorf as a Russian noble. (The monks at the Eastern Orthodox Monastery from where Tischendorf had obtained his manuscripts had accused him of taking this without permission).
Meanwhile, in 1859, he had been made professor ordinarius of theology and of biblical palaeography, this latter professorship being specially created for him in Germany thanks to the Textual Critics. 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 overwork in 1873. He died in December 1874 at Leipzig.
The great edition, of which the text and apparatus appeared in 1869 and 1872,' 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 Tischendorfs text may be distinguished, dating respectively from his editions of 1841, 1849, 1859 (ed. vii.), 1869-1872 (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 Tischendorfs other editions by coming nearer to the received text ; However, in the 8th edition the testimony of the Sinaitic MS. received great (probably top great) weight. The readings of the Vatican MS. [ referring here to Codex Vaticanus ] 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 S. P. Tregelles.
Much less important was Tischendorfs work on the Greek Old Testament. His edition of the Roman text, with the variants of the Alexandrian MS., the Codex Ephraemi and the Friderico-Augustanus, 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 by the aid of C. E. Nestle's appendix to the 6th issue (1880). Besides this may be mentioned editions of the New Testament Apocrypha [De Evangeliorum apocryphorum origine el usu (1851); Acta Apostolorum apocrypha (1851); Evangelia apocrypha (1853; 2nd ed., 1876); Apocalypses apocryphae (1866)] and various minor writings, in part of an apologetic character, such as Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst (1865; 4th ed., 1866), Haben wir den echten Schrifttext der Evangelisten und Apostel (1873), and Synopsis evangelica (7th ed., 1898).
Though Tischendorf thought of himself as sincere, he labored all of his life within the German Educational establishment having received his position in German Univerisities to teach as a full professor. He was a textual critic, and used his own self-professed claim of "sincerity" to greatly undermine the historic Textus Receptus. We should not forget that Tischendorf left to find his "real" texts of the Bible based on his theory that Christianity had been misled and that the Bible was corrupt. But these were not Facts of history, only the departing premise for Tischendorf.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947/48, the old Testament texts of Esther and Isaiah were found among them. These texts were dated to 200 years BEFORE CHRIST. Far from the Bible turning out to be false or hopelessly corrupted, what the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrated is that the historic text of the Bible, which - historically is the King James Version/ Textus Receptus (in Hebrew - Text of Ben Chayyim) were totally in agreement with the Massoretic Text of those Dead Sea Scrolls. In other words, the claims of Tischendorf that the Bible had been corrupted - was false !
Regretably, it was the false Greek Text of Tischendorf - based on rejected false Biblical manuscripts, that would be used to corrupt Modern Versions.It was his work along with the Greek False text of Westcott & Hort, that became the basis for the New Greek composite Text of Nestle, known today as the Nestle-Aland Text.
Sources: Ravenous Wolves: Textual Criticism and the Abandonement of the Reformation- A History of HIgher Criticism and German Theology by Lichtenberger. In addition, the works of the subjects of this biography, and Early Editions of Ency. Brit.
source: Some Sources also used under license
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