TISCHENDORF, LOBEGOTT FRIEDRICH KON STANTIN VON (1815-1874), German biblical critic, the son of a physician, was born on Jan. 18, 1815, at Legenfeld, near Plauen, in the Saxon Vogtland. He was educated at the gym nasium of Plauen and the university of Leipzig, where he qualified as a lecturer in 184o with a dissertation on the recensions of the New Testament text. These studies convinced him of the ab solute necessity of new and exacter collations of mss. From October 1840 till January 1843 he was in Paris, studying in the great library, eking out his scanty means by working for other scholars and for the publisher Didot. The great triumph of these laborious months was the decipherment of the palimpsest Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus, abandoned as illegible by earlier col lators. The New Testament part was printed before he left Paris and the Old Testament in 1845. From Paris he had paid short visits to Holland (1841) and England (1842). In 1843 he visited Italy, and after a stay of thirteen months went on to Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and the Levant, returning by Vienna and Munich. (See his Reise in den Orient [Leipzig, 1845-46] .) From Sinai he brought a great treasure, forty-three leaves of what is now known as the Codex Sinaiticus. He kept the place of discovery a secret, and the fragments were published in 1846 as the Codex Friderico Augustanus, a name given in honour of the king of Saxony. He now became professor extraordinarius in Leipzig, and married (1845). In the same year he began to publish an account of his travels in the East (2 vols., 1845-1846). In 185o appeared his edition of the Codex Amiatinus and of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament; in 1852, amongst other works, his edition of the Codex Claromontanus. In 1853 and 1859 he made a second and a third voyage to the East. In the last of these, in which he had the active aid of the Russian government, he at length got access to the remainder of the precious Sinaitic codex, and per suaded the monks to present it to the tsar, at whose cost it was published in 1862 (in four folio volumes). In 1859, he had been
made professor of theology and biblical palaeography. The mss. brought to Europe on the first two journeys are catalogued in the Anecdota sacra et profana (Leipzig, 1855, enlarged i861). See also the Monumenta sacra inedita (Leipzig, 1846), and Nova collectio of the same (1855-1869). The 3rd volume of the Nova collectio gives the results of his last Eastern journey. Side by side with his industry in collecting and collating mss., Tischendorf pursued a constant course of editorial labours, mainly on the New Testament, until he was broken down by overwork in 1873. He died on Dec. 7, 1874, at Leipzig.
Four main recensions of Tischendorf's text of the New Testament may be distinguished, dating respectively from his editions of 1841, 1849, 1859 (ed. vii.), 1869-72 (ed. viii.). The edition of 1849 may be regarded as historically the most important from the mass of new critical material it used; that of 1859 is distinguished from Tischen dorf's other editions by coming nearer to the received text ; in the 8th edition the testimony of the Sinaitic ms. received great (probably too great) weight.
See in addition to the handbooks on New Testament criticism, Carl Bertheau's article on Tischendorf in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopddie (3rd ed., 1907).