PREFACE.

Among our students of the Oriental sacred letters, where the praiseworthy, ardent spirit manifesting itself—together with the happy progress of their sacred studies—and the requests frequently coinciding from students to me, that I might distribute to them copies of the Greek-Latin New Testament at a moderate price, have for a long time churned in my mind and provoked a result, and added a new stimulus to meet the requests of the students, and to apply my own hand to publishing a new recension of the Greek-Latin New Testament, such as I had long intended to initiate, had not excessive labor and other burdens of business given me a delay from perfecting the undertaking. On the occasion when I disseminated more than 900 copies of the Greek-Latin New Testament, by the study of D. P. A. Gratz, Tübingen 1821, partly for free and partly for a moderate price, among students of the sacred letters, many requests flowed to me from many well-lettered men, touching upon a new method of Greek-Latin New Testament recension; insofar as I thought it was very pleasing to grant these requests, I did not refuse to join them to my own desires, provided, however, that I did not essentially recede from the method of recension I had long intended.