Tischendorf was an inordinately ardent scholar who saw his work on the text of the New Testament as a sacred, divinely ordained task. As he once wrote his fiancée, while still in his early twenties: “I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament.”20 This sacred task he sought to fulfill by locating every manuscript tucked away in every library and monastery that he could find.
My kind of guy.
