Francis Karl Alter

Francis Karl Alter (1749–1804), a Jesuit, born in Silesia, and professor of Greek at Vienna, was an editor of the Greek text of the New Testament. His edition was different from those of Mill, Wettstein, and Griesbach, because he used only the manuscripts housed at the Imperial Library at Vienna. It was the first edition of the Greek New Testament that contained evidence from Slavic manuscripts themselves, as opposed to Christian Frederick Matthaei's editions (1803-7), also claimed (by Bruce Metzger) to be the first to contain evidence from the Slavic version of the New Testament.

Marsh gave this opinion: "The text of this edition is neither the common text nor a revision of it, but a mere copy from a single manuscript, and that not a very ancient one".

It was not the Textus Receptus, and it was not an important edition for textual criticism, but Alter's comparison of Slavic and Greek texts did provide material for future textual criticism.

Alter also edited Homer's Iliad (1789) and Odyssey (1794) and wrote an essay on Georgian literature (1798).

Selected works