Hermann Gunkel

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Hermann Gunkel

Hermann Gunkel (born May 23, 1862 in Springe , Kingdom of Hanover , † March 11, 1932 in Halle ) was a German Protestant theologian ( Old Testament scholar ).

Life

Hermann Gunkel was born as the son of the First Pastor in Springe. Karl Gunkel was his brother. After graduating from school he studied theology in Göttingen , then Gießen and finally Göttingen again . In Göttingen he attended lectures with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and seminars, especially with Albrecht Ritschl , against whom a circle around Albert Eichhorn (1856–1926) emerged, from which the so-called religious history school was later to emerge.

Gunkel received his doctorate and habilitated at the same time in 1888 in Göttingen for biblical theology and exegesis and then worked there as a private lecturer for the New Testament . In 1889 he had his habilitation as lecturer for exegesis of the Old Testament in Halle , where the Prussian ministerial director Friedrich Althoff had recommended him (without his motives being still recognizable today).

In 1895 Gunkel became an associate professor for the Old Testament in Berlin , but went on a few lecture tours and held holiday courses to improve his financial situation. Creation and Chaos was also published in the same year . An application for the position of elementary school teacher failed. It seems as if the Empress opposed Gunkel. In 1901 the first edition of the Genesis Commentary came on the market. "This commentary, the third edition published in 1910, is still considered a classic today - perhaps the best commentary of the 20th century on an Old Testament script."

It was not until 1907 that Gunkel was appointed full professor in Giessen. In 1913 the University of Oslo awarded him an honorary doctorate - in gratitude he dedicated his anthology of speeches and essays to the Collegium Academicum . In 1920, on the initiative of Undersecretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Carl Heinrich Becker , who was also responsible for Hugo Gressmann's appointment to Berlin, he returned to the theological faculty in Halle . Here he wrote his psalms commentary. For health reasons, Gunkel retired there in 1927 , but still held a teaching position for Old Testament literary history. The introduction to the Psalms was his last major project, which was supposed to be completed by Joachim Anbich .

By then, Gunkel had become an outstanding representative of the school of religious history. In addition to his scientific work on the Old and New Testament, he had developed the method of form and genre history in theology as a delimitation and extension to the method of literary history and, influenced by Wilhelm Wundt , researched the meaning of sagas and legends (especially in the Old Testament) and discovered the fairy tale as an Old Testament genre.

Nevertheless, a large part of his literary production was written in an educational effort for a wider audience. As editor, Gunkel accompanied the series of researches on the religion and literature of the Old and New Testaments (FRLANT) and the first two editions of the lexicon Religion in Past and Present (RGG).

Hermann Gunkel died on March 11, 1932 in Halle.

literature

  • Walter Baumgartner : Hermann Gunkel . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, year 1932, No. 489/499; reprinted in: Ders .: To the Old Testament and its environment . Brill, Leiden 1959, pp. 371-378.
  • Walter Baumgartner: On the 100th birthday of Hermann Gunkel. In: Congress Volume Bonn 1962 (= Vetus Testamentum. Supplements 9). Brill, Leiden 1963, pp. 1-18; reprinted in: Hermann Gunkel, Genesis , 6th edition. Reprint of the 3rd edition with detailed registers by Paul Schorlemmer, Göttingen 1964, S. CV-CXXII.
  • Konrad Hammann: Hermann Gunkel. A biography . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2014. ISBN 978-3-16-150446-4 .
  • Gerhard Wolfgang Ittel: Primitive Christianity and Foreign Religions in the Judgment of the School of Religious History . Inaugural dissertation, Erlangen 1956, pp. 29-33.
  • Werner Klatt: Hermann Gunkel. On his theology of the history of religion and the emergence of the form-historical method . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1969.
  • Hans-Joachim Kraus : History of the historical-critical research of the Old Testament . Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsverein, Neukirchen 1956, p. 309 ff.
  • Paul Michael Kurtz: Kaiser, Christ, and Canaan: The Religion of Israel in Protestant Germany, 1871-1918 . Research on the Old Testament I / 122. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018.
  • Hans-Peter Müller : Hermann Gunkel . In: Martin Greschat (ed.): Theologians of Protestantism in the 19th and 20th centuries . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1978, Vol. 2, pp. 241-255.
  • Konrad von Rabenau : Hermann Gunkel on rough paths to Halle . In: Evangelische Theologie 30 (1970), pp. 433-444.
  • Konrad von Rabenau:  Gunkel, Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 322 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hans Rollmann: Two letters from Hermann Gunkels to Adolf Jülicher on the method of religious history and formal history . In: Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 78 (1981), pp. 276–288.
  • Hans Schmidt : In Memoriam Hermann Gunkel . In: Theologische Blätter 11 (1932), pp. 97-103.
  • Rudolf Smend : German Old Testament Students in Three Centuries . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1989. ISBN 3-525-53584-8 . Pp. 160-172.
  • Ernst-Joachim Waschke : Hermann Gunkel, the founder of the religious-historical school and genre-historical research . In: Arno Sames (ed.): 500 years of theology in Wittenberg and Halle - 1502 to 2002 . Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2003. ISBN 3-374-02115-8 . Pp. 129-142.
  • Ernst-Joachim Waschke (Ed.): Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932). (= Biblical-Theological Studies 141). Neukirchener, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2013. ISBN 978-3-7887-2719-2
bibliography
  • Johannes Hempel in: Eucharisterion. Studies on the religion and literature of the Old and New Testaments. Festive offering for Hermann Gunkel on the occasion of his 60th birthday, May 23, 1922, offered by his students and friends . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1923, Bd. 2, 214-225 (until 1922).
  • Werner Klatt: Hermann Gunkel. On his theology of the history of religion and the emergence of the form-historical method . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1969, pp. 272 ​​ff. (1922–1969).
Specialist dictionaries

Web links

Wikisource: Hermann Gunkel  - Sources and full texts

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Reinhard Wonneberger: Gunkel, Hermann . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE). Vol. 14, pp. 297-300, here p. 297.
  2. ^ Bernhard Lang : «Reform of exegesis from Impressionism». In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 17, 2014, p. 67.
personal data
SURNAME Gunkel, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian (Old Testament scholar)
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Jump , Kingdom of Hanover
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1932
Place of death Hall