ALTER, FRANZ KARL. - Jesuit philologist, b. at Engelsberg (Czechoslovakia) on 21 Jan. 1749, d. at Vienna on 29 March 1804. Having entered (1766) the Bohemian province of the Society, he subsequently taught history, Greek, and Hebrew at the College of S. Clemente in Prague. After the suppression of the Society (1773), he took a degree in philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he became librarian and professor of Greek.
Exceptionally learned in the classical and Oriental languages, he published critical editions of Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Cicero, Lucretius, the Chronicon of Giorgio Frantzès, and studies on the Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Georgian languages (from 1796 to 1802). Noteworthy are his critical works on biblical texts and versions (Old Latin, Armenian, Arabic), published at Vienna (1779) and in Paulus’s Philosophische Zeitschrift (Leipzig 1792–96); he studied the pre-Jeromian Latin fragments of Luca and Marco in the Codex purpureus of the Palatine Library of Vienna (1791). His principal work is Novum Test, ad codicem Vindobonensem graece expressum (2 vols., 8vo, Vienna 1787), in which he reproduces the codex Lambecii I together with the variants (in an appendix) of more than 20 Vienna manuscripts. Gaps and oversights (he follows the textus receptus of R. Estienne) do not detract from the merit and usefulness of A.’s original contributions; he remains a pioneer alongside J. Mill, J. J. Wetstein, and J. J. Griesbach.