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Julius Wellhausen

 

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Julius Wellhausen



 
 
Julius Wellhausen (May 17, 1844 - January 7, 1918), was a German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 biblical
Biblical studies

Biblical studies is the academic study of the Judeo-Christian Bible and related texts. For Christianity, the Bible traditionally comprises the New Testament and Old Testament, which together are sometimes called the "Scriptures." Judaism recognizes as scripture only the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Tanakh, an acronym for the Hebrew languag...
 scholar and orientalist.

He was born at Hamelin
Hamelin

Hamelin is a town on the river Weser in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Hamelin-Pyrmont and has a population of 58,872 ....
 in the Kingdom of Hanover
Kingdom of Hanover

The Kingdom of Hanover was established in October of 1814 by the Congress of Vienna, with the restoration of George III of the United Kingdom to his Hanoverian territories after the Napoleonic wars....
.

Having studied theology
Theology

Theology is the study of the existence or attributes of a deity or gods, or more generally the study of religion or spirituality. It is sometimes contrasted with religious studies: theology is understood as the study of religion from an internal perspective , and religious studies as the study of religion from an external perspective....
 at the University of Göttingen under Georg Heinrich August Ewald, he established himself there in 1870 as Privatdozent
Privatdozent

Private docent is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German language-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor....
 for Old Testament
Old Testament

In Western Christianity, the Old Testament refers to the books that form the first of the two-part Christianity Bible Biblical canon. These works correspond to the Hebrew Bible , with some variations and additions....
 history. In 1872 he was appointed professor ordinarius
Professor

The meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the Academic department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual....
 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
Philology

Philology, derived from the Greek language considers both morphology and Meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies....
 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
Biblical criticism

Biblical criticism is "the study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning and discriminating judgments about these writings." It asks when and where a particular text originated; how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced; what influences were at work in its production; what sources we...
 into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch
Hexateuch

The Hexateuch is the first six books of the Hebrew Bible . Some scholars propose that Joshua represents part of the northern Yahwist source , detached from JE document by the Deuteronomist and incorporated into the Deuteronomic history, with the books of Judges, Kings, and Samuel....
, 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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Julius Wellhausen (May 17, 1844 - January 7, 1918), was a German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
 biblical
Biblical studies

Biblical studies is the academic study of the Judeo-Christian Bible and related texts. For Christianity, the Bible traditionally comprises the New Testament and Old Testament, which together are sometimes called the "Scriptures." Judaism recognizes as scripture only the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Tanakh, an acronym for the Hebrew languag...
 scholar and orientalist.

He was born at Hamelin
Hamelin

Hamelin is a town on the river Weser in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Hamelin-Pyrmont and has a population of 58,872 ....
 in the Kingdom of Hanover
Kingdom of Hanover

The Kingdom of Hanover was established in October of 1814 by the Congress of Vienna, with the restoration of George III of the United Kingdom to his Hanoverian territories after the Napoleonic wars....
.

Having studied theology
Theology

Theology is the study of the existence or attributes of a deity or gods, or more generally the study of religion or spirituality. It is sometimes contrasted with religious studies: theology is understood as the study of religion from an internal perspective , and religious studies as the study of religion from an external perspective....
 at the University of Göttingen under Georg Heinrich August Ewald, he established himself there in 1870 as Privatdozent
Privatdozent

Private docent is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German language-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor....
 for Old Testament
Old Testament

In Western Christianity, the Old Testament refers to the books that form the first of the two-part Christianity Bible Biblical canon. These works correspond to the Hebrew Bible , with some variations and additions....
 history. In 1872 he was appointed professor ordinarius
Professor

The meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the Academic department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual....
 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
Philology

Philology, derived from the Greek language considers both morphology and Meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies....
 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
Biblical criticism

Biblical criticism is "the study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning and discriminating judgments about these writings." It asks when and where a particular text originated; how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced; what influences were at work in its production; what sources we...
 into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch
Hexateuch

The Hexateuch is the first six books of the Hebrew Bible . Some scholars propose that Joshua represents part of the northern Yahwist source , detached from JE document by the Deuteronomist and incorporated into the Deuteronomic history, with the books of Judges, Kings, and Samuel....
, 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
Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels

Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels is a book by German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen which formulated the documentary hypothesis . The book was extremely influential and can be compared for its impact in its field with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species....
 of 1883 (first published 1878 as Geschichte Israels), in which he advanced a definitive formulation of the Documentary hypothesis
Documentary hypothesis

The documentary hypothesis is the proposal that the first five books of the Old Testament represent a combination of documents from originally independent sources....
, arguing that the Torah
Torah

The term "Torah" , or Five Books of Moses or Pentateuch, refers to the entirety of Judaism's founding Halakha and ethical religious texts....
 or Pentateuch had its origins in a redaction of four originally independent texts dating from several centuries after the time of Moses
Moses

Moses is a Hebrew Bible Hebrews religious leader, lawgiver, prophet, to whom the Mosaic authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. Also called Moshe Rabbeinu in Hebrew , he is the most important prophet in Judaism, and also an important prophet of Christianity, Islam, the Bah?'? Faith, Rastafari movement, Chrislam and many ot...
, their traditional author
Mosaic authorship

Mosaic authorship is the traditional belief that the five books of the Torah or Pentateuch were authored by Moses sometime between 13th and 17th century BCE....
. 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
Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Mark is the second of the four canonical gospels in the New Testament and was probably the first of the three synoptic gospels to be written....
 over the hypothetical source known as Q
Q document

The Q document or Q is a postulated lost textual source for the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke. It is a theoretical collection of Jesus' sayings, written in Greek....
, 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
Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism refers to various ideologies based on a concept that competition among all individuals, groups, nations, or ideas drives social evolution in human societies....
 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
Kenneth Kitchen

Kenneth Anderson Kitchen is Personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England....
, 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
Priestly source

The Priestly Source is posited as the most recent of the four chief sources of the Torah, as postulated by the long-established "standard" Wellhausen formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis ....
 'P' as post-exilic
Babylonian captivity

The Babylonian captivity, or Babylonian exile, is the name typically given to the deportation and exile of the Jews of the ancient Kingdom of Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 586 BCE....
 cannot explain the demonstration that the Jubilee
Jubilee (Biblical)

The Jubilee year, is the year at the end of seven cycles of Sabbatical year s , and according to Bible regulations had a special impact on the ownership and management of land, in the territory of the kingdom of Israel and kingdom of Judah; there is some debate whether it was the 49th year , or whether it was the following 50th year....
 and Sabbatical
Shabbat

Shabbat or Shabbos , is the weekly day of rest in Judaism, symbolizing the seventh day in Genesis, after the six days of creation. Though it is commonly said to be the Saturday of each week, it is observed from sundown on Friday until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night....
 legislation, an essential part of the 'priestly' laws
Priestly Code

The Priestly Code is the name given, by academia, to the body of laws expressed in the Torah which do not form part of Deuteronomy, the Holiness Code, the Covenant Code, the Ritual Decalogue, or the Ethical Decalogue....
, 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
Ezekiel

This article is about the main speaker in the biblical Book of Ezekiel. For a summary and analysis of the book itself, see Book of Ezekiel.According to religious texts, Ezekiel was a prophet and priest in the Hebrew Bible who prophesied for 22 years sometime in the 6th century BC in the form of visions while exiled in Babylon, as recorded...
 and Leviticus
Leviticus

Leviticus is third book of the Torah , the name given in Judaism to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible .Leviticus contains laws and priestly rituals, but in a wider sense is about the working out of Covenant set out in Genesis and Exodus - what is seen in the Torah as the consequences of entering into a special relationship with God...
 shows that it is impossible that the Ezekiel passages could have been written before the parallel passages in Leviticus. Gordon Wenham
Gordon Wenham

Gordon Wenham is an Old Testament scholar and author of several books about the Bible.He read Theology at University of Cambridge, graduating in 1965 with distinction, and completed his PhD on Deuteronomy in 1970....
's analysis of the chiastic structure
Chiastic structure

Chiastic structure is a literary structure used in the Torah, the Bible, as well as in other texts. Concepts or ideas are placed in a special symmetric order or pattern in a chiastic structure to emphasize them....
 of Genesis 6:10 to 9:19—probably the finest example of chiasm
Chiasmus

In rhetoric, chiasmus is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted Parallelism ....
 in the entire Bible—has been presented as an argument in favor of the artistic unity of the Bible's Flood narrative
Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark is a large vessel featured in the mythology of Abrahamic religions. Narratives that include the Ark are found in the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an ....
, 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
Kenneth Kitchen

Kenneth Anderson Kitchen is Personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England....
 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
Karl Heinrich Graf

Karl Heinrich Graf , German people Old Testament scholar and orientalist, was born at Mulhausen in Alsace.He studied Biblical exegesis and oriental languages at the University of Strassburg under Edouard Guillaume Eug?ne Reuss, and, after holding various teaching posts, was made instructor in French language and Hebrew language at the Lande...
'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
    Friedrich Bleek

    Friedrich Bleek , Germany Biblical scholar, was at Ahrensb?k, in Holstein, a village near L?beck.His father sent him in his sixteenth year to the gymnasium at L?beck, where he became so much interested in ancient languages that he abandoned his idea of a legal career and resolved to devote himself to the study of theology....
    '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
New Testament

The New Testament is the name given to the second major division of the Christianity Bible, the first such division being the much longer Old 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

  • Origin and development of the Qur'an#Collaborative Effort
    Origin and development of the Qur'an

    The study of the origins and development of the Qur?an can be said to fall into two major schools of thought, the first being a traditionalist view and the later being a non-traditionalist view....


External links

  • at the Internet Archive
    Internet Archive

    The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive site of the World Wide Web....