LACHMANN, Karl. - German Protestant philologist (1793-1851), professor at Berlin, renowned not only for his works in Germanic studies and classical philology but also for his contributions to textual criticism of the New Testament, in which he inaugurated a new era.
Until Lachmann, for some 200 years, the *textus receptus* had prevailed, a Greek text edited by Robert Estienne and especially by the Elzeviers in 1633. Although this widely circulated text lacked critical value, being based as it was on few and late manuscripts, no one had dared to publish a better text; instead, the *textus receptus* continued to be printed, with variant readings noted at most and emended here and there. The famous philologist R. Bentley (q.v.) had intended to abandon the *textus receptus*, but did not carry it out. It was Lachmann who definitively broke with this text by publishing in 1831 a Greek text of the New Testament based solely on the most ancient documents. This was the first systematic attempt to replace arbitrary selection in the discrimination of various readings with a scientific method. Lachmann did not claim to have already restored the primitive text, the goal of all textual criticism, but by renouncing even the fruitful principle of Griesbach’s (q.v.) classification of texts and the use of internal principles of criticism, he limited himself to presenting in his edition the text that he found to have been most widespread in the Church at the time of St. Jerome (c. 380). This seemed to him the best foundation upon which subsequent critical work could, by means of internal criteria, more closely approach the primitive text. The first stereotyped edition was published in 1831 in Berlin and reprinted in 1837 and 1846; it provided only the text restored by Lachmann and an appendix with variant readings from the *textus receptus*. A more extensive edition appeared in 2 vols. (1842 and 1850) with a critical apparatus by Ph. Buttmann.
It cannot be denied that the principles established by Lachmann for determining the sacred text were sound. Nevertheless, his text was imperfect, both because he did not consistently follow his own rules and because the manuscripts he selected were too few, and the best codices were accessible to him only in defective collations. His example, however, was undoubtedly decisive in the textual criticism of the New Testament.