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 took his degree in philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he became librarian and professor of Greek.
Most erudite in the classical and Oriental languages, he published critical editions of Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Cicero, Lucretius, the Chronicon of George Phrantzes, and studies on the Slavic, Indo-Iranian and Georgian languages (from 1796 to 1802). Noteworthy are his critical works on the texts and versions of the Bible (Old Latin, Armenian, Arabic), published at Vienna (1779) and in Paulus's Philosophische Zeitschrift (Leipzig 1792-96); he studied the pre-Jerome Latin fragments of Luke and Mark from the purple Codex of the Palatine library of Vienna (1791). His principal work is Novum Test, ad codicem Vindobonensem graece expressum (2 vols. in 8°, Vienna 1787), in which he reproduces the codex Lambecii I with the variants (in an appendix) of more than 20 manuscripts of Vienna. Gaps and oversights (he follows the textus receptus of R. Estienne) do not detract from the merit and usefulness of A.'s original contributions, who remains a pioneer alongside J. Mill, J. J. Wetstein and J. J. Griesbach.
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Antonino Romeo