Karl Lachmann

Karl Lachmann was a German philologist of the first half of the nineteenth century who worked with equal authority on Latin poetry, medieval German literature and the Greek New Testament. He is remembered above all for two achievements. In 1831 he published an edition of the Greek New Testament that, for the first time, set aside the traditional printed text entirely and attempted to reconstruct the text from the oldest manuscripts alone. In 1850 he published an edition of the Roman poet Lucretius in which he reconstructed the lost manuscript from which all surviving copies descended, down to the number of its pages and lines. His name has become attached to the genealogical method of editing texts, often called the Lachmann method, which dominated classical and medieval scholarship for a century and is still taught. Modern historians of scholarship have shown that the method was the work of many hands, and that Lachmann’s own contribution was in some respects different from the one attributed to him. His influence on the study of the New Testament was nevertheless decisive, for it was through his edition that the authority of the Textus Receptus was finally broken. This article describes his life and character, his work on classical and German texts, his New Testament editions and his article on the order of the Gospels, the method that bears his name, and the reassessment of his achievement.¹²³

Early Life and Education

Lachmann was born at Braunschweig on 4 March 1793, the son of a Lutheran pastor and schoolman. His mother died when he was two, and he was educated at first by his father and then at the gymnasium of his native town. In 1809 he went to the University of Leipzig to study theology, and in the same year he moved to Göttingen, where he turned to classical philology. At Göttingen he studied under the classicists Christian Gottlob Heyne and Ludolph Dissen, and he also came into contact with the study of the German past that was then beginning to flourish in the universities. His teacher in this field was Georg Friedrich Benecke, a pioneer of the study of Middle High German, who became his friend and later his collaborator.⁴⁵⁶

The years of Lachmann’s education were those of the Napoleonic wars, the collapse of the old Holy Roman Empire and the rise of German national feeling. The study of German antiquity was bound up with the recovery of a national identity, and the poems of the German Middle Ages were read as monuments of the national spirit. Lachmann shared this enthusiasm, and in 1815, during the Hundred Days, he enlisted as a volunteer in the campaign against Napoleon, although he saw no fighting. He took his doctorate at Halle in 1814 with a dissertation on the Latin elegiac poet Tibullus and qualified as a university teacher at Göttingen in 1815.⁷⁸

Königsberg and Berlin

After a brief period as a schoolteacher in Berlin, Lachmann moved in 1816 to Königsberg in East Prussia, where he taught at a gymnasium and in 1818 became extraordinary professor at the university. He remained there until 1824. In that year he undertook a long journey through the libraries of Germany and Switzerland to study manuscripts of medieval German poetry, visiting Wolfenbüttel, Kassel, Heidelberg, Munich, St Gallen and other collections. In 1825 he was appointed to the University of Berlin, founded fifteen years earlier on the principles of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and in 1827 he became ordinary professor of classical and German philology. He spent the rest of his life in Berlin.⁹¹⁰¹¹

Berlin in the 1820s and 1830s was the centre of German scholarship. Lachmann’s colleagues included the classicist August Boeckh, the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the philosopher Hegel. In 1830 he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and in 1841 the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, his old friends and correspondents, moved to Berlin and joined him in the Academy. Lachmann served as dean of the faculty of philosophy and in 1843 to 1844 as rector of the university. He never married. He died at Berlin on 13 March 1851, aged fifty-eight,. Jacob Grimm delivered the memorial address before the Academy, and Martin Hertz, a former pupil, published a biography in the same year.^12131415

Character and Manner of Work

Lachmann’s contemporaries describe a man of severe and uncompromising temper. He set high standards for himself and for others, and he was merciless to work he considered careless or pretentious. His reviews were feared. His prefaces were terse, sometimes to the point of obscurity, and he rarely explained his reasoning at length, preferring to let his texts speak for themselves. Jacob Grimm, who admired and loved him, spoke of his sharpness and his unwillingness to compromise, but also of his loyalty to his friends and his devotion to his work.¹⁶¹⁷

His learning was extraordinarily wide. He was equally at home in the Latin poets, the Greek New Testament, the metres of Middle High German lyric and the Roman lawyers, and he moved between these fields without apparent effort. He edited the Institutes of the Roman jurist Gaius, the Byzantine historian Genesius and the surveyors’ texts of the Roman agrimensores, as well as the works for which he is best known. He also translated Shakespeare, publishing German versions of the Sonnets in 1820 and of Macbeth in 1829. This breadth gave him a perspective on the problems of editing that few of his contemporaries could match, and he was able to apply to one field the methods he had developed in another.¹⁸¹⁹

The Latin Poets

Lachmann’s first editions were of the Latin elegiac poets. His Propertius appeared in 1816, and his editions of Catullus and Tibullus in 1829. In these early works he was already concerned with the classification of manuscripts and the attempt to establish the text on the basis of the best witnesses rather than on the readings of the printed editions. His review of an edition of Propertius in 1817 set out principles for judging the authority of manuscripts that anticipate his later work.²⁰²¹²²

The culmination of his classical work was the edition of Lucretius, published in 1850 with a separate volume of commentary. Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura, an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus in six books of Latin hexameters, survives in two ninth-century manuscripts at Leiden, known from their shapes as the Oblongus and the Quadratus, together with fragments and a large number of Italian Renaissance copies. Lachmann showed that the Renaissance copies descended from a lost manuscript related to the ninth-century ones and had no independent value, so that the text must be based on the two Leiden manuscripts.²³²⁴²⁵

He went further. By studying the transpositions and omissions common to all the surviving manuscripts, he argued that they all descended from a single lost archetype, and he reconstructed the physical form of that archetype: a manuscript of 302 pages, each of 26 lines. Passages that appeared in the wrong place in the surviving manuscripts could be explained as the result of leaves or blocks of lines displaced in the archetype. The demonstration was dazzling, and it made a deep impression on contemporaries. Later scholars showed that it was not entirely original, since Jacob Bernays and others had reached similar conclusions, and that some details were mistaken, but the Lucretius remained the classic example of what the genealogical method could achieve.²⁶²⁷²⁸

Medieval German Literature

Lachmann’s work on medieval German poetry was as important as his classical work, and for German scholars it was perhaps more so. He was one of the founders of the scientific study of Middle High German, the literary language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He established the principles of its metre and grammar, and he produced editions of its major works that remained standard for generations.²⁹³⁰

His edition of the Nibelungenlied, the great heroic epic of the Burgundians and their destruction at the court of Attila, appeared in 1826. Lachmann based his text on the manuscript known as A, now at Munich, which he regarded as the oldest and most authentic, and he developed a theory that the poem had been compiled from twenty separate songs, which he believed could be identified by inconsistencies in the narrative. The theory was a version of the approach that Friedrich August Wolf had applied to Homer in his Prolegomena of 1795, and Lachmann applied the same reasoning to the Iliad in a series of papers read to the Berlin Academy and collected in 1847. The song theory of the Nibelungenlied provoked fierce controversy and is no longer accepted, and later scholars came to prefer manuscript B or C as the basis of the text.³¹³²³³

His editions of the lyric poems of Walther von der Vogelweide in 1827, of the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, including Parzival, in 1833, and of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, with Benecke, in 1827, were more lasting. In these he applied his methods to texts preserved in many manuscripts of different dates and dialects, and he attempted to restore not only the words but the spelling and grammar of the poets’ own time, producing a normalised Middle High German that was a scholarly construction. This practice has been much criticised since, but it was influential, and Lachmann’s editions of Walther and Wolfram remained in use, in revised forms, into the twentieth century. He also began, with Moriz Haupt, the collection of early German love lyric that was published after his death as Des Minnesangs Frühling.^34353637

Lachmann’s edition of Lessing’s complete works, published in thirteen volumes from 1838 to 1840, was the first critical edition of a modern German author. He treated Lessing’s texts with the same care he gave to ancient and medieval authors, establishing the text from the first editions and manuscripts. The edition, revised by Franz Muncker, remains the standard edition of Lessing. That Lessing had himself been a pioneer of biblical criticism, publishing the fragments of Reimarus in the 1770s, gives the project an added interest in the context of Lachmann’s work on the New Testament.³⁸³⁹

Lachmann’s friendship with the brothers Grimm was one of the defining relationships of his life. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the founders of German historical linguistics and of the systematic collection of German folk tales, and their work on the grammar and antiquities of the German language provided the foundation on which Lachmann built his editions. Their correspondence, which extended over decades, shows an exchange of ideas on metre, grammar and the interpretation of medieval texts. Jacob Grimm’s German Grammar, whose first volume appeared in 1819, and Lachmann’s editions were complementary achievements: Grimm described the historical development of the language, and Lachmann applied that knowledge to the restoration of particular texts. Together they made the study of the German past a rigorous academic discipline.⁴⁰⁴¹⁴²

The State of the New Testament Text before Lachmann

To understand the significance of Lachmann’s New Testament, it is necessary to recall the state of the printed text in the early nineteenth century. The first printed editions of the Greek New Testament, those of Erasmus in 1516 and of the Complutensian Polyglot, printed in 1514 and published in 1522, had been based on a handful of late medieval manuscripts. Erasmus’ text, revised by himself and by later editors such as Robert Estienne and Theodore Beza, became the standard text of Protestant Europe. The edition published by the Elzevir brothers at Leiden in 1633 described it as the text now received by all, and the phrase gave it the name Textus Receptus.⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scholars collected an enormous quantity of variant readings from manuscripts, ancient translations and quotations in the church fathers. John Mill’s edition of 1707 recorded some thirty thousand variants. Johann Albrecht Bengel and Johann Jakob Wettstein in the eighteenth century, and Johann Jakob Griesbach at its end, classified the manuscripts into groups and recognised that the oldest witnesses often differed from the received text. But all of them printed the Textus Receptus as their text, modifying it only in a limited number of places, and presented the evidence of the manuscripts in their apparatus. The received text had become so sacred by long use that even scholars who knew its weaknesses hesitated to replace it.⁴⁶⁴⁷⁴⁸

One scholar had proposed a radical alternative. In 1720 Richard Bentley, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, published proposals for an edition of the Greek New Testament and the Latin Vulgate based entirely on the oldest manuscripts of both, arguing that by comparing the oldest Greek with the oldest Latin he could restore the text as it stood in the fourth century, at the time of the Council of Nicaea. Bentley collected materials for years, but the edition was never completed. Lachmann knew of Bentley’s plan and regarded his own work as its realisation.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹

The Edition of 1831

Lachmann’s first edition of the Greek New Testament appeared at Berlin in 1831, published by Georg Reimer. It was a small volume, and its preface was only a few lines long. In place of an explanation, Lachmann referred readers to an article he had published the previous year in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken, in which he gave an account of his principles. The brevity of the preface and the obscurity of its reference contributed to the hostile reception of the edition, which many readers regarded as an arbitrary and irreverent tampering with the sacred text.⁵²⁵³

The principles set out in the article were simple and radical. Lachmann did not claim to restore the original text of the apostles. He thought that impossible with the evidence available. His aim was more modest and more precise: to restore the text as it was read in the Eastern church at the end of the fourth century, about the year 380. For this purpose he set aside the Textus Receptus entirely and based his text only on the oldest witnesses: the great Greek uncial manuscripts, above all the Codex Alexandrinus and the Codex Vaticanus, as far as the latter was then known; the Old Latin translations and the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate; and the quotations of early fathers such as Origen, Irenaeus, Cyprian and Hilary. Where these witnesses agreed, he followed them; where they disagreed, he followed the majority or, where there was no majority, printed alternatives.^54555657

The method was mechanical by design. Lachmann wished to exclude the editor’s personal judgment as far as possible, at least in the first stage of the work. The task of choosing among readings on internal grounds, which he called emendation, was to be undertaken only after the evidence of the manuscripts had been weighed. He thought that previous editors had confused these stages and had allowed their preferences to influence their choice of manuscripts. By separating them, he hoped to place the text on a firm historical foundation.⁵⁸⁵⁹

The result was a text that differed from the Textus Receptus in a great many places. Lachmann’s text omitted passages such as the Johannine Comma, the verse on the three heavenly witnesses in the First Letter of John, which had long been recognised as spurious by scholars but remained in printed Bibles. It also adopted many shorter readings found in the oldest manuscripts and rejected later expansions. In this respect it anticipated the texts of Tischendorf, Tregelles and Westcott and Hort later in the century, and through them the critical texts in use today.⁶⁰⁶¹

The decision to aim at the text of the late fourth century deserves comment, because it is often misunderstood. Lachmann did not believe that the fourth-century text was identical with the original, and he did not claim that his edition gave the words of the apostles. He chose the fourth century because it was the earliest period for which, in his judgment, the evidence allowed a text to be reconstructed with confidence. The great uncial manuscripts were of that period or a little later, and the fathers whose quotations he used belonged to the third and fourth centuries. By limiting his aim he made his result verifiable: anyone could check whether his text corresponded to the evidence of the witnesses he had chosen. The task of moving behind the fourth-century text towards the original was one he left for later, and he thought it would require the use of conjecture on a scale that he was not yet prepared to undertake in a text of such importance.⁶²⁶³⁶⁴

The Larger Edition

Between 1842 and 1850 Lachmann published a much larger edition in two volumes, in collaboration with Philipp Buttmann, son of the classical scholar of the same name. This edition printed the Greek text with an apparatus of the ancient witnesses on which it was based, and with the Latin text of the Vulgate on the same page. The Latin was established from the oldest manuscripts, including the Codex Fuldensis, written for Bishop Victor of Capua in the sixth century, and the Codex Amiatinus, the great Northumbrian Bible written at Wearmouth-Jarrow before 716. Buttmann was responsible for the Greek apparatus, and Lachmann for the text and the Latin.⁶⁵⁶⁶⁶⁷

The larger edition included a long Latin preface in which Lachmann set out his principles more fully than before. He defended the decision to aim at the fourth-century text, explained the use of the Latin evidence and discussed the relationship between the Greek and Latin traditions. He also answered his critics, sometimes sharply. The edition was a monument of scholarship, but its basis was limited by the evidence available. Lachmann had not seen the Codex Vaticanus himself and relied on imperfect collations. The Codex Sinaiticus had not yet been discovered. The number of early witnesses he used was small, and in parts of the New Testament his text rested on only two or three manuscripts.⁶⁸⁶⁹⁷⁰

The value of Latin evidence for the Greek text was one of Lachmann’s central convictions. Like Bentley, he believed that the oldest Latin manuscripts preserved a text translated from Greek manuscripts older than any that survived, and that the agreement of the oldest Greek and the oldest Latin was a strong indication of the fourth-century text. This conviction gave the Old Latin and the Vulgate a prominent place in his apparatus and contributed to the development of Latin textual studies in the later nineteenth century.⁷¹⁷²⁷³

Reception

The reception of Lachmann’s New Testament was mixed. Theologians who regarded the received text as the word of God attacked him as a destroyer, and even scholars who accepted the need for revision objected to his mechanical method and to the narrow base of his evidence. Some objected to his decision to aim only at the fourth-century text, arguing that the task of the editor was to approach as near as possible to the original. Others criticised the obscurity of his explanations.⁷⁴⁷⁵

Yet the edition’s influence was profound. It showed that a critical text of the New Testament could be built on the ancient witnesses alone, and it made the abandonment of the received text a matter of practical possibility rather than theoretical desire. Samuel Prideaux Tregelles in England, working independently on similar principles, acknowledged Lachmann’s priority. Constantin von Tischendorf in Germany, who disagreed with him on many points, adopted his basic principle of following the oldest witnesses. Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, whose edition of 1881 became the foundation of modern critical texts, described Lachmann as the first editor to construct a text entirely from ancient evidence. Later historians of the subject came to regard 1831 as the beginning of a new period in the history of the New Testament text.⁷⁶⁷⁷

The modern editions of the Greek New Testament, published by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at Münster, are the descendants of this work. They are based on a far larger body of evidence, including papyri unknown in Lachmann’s time, and they use methods, such as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, that would have been unimaginable to him. But the principle that the text must be constructed from the earliest and best witnesses, without deference to the traditional printed form, is his.⁷⁸⁷⁹

The Order of the Gospels

In 1835 Lachmann published another article in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken, written in Latin, on the order of the narratives in the Synoptic Gospels. He observed that when Matthew and Luke agree with each other in the order of events, they also agree with Mark, and that when they depart from Mark’s order, they do not agree with each other. He concluded that Mark’s order represented the common order underlying all three. Lachmann himself did not argue that Matthew and Luke had copied Mark. He thought rather that all three depended on a common source, of which Mark preserved the order most faithfully.⁸⁰⁸¹

Lachmann’s observation became one of the foundations of the theory of Marcan priority, which holds that Mark was the first Gospel written and that Matthew and Luke used it as a source. The theory was developed by Christian Hermann Weisse and Christian Gottlob Wilke in 1838 and became the dominant view in German scholarship in the later nineteenth century, combined with the hypothesis of a second source of sayings used by Matthew and Luke. The argument from order, as it came to be called, was later criticised as a logical fallacy, since the same pattern of agreements could be explained by other hypotheses, and it is sometimes referred to as the Lachmann fallacy. That criticism applies more to later uses of his observation than to Lachmann himself, who drew a more cautious conclusion.⁸²⁸³

The Lachmann Method

The method that bears Lachmann’s name is the genealogical or stemmatic method of textual criticism. Its principles may be stated simply. The editor first collects all the manuscripts of a text and compares them. He then determines their relationships by identifying errors shared by groups of manuscripts, on the assumption that two manuscripts sharing a significant error are likely to descend from a common ancestor that contained it. The relationships are expressed in a family tree, or stemma. From the stemma, the editor reconstructs the lost archetype from which all surviving manuscripts descend. Finally, where the archetype is itself corrupt, the editor corrects it by conjecture. The process thus has two stages: recension, the reconstruction of the archetype from the evidence of the manuscripts, and emendation, the correction of the archetype.⁸⁴⁸⁵⁸⁶

The method was formulated most rigorously by Paul Maas in a short treatise of 1927, translated into English in 1958, which became the standard introduction to the subject. Maas stated the principles with almost mathematical precision and defined the conditions under which a stemma could be constructed. His treatise was the classic statement of the Lachmann method, though it went far beyond anything Lachmann himself wrote.⁸⁷

The method was immensely successful in classical philology, where it was applied to the texts of Greek and Latin authors throughout the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was also applied to medieval texts in many languages. Its great strength was that it replaced the arbitrary choice of readings by a systematic procedure that could be checked by others. Its weakness was that it assumed a simple pattern of transmission, in which each manuscript was copied from a single exemplar, and it could not easily deal with contamination, the mixture of readings from different sources that was common in heavily copied texts.⁸⁸⁸⁹

Timpanaro and the Genesis of the Method

In 1963 the Italian scholar Sebastiano Timpanaro published a short book, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, which transformed understanding of Lachmann’s place in the history of scholarship. Timpanaro showed that the elements of the method had been developed over a long period by many scholars. Bengel in the eighteenth century had proposed classifying New Testament manuscripts into families and had imagined a genealogical table of them. Friedrich August Wolf had applied similar ideas to Homer. Classical scholars such as Karl Gottlob Zumpt, Johan Nicolai Madvig and Friedrich Ritschl had used the concept of the archetype and reconstructed lost manuscripts before Lachmann’s Lucretius. The first published stemma, in the modern sense, was drawn not by Lachmann but by Carl Johan Schlyter, a Swedish scholar of medieval law, in 1827, and others followed before Lachmann.⁹⁰

Timpanaro also showed that Lachmann himself never drew a stemma, and that his methods in practice were less systematic than the later textbooks implied. In his New Testament work he did not attempt to construct a genealogy of the manuscripts at all, but followed a selection of the oldest witnesses on the basis of their age. His achievement, in Timpanaro’s view, lay in the rigour and authority with which he applied principles that were already in the air, and in the brilliance of particular demonstrations such as the Lucretius. The label Lachmann method was attached to the whole tradition only later. Timpanaro’s book, revised in several editions and translated into English by Glenn Most in 2005, is now the standard account of the subject.⁹¹⁹²

Criticism of the Method

The genealogical method has been criticised from several directions. The most famous attack came from the French medievalist Joseph Bédier, who in an article of 1928 on the manuscripts of a medieval French poem, the Lai de l’Ombre, observed that the stemmas drawn by editors of medieval texts almost always had two branches. He argued that this was not a fact about the manuscripts but a consequence of the method, which tended to divide the evidence into two groups in order to give the editor freedom to choose between them. Bédier proposed instead that editors should choose the best single manuscript and correct it only where it was clearly wrong. His critique led many editors of medieval texts to abandon the reconstruction of archetypes in favour of the edition of a single good manuscript.⁹³

In New Testament criticism, the method could not be applied in its classical form because of the vast number of manuscripts and the extent of contamination between them. Westcott and Hort used genealogical reasoning to classify the manuscripts into text types, but they could not construct a stemma of individual manuscripts. Modern scholars at Münster have developed the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, which uses computers to analyse the relationships between the texts of manuscripts at each variant passage. This approach is in some sense a descendant of Lachmann’s ideas, but it differs fundamentally from the classical stemma.⁹⁴⁹⁵⁹⁶

The study of Hebrew Bible manuscripts presents yet another case. The collations of Kennicott and de Rossi in the eighteenth century showed that the medieval Hebrew manuscripts differed little from one another in their consonantal text, and that genealogical classification was of limited use. The textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible developed along different lines, depending more on the ancient versions and, after 1947, on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The contrast illustrates the limits of any single method in the face of the varied histories of different texts.⁹⁷

Lachmann and the Idea of the Edition

Beyond his particular methods, Lachmann did much to establish the idea of the critical edition as a scholarly product distinct from the reading text. His editions presented the text he had established together with an apparatus recording the evidence, so that readers could see the basis of each decision and judge it for themselves. This combination of text and apparatus became the standard form of scholarly editions in all fields. Harald Weigel’s study of 1989 traced the development of this form in Lachmann’s work and showed how it grew out of his early experiments with classical and German texts.⁹⁸⁹⁹

Lachmann’s insistence on separating the evidence from the editor’s judgment reflected a broader nineteenth-century ideal of objectivity in historical scholarship. His contemporaries Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke sought to found history on the critical study of sources, and Lachmann sought to found the text on the critical study of manuscripts. The ideal was never fully realised, and later critics pointed out how much subjective judgment entered into the construction of stemmas and the choice of readings. But it gave textual scholarship a discipline and a public character that it had not had before.¹⁰⁰¹⁰¹

Lachmann’s influence was also transmitted through his teaching. At Berlin he directed the philological seminar, where students were trained in the reading of manuscripts and the criticism of texts. His pupils and younger colleagues included Moriz Haupt, who succeeded him in Berlin, and Martin Hertz, his biographer, as well as many scholars who later held chairs of classical and German philology in other universities. Through them the methods and standards he represented spread throughout the German universities and from there to the rest of Europe and to America, where German training became the model for graduate study in the later nineteenth century.¹⁰²¹⁰³

Assessment

Karl Lachmann was one of the most powerful scholarly minds of his generation. He worked in an extraordinary range of fields and in each he left editions and methods that shaped the work of his successors for a century or more. His Lucretius remains a classic demonstration of what the study of manuscripts can reveal. His editions of Walther and Wolfram founded the critical study of Middle High German. His Lessing was the first critical edition of a modern German writer. His observation on the order of the Gospels became a foundation of modern study of the Synoptic problem.¹⁰⁴¹⁰⁵

For the history of the Bible, his decisive contribution was the New Testament of 1831. By setting aside the Textus Receptus and building a text from the ancient witnesses alone, he did what Bentley had proposed a century earlier and what no editor since had dared to do. His text was limited by the evidence available and by his self-imposed aim of the fourth century, and it was soon superseded. But it changed the terms of the discussion. After Lachmann, the question was no longer whether the received text should be replaced, but how the earliest text could best be recovered.^106107108

Modern historians have rightly qualified the myth of Lachmann as the single inventor of the genealogical method. The method had many fathers, and Lachmann’s own practice was less systematic than the textbooks imply. Yet the attachment of his name to the method is not wholly unjust. It was his authority, his rigour and the brilliance of his demonstrations that persuaded the scholarly world that the history of a text could be reconstructed from its manuscripts and that the editor’s task was to follow that history wherever it led. In that sense he remains, as Timpanaro acknowledged, a central figure in the history of textual criticism.^109110111

Notes

1. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
2. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
3. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
4. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
6. Grokipedia, “Braunschweig”. ↩
7. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
8. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
9. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
10. Grokipedia, “University of Königsberg”. ↩
11. Grokipedia, “Humboldt University of Berlin”. ↩
12. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
13. Jacob Grimm, Rede auf Lachmann (Berlin: Dümmler, 1851). ↩
14. Grokipedia, “Jacob Grimm”. ↩
15. Grokipedia, “Prussian Academy of Sciences”. ↩
16. Jacob Grimm, Rede auf Lachmann (Berlin: Dümmler, 1851). ↩
17. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
18. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
19. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
20. Grokipedia, “Propertius”. ↩
21. Grokipedia, “Catullus”. ↩
22. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
23. Karl Lachmann, ed., T. Lucretii Cari De rerum natura libri sex, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1850). ↩
24. Grokipedia, “Lucretius”. ↩
25. Grokipedia, “De rerum natura”. ↩
26. Karl Lachmann, ed., T. Lucretii Cari De rerum natura libri sex, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1850). ↩
27. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
28. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
30. Harald Weigel, “Nur was du nie gesehn wird ewig dauern”: Carl Lachmann und die Entstehung der wissenschaftlichen Edition (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1989). ↩
31. Grokipedia, “Nibelungenlied”. ↩
32. Grokipedia, “Homeric Question”. ↩
33. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
34. Grokipedia, “Walther von der Vogelweide”. ↩
35. Grokipedia, “Wolfram von Eschenbach”. ↩
36. Grokipedia, “Parzival”. ↩
37. Grokipedia, “Hartmann von Aue”. ↩
38. Grokipedia, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing”. ↩
39. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
40. Grokipedia, “Jacob Grimm”. ↩
41. Grokipedia, “Brothers Grimm”. ↩
42. Jacob Grimm, Rede auf Lachmann (Berlin: Dümmler, 1851). ↩
43. Grokipedia, “Erasmus”. ↩
44. Grokipedia, “Textus Receptus”. ↩
45. See also “The Complutensian Polyglot” on this site. ↩
46. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
47. Caspar René Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1907). ↩
48. Grokipedia, “Textus Receptus”. ↩
49. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
50. Karl Lachmann, “Rechenschaft über seine Ausgabe des Neuen Testaments,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830): 817–45. ↩
51. See also “Richard Bentley’s Proposals for a New Testament” on this site. ↩
52. Karl Lachmann, ed., Novum Testamentum Graece (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1831). ↩
53. Karl Lachmann, “Rechenschaft über seine Ausgabe des Neuen Testaments,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830): 817–45. ↩
54. Karl Lachmann, “Rechenschaft über seine Ausgabe des Neuen Testaments,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830): 817–45. ↩
55. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
56. Grokipedia, “Codex Alexandrinus”. ↩
57. Grokipedia, “Codex Vaticanus”. ↩
58. Karl Lachmann, “Rechenschaft über seine Ausgabe des Neuen Testaments,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830): 817–45. ↩
59. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
60. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
61. Grokipedia, “Textus Receptus”. ↩
62. Karl Lachmann, “Rechenschaft über seine Ausgabe des Neuen Testaments,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830): 817–45. ↩
63. Karl Lachmann and Philipp Buttmann, eds., Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1842–50). ↩
64. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
65. Karl Lachmann and Philipp Buttmann, eds., Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1842–50). ↩
66. See also “The Codex Amiatinus” on this site. ↩
67. See also “The Latin Vulgate and Jerome’s Translation of the Bible” on this site. ↩
68. Karl Lachmann and Philipp Buttmann, eds., Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1842–50). ↩
69. See also “Codex Sinaiticus and the Sinai Manuscript Tradition” on this site. ↩
70. Caspar René Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1907). ↩
71. See also “The Vetus Latina and the First Latin Bibles” on this site. ↩
72. See also “The Latin Vulgate and Jerome’s Translation of the Bible” on this site. ↩
73. Karl Lachmann, “Rechenschaft über seine Ausgabe des Neuen Testaments,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830): 817–45. ↩
74. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
75. Caspar René Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1907). ↩
76. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
77. Caspar René Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1907). ↩
78. See also “New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room” on this site. ↩
79. See also “Computational Textual Criticism of the Gospel of Mark” on this site. ↩
80. Karl Lachmann, “De ordine narrationum in evangeliis synopticis,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 8 (1835): 570–90. ↩
81. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
82. Karl Lachmann, “De ordine narrationum in evangeliis synopticis,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 8 (1835): 570–90. ↩
83. See also “Computational Textual Criticism of the Gospel of Mark” on this site. ↩
84. Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, trans. Barbara Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). ↩
85. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩
86. Grokipedia, “Textual criticism”. ↩
87. Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, trans. Barbara Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). ↩
88. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩
89. E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). ↩
90. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
91. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
92. Harald Weigel, “Nur was du nie gesehn wird ewig dauern”: Carl Lachmann und die Entstehung der wissenschaftlichen Edition (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1989). ↩
93. Joseph Bédier, “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’Ombre: Réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes,” Romania 54 (1928): 161–96, 321–56. ↩
94. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
95. See also “Computational Textual Criticism of the Gospel of Mark” on this site. ↩
96. See also “New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room” on this site. ↩
97. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
98. Harald Weigel, “Nur was du nie gesehn wird ewig dauern”: Carl Lachmann und die Entstehung der wissenschaftlichen Edition (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1989). ↩
99. E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). ↩
100. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
101. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩
102. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
103. Grokipedia, “Humboldt University of Berlin”. ↩
104. Grokipedia, “Karl Lachmann”. ↩
105. Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851). ↩
106. Karl Lachmann, ed., Novum Testamentum Graece (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1831). ↩
107. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
108. Grokipedia, “Textus Receptus”. ↩
109. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). ↩
110. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). ↩
111. Grokipedia, “Textual criticism”. ↩