Christian Frederick Matthaei

Christian Frederick Matthaei (4 March 1744 in Mücheln – 26 September 1811), a Thuringian, palaeographer, classical philologist, professor first at Wittenberg and then at Moscow.

He was rector of the University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1803 he was appointed to the Professorship of Classical Literature at Moscow University. In Moscow he found a large number of Greek manuscripts, both Biblical and Patristic, originally brought from Athos, quite uncollated, and almost entirely unknown in the West Europe. He collated seventy manuscripts of the New Testament. He also gave a big collection of biblical citations in the writings of Chrysostom. He issued at Riga in 12 parts, between 1782 and 1788, an edition of the Greek text with the Latin Vulgate. His printed text is of little value because it is based on manuscripts of recent date, but his apparatus is valuable.

Matthaei managed to steal a good many manuscripts of both the classics and the fathers. Some of these he kept in his own library, while others he sold to the libraries in Germany (Dresden) and Holland.

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