Francis Karl Alter

[1] His edition was different from those of Mill, Wettstein, and Griesbach, because he used only the manuscripts housed at the Imperial Library at Vienna.

[2] 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.

He also used readings from the Coptic Bohairic version (edited by David Wilkins in 1716), four Slavonic codices and one Old Latin codex (i).

[3] Marsh gave this opinion: 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.

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