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Julius Wellhausen
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Julius Wellhausen (May 17, 1844 - January 7, 1918), was a German biblical scholar and orientalist.
He was born at Hamelin in the Kingdom of Hanover.
Having studied theology at the University of Göttingen under Georg Heinrich August Ewald, he established himself there in 1870 as Privatdozent for Old Testament history. In 1872 he was appointed professor ordinarius of theology at the University of Greifswald. Resigning in 1882 for reasons of conscience, he became professor extraordinarius of oriental languages in the faculty of philology at Halle, was elected professor ordinarius at Marburg in 1885, and was transferred to Göttingen in 1892 where he stayed until his death.
Major works
Wellhausen was famous for his critical investigations into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch, the uncompromising deductive attitude he adopted in testing its problems bringing him into antagonism with the older school of biblical interpreters.
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Encyclopedia
Julius Wellhausen (May 17, 1844 - January 7, 1918), was a German biblical scholar and orientalist.
He was born at Hamelin in the Kingdom of Hanover.
Having studied theology at the University of Göttingen under Georg Heinrich August Ewald, he established himself there in 1870 as Privatdozent for Old Testament history. In 1872 he was appointed professor ordinarius of theology at the University of Greifswald. Resigning in 1882 for reasons of conscience, he became professor extraordinarius of oriental languages in the faculty of philology at Halle, was elected professor ordinarius at Marburg in 1885, and was transferred to Göttingen in 1892 where he stayed until his death.
Major works
Wellhausen was famous for his critical investigations into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch, the uncompromising deductive attitude he adopted in testing its problems bringing him into antagonism with the older school of biblical interpreters. He is perhaps most well-known for his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels of 1883 (first published 1878 as Geschichte Israels), in which he advanced a definitive formulation of the Documentary hypothesis, arguing that the Torah or Pentateuch had its origins in a redaction of four originally independent texts dating from several centuries after the time of Moses, their traditional author. Wellhausen's hypothesis remained the dominant paradigm for Pentateuchal studies among non-conservative scholars until the last quarter of the 20th century, when it began to be challenged by scholars who saw more and more hands at work in the Torah, ascribing them to periods even later than Wellhausen had proposed.
His work on the New Testament, in which he argued for the priority of the Gospel of Mark over the hypothetical source known as Q, was not so well received. (Das Evangelium Marci, übersetzt und erklärt, 1903.)
Evaluations of Wellhausen's methods in recent scholarship
Wellhausen's deductive method has come under criticism as inappropriate for the reconstruction of ancient history. Deduction is "inference in which the conclusion about particulars follows necessarily from general or universal premises." The "general or universal premises" behind Wellhausen's scholarship were the theories of social Darwinism and Hegel's dialectic, which Wellhausen used to craft an interpretation of Israel's history and the literary development of the Scriptures. Recent criticism has maintained that such a deductive approach to historical reconstruction is fundamentally unscientific, since the "science" of Wellhausen and those who followed his methods was not the science that brought about the scientific revolution of modern times, because the method of true science starts with observation, whereas these writers started with a theory and then used that theory to reconstruct history. They either trampled on or ignored such observations as were beginning to come from archaeological findings in the ancient Near East. Some archaeologists, such as Kenneth Kitchen, have criticized any approach that starts with presuppositions rather than the evidence gathered from archaeology and the interpretation of ancient written records. Other recent scholarship has stated that Wellhausen's dating of the hypothetical Priestly source 'P' as post-exilic cannot explain the demonstration that the Jubilee and Sabbatical legislation, an essential part of the 'priestly' laws, was known all the time that Israel was in its land, starting in 1406 BC. Wellhausen's statements that the priestly portions of the Pentateuch necessarily were composed after Ezekiel's writings has been challenged by Risa Levitt Kohn, John Bergsma, and other scholars who maintain that a comparison of similar passages in Ezekiel and Leviticus shows that it is impossible that the Ezekiel passages could have been written before the parallel passages in Leviticus. Gordon Wenham's analysis of the chiastic structure of Genesis 6:10 to 9:19—probably the finest example of chiasm in the entire Bible—has been presented as an argument in favor of the artistic unity of the Bible's Flood narrative, in contradiction to its division by Wellhausen (and others) into "J" and "P" sources. The ancient literary device of the chiasm was unknown to Wellhausen, as were the later archaeological findings from Ugarit and Egypt that showed that inscriptions from the ancient world used, in the same original document, more than one name for their deity. The Quran, which unquestionably had but one author, also uses different names for God. Therefore the basic assumption of Wellhausen that different names for God necessarily imply different source documents can no longer be held. Kenneth Kitchen has stated that it is not only these and other post-Wellhausen findings by archaeologists and historians that have refuted Wellhausen's ideas, but even such discoveries from Egypt and Assyria that were being made in Wellhausen's day were ignored by him because they conflicted with his deductive (presupposition-based) approach to history.
Despite such criticisms, the deductive method espoused by Wellhausen continues to find support among a few scholars. Examples using Wellhausen's deductive approach are the fairly recent studies of the history of Israel's divided kingdom period by Christine Tetley and Jeremy Hughes. Hughes in particular (ibid., p. 2) recognizes his debt to the earlier scholarship of Wellhausen.
It has been alleged that Wellhausen's scholarship had an antisemitic (and anti-Catholic) component. Wellhausen openly expressed his hostility to the legal (i.e., Jewish) and priestly (i.e., Catholic) portions of the Torah. On learning of Karl Heinrich Graf's hypothesis of the Mosaical law as a late addition to the original spiritual religion of the prophets, Wellhausen was ready to accept Graf's hypothesis "almost before I heard his reasons."
The best known of his works are:
- De gentibus et familiis Judaeis (Göttingen, 1870)
- Der Text der Bücher Samuelis untersucht (Göttingen, 1871)
- Die Phariseer und Sadducäer (Greifswald, 1874)
- Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1882; Eng. trans., 1885; 5th German edition, 1899; first published in 1878 as Geschichte Israels)
- Muhammed in Medina (Berlin, 1882)
- Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments (1876/77, 3rd ed. 1899)
- Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (1894, 4th ed. 1901)
- Reste arabischen Heidentums (1897)
- Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902)
- Skizzen und Vorarbeiten (1884-1899)
- new and revised editions of Friedrich Bleek's Einleitung in das Alte Testament (4-6, 1878-1893).
In 1906 appeared Die christliche Religion, mit Einschluss der israelitisch-jüdischen Religion, in collaboration with A Jülicher, Adolf Harnack and others. He also did useful and interesting work as a New Testament commentator. He published Das Evangelium Marci, übersetzt und erklärt in 1903. Das Evangelium Matthäi and Das Evangelium Lucae in 1904 and Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien in 1905.
See also
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