Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga

Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga (1874–1957)

Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga (born June 27, 1874 in 's-Gravenhage , † May 26, 1957 in Haarlem ) was a Dutch Reformed theologian , historical-critical New Testament scholar , philosopher and historian . He was a representative of the Dutch radical criticism .

Life

Van Eysinga was the son of Marie Henri Philip van den Bergh and Ida Catharina Wilhelmina Roorda van Eysinga and brother of the philosophical writer and religious socialist Henri Wilhelm Philippus Elize. Since 1906 he was married to the Dutch suffragette Jeannette Elias.

After attending high school in Sneek , van Eysinga studied Protestant theology at the University of Leiden in 1893 . He was u. a. Student of the Hegel specialist GJPJ Bolland and the New Testament scholar Willem Christiaan van Manen, with whom he received his doctorate on January 25, 1901 on the subject of Indian invloeden op oude christelijke verhalen . The German edition appeared in 1904 under the title: Indian Influences on Evangelical Tales . His teachers represented the so-called Dutch radical criticism and disputed the historicity of Jesus and / or the authenticity of all Pauline letters . Van Eysinga continued her work and became the most important representative of this school.

After completing his studies, he worked from 1901 to 1911 in Oss as the parish pastor of the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk , then to 1915 at the parish in Helmond and from 1915 to 1936 in Santpoort . He was temporarily head of the Vrije Gemeente in the Weteringschans, in Amsterdam (today " Paradiso "). He took the view that one could make the Christian message understandable even without the acceptance of a historical Jesus by means of a purely symbolic method of interpretation.

Since 1904 van Eysinga was a private lecturer at the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht . From 1936 to 1944 he was the successor to Daniel Plooy (1877-1935) holder of the chair for the New Testament at the University of Amsterdam . He continued his work in Utrecht after his retirement until his death.

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Critique of the Gospels

In his exegetical writings van Eysinga criticizes the "deduction method" of the liberal Jesus researchers : In order to save the historicity of Jesus, the parts of the Gospels that cannot be explained "naturally" (e.g. virgin birth , natural and healing miracles , etc.) are arbitrarily removed. A historical core of the Gospels is assumed without reflection and their purely dogmatic character is misunderstood. The Jesus of the Gospels is not a mythical history, but a historicized myth . Its "historicity" only serves as an accessory for church dogma , but is not a historical fact. It was not the carpenter's son Jesus who stood at the beginning of Christianity, but the myth of a savior, who was sent to earth by the highest God, who died and rose again.

According to van Eysinga, this redemption myth originated in Alexandria and formed the basis of the oldest Gospel according to Mark . that have not yet contained any historical information. The historicization process did not begin until 150 in Rome. There the Gnostic Savior was transformed into a Jewish Messiah and given pseudo-historical attributes. The urban Roman Jewish Christianity is said to have been primarily responsible for this, which the Old Testament introduced and thus established the basic lines of the life story of Jesus, from Bethlehem to Golgata.

In the end, the Old Testament and the Stoic philosophy would have created that image of the man Jesus, which the Church needed to defend itself against the docetism of Gnosis. At the same time she remained attractive for the mass of believers, who knew more about how to begin with a human savior than with a purely metaphysical being.

Critique of Paul's letters

With his criticism of the Pauline letters, van Eysinga continues the theses of van Manen and the Amsterdam theologian AD Loman. These in turn followed the forerunners Edward Evanson (1731–1805) and Bruno Bauer , who for similar reasons had already declared all of Paul's letters to be false. Van Eysinga devoted himself to the life and work of Bauer in numerous writings.

Like his teachers, he referred to a lack of external evidence ( argumenta externa ) for the Pauline letters in the first century, their non-mention in the Acts of the Apostles and in Justin (around 150) and contradictions to the biographical information in the Acts of the Apostles about Paul. Like the Tübingen school , he rejected the 1st letter of Clement and the letters of Ignatius as spurious. He declared the Pauline letters to be pseudepigraphies from the environment of the heretic Marcion, who had been excluded from the church : This is shown above all by the Marcionite text of the letters, which can be reconstructed from the testimony of the Church Father. As a rule, it contains older and more original readings than the canonical version or the Textus receptus. For van Eysinga, "Paul" is a symbol of Marcionitism, who with the help of pseudepigraphic scripts projected his theology and teaching into the apostolic past of the first century in order to assert himself in the theological struggles of the second century. Later, the proto-Orthodox church appropriated the literary legacy of Marcionitism and revised it in its spirit.

reception

The Dutch radical criticism ended with van Eysinga . Only individuals like the American theologians Darrell Doughty and Robert M. Price and in Germany Hermann Detering have taken up his theses.

The inauthenticity of all Paul’s letters and the non-historicity of Jesus are then as now rejected by NT research. Among van Eysinga's early critics were the theologians Hans Windisch , Carl Clemen , Gilles Quispel and his student LG Hartdorff.

Publications

• Godsdienstwetenschappelijken Studiën (= Religious Studies)
• Articles and reviews in Nieuw Theologischer Tijdschrift
• Indian influences on evangelical narratives. 2nd edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1909.
• The Dutch radical critique of the New Testament, its history and significance for the understanding of the emergence of Christianity. Diederichs, Jena 1912.
• Voorchristeliik Christendom , 1918
• De wereld van het Nieuwe Testament , 1929
• Commentary on Matthew, 1947
• Hermann Detering, Frans-Joris Fabri (Ed.): Is Jesus alive? - or did he just live? - Early Christian Studies , BoD, Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8391-6701-4

literature

• Hermann Detering : Paul’s Letters without Paul? The Pauline letters in the Dutch radical criticism. Peter Lang, Berlin 1991 (Diss.), ISBN 3-631-44787-6 .

Web links

• Article: Bergh van Eysinga, Gustaaf Adolf van den (1874-1957) , in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland (Dutch)
• radikalkritik.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Is Jesus alive - or did he just live? .
2. ↑ From an unpublished biography of Bruno Bauer: Bruno Bauer in Bonn 1839–1842. Milan 1963; Bruno Bauer's afscheid van de theology. In: GA van den Bergh van Eysinga (ed.): Godsdienstwetenschappelijke Studiën. II. Haarlem 1947, pp. 3-45; Hoe Bruno Bauer van Rechts-Hegeliaan dead Radicaal has become. In: Godsdienstwetenschappelijke Studiën. XVII. Haarlem 1955, pp. 3-28.
3. ↑ Summary mainly on the basis of: Marcion als getuige voor een voorkatholiek christendom, in: GA van den Bergh van Eysinga (ed.), Godsdienstwetenschappelijke Studiën XVIII, Haarlem 1955,5-39 (part I.), XIV, Haarlem 1956 , 3–28 (Part II.)
4. ↑ LG Hart Dorff: History of historisering? Een onderzoek naar de visie van GA van den Bergh van Eysinga op de wordingsgeschiedenis van het Christendom, voorzien van bibliografie , Amsterdam 1950.