Tischendorf and the New Testament

"Before me lies a sacred life task, the struggle for the original form of the New Testament." These were the words written by Konstantin von Tischendorf to his fiancee in 1842. Tischendorf, then only 27 years of age, was an assistant professor in Leipzig, Germany. When he died some 33 years later, his obituary recorded that no single individual had done more for the New Testament since its books were originally written by the apostles than this man Tischendorf. Hearing of this claim, we may ask, In what way did Konstantin von Tischendorf make such an outstanding contribution on behalf of the New Testament?

During the years when young Tischendorf was a theology student, the authority and authenticity of the New Testament were under attack in Germany as never before. Illustrious theologians were convinced that they were serving the cause of truth by subjecting the sources of the Christian faith to the most rigorous critical investigation. The result was, for example, that the apostle Paul was considered the author of only four of the books that carry his name, while the others were thought to be products of anonymous authors centuries later. Also, many of the stories about the life and ministry of Jesus found in the Gospels were rejected as legendary, and especially the Gospel of John was declared to be a fabrication dating from a period when the true facts about Jesus had long been forgotten.

Young Tischendorf, a deeply religious man, was pained by this situation and felt that the defense of the New Testament needed, in the first place, a solid foundation, namely a Greek text that would be accepted even by critically inclined scholars as being nearly identical with the original text. This was not the case in the early nineteenth century. Although more than four thousand manuscripts of the Greek New Testament were known to exist in monasteries and libraries, they were mostly copies dating from the Middle Ages and containing many thousands of variants. For this reason many scholars had come to the conclusion that there was no way of finding out what the original Bible writers actually had written. On the other hand, conservative students of the Bible maintained that God had held His hand over His Word and protected it from corruption, but they lacked the evidence that the Bible had faithfully been transmitted down through the centuries with out having experienced corruption.

The earliest Greek New Testament available at that time was the Codex Alexandrinus (symbolized by the letter A) in the British Museum, which several editors of the Greek text of the New Testament had consulted ever since it had come to England in 1627, and which had been fully published by the eighteenth century. However, that manuscript dates from the fifth century A. D., hence was still a relatively late witness of the original Bible text when one considers that the books of the New Testament had all been written during the first century.

Furthermore, the Codex Vaticanus (B), a fourth-century Bible manuscript, had been in the Vatican Library at least since 1481, when it appeared for the first time in the library's catalog. But this manuscript had never been made available to outside scholars and was still inaccessible to them in the mid-nineteenth century.

Finally, the National Library in Paris owned a fragmentary fifth-century Bible manuscript, the Codex Ephraemi (C). However, that manuscript was apparently of no value, for it was a palimpsest, which means that its pages had been used twice, first for one composition that at a later time had been washed off so that the writing material, in this case expensive parchment, could be used for another literary work. It happened that the Codex Ephraemi's original composition had been a text of the Greek Bible, and this had later been erased and replaced by sermons of Saint Ephraem of Syria. So thorough had been the work of erasure that the director of the Paris National Library had said that mortal man would never be able to decipher this codex.

It becomes readily apparent that Tischendorf had a herculean task before him in his desire to reconstruct the original Greek text of the New Testament, in view of the fact that only late copies of the Bible were available to him and that thousands of known Bible manuscripts had to be consulted and collated. All of them, with the exception of the Codex Vaticanus, which remained inaccessible, were produced after the Christian faith had become a state religion and the Bible text had reached what was thought to be a fixed but somewhat corrupt form. But working day and night with all manuscript publications available at that time Tischendorf published in 1840 the first edition of his Novum Testamentum Graece, which was superior to any existing Greek New Testament in print, so that the Lutheran Bishop Draseke could call it "the foundation of Tischendorfs literary immortality." During his lifetime seven more editions were published of this Greek New Testament, which for many decades remained the foundation of all scholarly work on the New Testament.

However, Tischendorf still needed to locate earlier Bible manuscripts than those already known and to publish any that had not yet become available to the scholarly world. Since it was impossible for him to have access to the Codex Vaticanus, a text a hundred years closer to the apostolic age than the earliest manuscript available to him, he went to Paris to examine the Codex Ephraemi and see for himself whether it would be possible to decipher the underlying Greek text that had been erased, in spite of the fact that every scholar who had tried his hand on it had declared it to be undecipherable. He traveled to Paris in the fall of 1840 and was granted permission to study the manuscript. Fortunately Tischendorf possessed the eyes of an eagle and an incredible amount of patience that served him well in his work of reading and deciphering ancient manuscripts. For more than two years Tischendorf sat at a small table in front of a window during every hour that the library was open and deciphered the faint traces of the old Greek characters. Letter after letter and word after word was carefully examined, and all possibilities were tested until he was convinced he knew what the original text was saying. When he left Paris in 1843, he carried with him a copy of that valuable Bible manuscript of the fifth century.

I wish to insert here a brief experience of my own. In the summer of 1958, I had the opportunity of spending half a day with this precious manuscript, the Codex Ephraemi, in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Being desirous to obtain a personal impression of the quality of Tischendorfs work, I had made several unsuccessful attempts to examine this codex. Finally I received permission from the director to handle it for a day. The secretary personally brought the manuscript to me and seated me at the same table in front of the window where Tischendorf is said to have worked for more than two years. I was greatly excited as I handled the parchment leaves of this ancient Bible and compared that great man's work from his published edition with the actual manuscript. I must admit that my admiration for Tischendorfs work increased immeasurably during those hours.

A few months after Tischendorf had left Paris he published the New Testament section of the Codex Ephraemi, and this unheard-of accomplishment established his fame as an authority in the area of Biblical textual studies. Libraries eagerly opened their doors to him, and he made ready use of these opportunities to visit in the next few months the libraries of Switzerland, Venice, Milan, Turin, Modena, Florence, and Naples.

Finally he came to Rome and, armed with letters of recommendation from Prince John of Saxony and the archbishop of Paris, presented himself at the Vatican. He was received by Pope Gregory XVI, who had already heard of the young scholar's fame, and received permission, given somewhat reluctantly, to do some collation work on the Codex Vaticanus. However, after only six hours of work with the famous manuscript this permit was withdrawn. It is not known why the Vatican was so reluctant to let Tischendorf publish this Bible text for which Christian theologians in all parts of the world were waiting. Some have thought that Cardinal Mai, at that time the librarian of the Vatican Library, wanted to publish it himself, while others have speculated that the Vatican authorities were afraid that this earliest-known Bible text might contradict the official Catholic translation, the Vulgate, and thus possibly create doctrinal problems. Whatever the reasons were, Tischendorf was forced to wait patiently for another twenty years before he was finally allowed to study and eventually to publish the Codex Vaticanus.

In the spring of 1844, Tischendorf made the first of his three trips to the Near East in search of ancient manuscripts, reaching the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai after a twelve-day ride on camelback from Egypt. Why did that isolated monastery in the Sinai desert attract him so much? Because it was the only early Christian monastery that since its founding by the Emperor Justinian in A.D. 530 had not suffered destruction, neither accidentally by fire nor violently by acts of war. Hence Tischendorf reasoned that early copies of handwritten Bibles should have had a much greater chance of survival in this monastery than anywhere else. However, a careful search of several weeks in the library of the monastery led to disappointing results. After searching through many hundreds of valuable manuscripts in the library's possession Tischendorf could not find one copy of an early Bible among them. However, at the end of his stay he discovered 129 large parchment leaves of a Biblical manuscript in a large wastepaper basket that contained dis carded writing material to be used as fuel. These leaves, dated by him to the fourth century, contained various parts of the Old Testament books. The monks gave him forty-three of these leaves as a gift and retained eighty-six leaves after having learned that they were extremely valuable.

After leaving Mount Sinai, Tischendorf deposited these forty-three leaves of the newly discovered fourth-century Bible manuscript in the library of the university of Leipzig, and published them in 1846 without revealing their place of origin to prevent anyone from attempting to purchase the remaining eighty-six leaves.

In February, 1853, Tischendorf was back in St. Catherine's monastery with the purpose of acquiring these eighty-six leaves, but he was unable to find out anything of what had happened to them since his departure nine years earlier. His third and final trip to the Near East was on January 31, 1859. This time he was welcomed by the Sinai monks as the official envoy of Czar Alexander II of Russia, who was considered by the monks to be their powerful patron and special benefactor. But the experience of his second visit in 1853 was repeated. All of Tischendorfs inquiries led to nothing.

However, on the eve of his departure, on February 4, 1859, he made the greatest discovery of his life. As the result of a conversation with the monastery's iconomos, he learned that this young Greek had a handwritten Bible in his cell. Eager to see it, he was shown a stack of 346 parchment leaves wrapped in a red cloth. Dumbfounded with amazement and joy, he discovered that this stack of leaves contained not only the long-searched for eighty-six leaves that he had rescued from a fiery destruction some 15 years earlier but also the complete New Testament, parts of several Old Testament books, and a copy of the noncanonical Epistle of Barnabas, as well as the Shepherd of Hermas, both of which were early Christian works. In fact, the discovery of the Epistle of Barnabas was of great importance to church historians, since it was known only from very imperfect copies up to that time.

Tischendorf gave to this famous Bible manuscript, known since then as the Codex Sinaiticus, the symbol [Aleph], the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Because all the early letters of the Roman alphabet were already used up as symbols to designate other Bible manuscripts, and because he considered the Codex Sinaiticus as far too important to receive a letter down the line in the Roman alphabet, he gave it this initial letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

On September 28, 1859, the presentation of the manuscript to Tischendorf took place in a solemn ceremony in the archbishopric residence in Cairo, and nearly two months later, on November 19, 1859, Tischendorf placed this precious Bible in the hands of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). * In 1862, Tischendorf published it in four huge quarto volumes printed in facsimile type. In 1933 the Soviet Government sold it for £100,000 to Great Britain. Since that time it has been on display side by side with the Codex Alexandrinus in the British Museum in London.

The study of the Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible manuscript a hundred years older than the earliest Bible manuscript avail able at that time, showed that its text in all essentials was practically identical with the standard Greek text of the Bible, and proved that no discoveries of earlier Bible manuscripts would challenge any established doctrines based on the Bible. This fact has been borne out numerous times since Tischendorf s epoch-making find by further discoveries of even earlier Bible manuscripts, such as the Chester Beatty papyri, which contain parts of fifteen New Testament books dating from the third century, and the Bodmer papyri, which are even earlier, reaching in part back to the second century.

The publication of this early fourthcentury manuscript, Codex Sinaiticus, did not fail to make also an impact on the Vatican authorities. Not only did it establish Tischendorf as the unrivaled authority on the Greek New Testament but it also assuaged any fear that the publication of early Bible manuscripts would be detrimental to the church or to its teachings. The result was that Tischendorf finally received the coveted permission to publish the Vatican's most famous Bible manuscript, Codex Vaticanus. His New Testament edition of this codex saw the light of day in 1867 under the title of Novum Testamentum Vaticanum. A year later it was followed by an official edition issued by the papal authorities.

Tischendorf's versatile pen continued to produce important textual editions and studies until the number of books published during his lifetime reached seventy-two. As he approached the age of 60 and made plans for another journey to the Near East to search for more ancient Bible manuscripts, in addition to a proposed trip to the New World, a stroke brought an end to his work. When he died on December 7, 1874, a true Christian warrior and a great Biblical scholar passed away. His last will revealed his unshakable faith in God's leadership throughout his life, just as his work had been a witness to this faith. In part the will stated: "God has given me a life, happy and rich, and adorned by his blessings. Toil and hard labor was my lot, but it was truly precious. May God also put His blessings on the things which I leave behind: They are His work. "