Curt Peters

This article is about the orientalist Curt Peters. For other people see Kurt Peters and Kurd Peters .

Curt Peters (born April 26, 1905 in Goch , † December 7, 1943 near Scheveningen ) was a German Catholic theologian and orientalist .

After graduating from high school in Attendorn, Curt Christian Heinrich Peters attended the Archbishop's Academy in Paderborn and was ordained a deacon there in 1930 , although he waived the planned priestly ordination. From 1931 to 1934 he studied Oriental Studies and Classical Philology at the University of Münster , where he received his doctorate in 1933 under Anton Baumstark with a thesis on Peschitta and Targumim of the Pentateuch (graduation ceremony: October 30, 1935). Subsequently, he mainly occupied himself with the research of the Diatessaron of Tatian , in which he obtained important results. Most recently he worked on Arabic translations of the Bible.

Around 1935 Peters worked with Paul Kahle at the Oriental Seminary in Bonn, where Anton Baumstark had also retired. Peters was sentenced in Bonn in 1937 in a morality trial and the University of Münster then revoked his doctorate. By 1939 at the latest, Peters was scientifically active in Leiden in the Netherlands and near Utrecht. After the German attack on the Netherlands in 1940, he withdrew from service in the Wehrmacht . An attempt to escape to England failed in 1942. Peters was arrested, sentenced to death and shot as a deserter on December 7, 1943 (not: 1944) in the Waalsdorper Senke near Scheveningen . Those executed there were buried in the Nationaal Ereveld Loenen near Apeldoorn in 1949, but Peters' body was not identified. In Germany, Peter's convictions have now been overturned by law.

Major works

• Peschittha and Targumim of the Pentateuch: their relationships examined in the context of their deviations from the Masoretic text . Diss. Phil. Münster 1933 (printed in: Le Muséon 48. 1935, 1-54).
• Tatian's Diatesseron. Its tradition and its aftermath in the Orient and Occident as well as the current state of its research (Orientalia Christiana Analecta 123). Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum , Roma 1939.
• From Arabic Gospel texts in manuscripts in the Leiden University Library . In: Acta Orientalia 18 (1940) 124-137.
• The meaning of the old Italian gospel harmonies in the Venetian and Tuscan dialect , in: Romanische Forschungen 56 (1942) 181–192.
• The origin of the Greek translation of the Diatesseron and its reverberation in Byzantine church poetry , in: Orientalia Christiana Periodica 8 (1942) 468–476
• Johannan b. Serapion , in: Muséon 55 (1942) 139-142
• Basic remarks on the question of the Arabic Bible texts . In: Rivista degli Studi orientali 20 (1942) 129-143.

literature

• William Lawrence Petersen: Tatian's Diatessaron. Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Sholarship . Brill, Leiden u. a. 1994, ISBN 90-04-09469-5 , pp. 251-256.
• Heinzgerd Brakmann: Baumstark and Syzygoi. Eastern liturgical studies at the University of Bonn . In: Albert Gerhards - Tinatin Chronz (ed.): Orientation over the whole . LIT. Berlin 2015, 99–144, esp. 135f with note 149f.
• Otto Gertzen: In memory of Curt Peters . In: "Everything is so completely destroyed in one fell swoop". Victims of National Socialism at the University of Münster . Edited by Sabine Happ - Veronika Jüttemann. Aschendorff, Münster 2018, 796–804.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gertzen: In memory of Curt Peters .
2. ↑ Oranjehotel: Dodenboeken with photo of the scholar [1]