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 later taught history, Greek and Hebrew at the college of St Clement in Prague. After the suppression of the Society (1773), he earned a degree in philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he became librarian and professor of Greek.
PROFOUNDLY learned in classical and Oriental languages, he published critical editions of Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Cicero, Lucretius, the Chronicon of Georgius Frantzensis, studies on Slavic, Indo-Iranian and Georgian languages (from 1796 to 1802). Notable are his critical works on the texts and versions of the Bible (Old Latin, Armenian, Arabic), issued in Vienna (1779) and in the *Philosophisch-theologische Zeitschrift* of Paulus (Leipzig 1799–96); he also studied the pre-Hieronymian Latin fragments of Luke and Mark from the Codex Purpureus of the Palatine Library in Vienna (1791). His principal work is *Novum Test. ad codicem Vindobonensem graece expressum* (2 vols. 8°, Vienna 1787), in which he reproduces Codex Lambecii I with variants (in an appendix) from more than twenty Vienna manuscripts. Gaps and oversights (following the *textus receptus* of R. Estienne) do not diminish the original contributions of A., who remains a pioneer alongside J. Mill, J. J. Wetstein and J. J. Griesbach.