Hugo Gressmann

Hugo Gressmann (born March 27, 1877 in Mölln , † April 7, 1927 in Chicago ) was a German Protestant Old Testament scholar .

Life

Gressmann was the son of a station administrator. After childhood in Travemünde and school in Lübeck , he began to study theology in Greifswald , later in Göttingen and Marburg as well as the oriental languages ​​in the places mentioned and in Kiel . While studying in Greifswald was he a member of the 1896 Schwarzenburg Bund - connection Sedinia in Göttingen 1897 Schwarzenburg covenant connection Burschenschaft Germania and in Marburg 1898 Schwarzenburg fret interconnecting Frankonia . His teachers included Friedrich Giesebrecht, Julius Wellhausen , Rudolf Smend , Wilhelm Bousset , Otto Baumgarten and Mark Lidzbarski .

Gressmann won a prize assignment from the Göttingen faculty for the year 1897/98 on the then still young thesis of Bernhard Duhm about the acceptance of a Tritojesaja in Isa 56-66. The motto that preceded the work was “Be a babbler - and see, | All difficulties disappear. ”With reference to this, Wellhausen is said to have said:“ The one with the cheeky motto has judiciary ”, which was ultimately the decisive factor for Gressmann's work. The runner-up was August Marahrens , the later regional bishop of Hanover . With this thesis - almost without any references to the literature - he was awarded a doctorate from the Göttingen faculty in 1899. phil. PhD. The theological doctorate ( studies on Euseb's theophany , Leipzig: Hinrichs 1903) took place in Kiel in 1902, shortly thereafter the habilitation ( music and musical instruments in the Old Testament. ).

In 1906 Gressmann stayed at the German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies in the Holy Land under the direction of Gustaf Dalmans . He received an extraordinary professorship in 1907, succeeding Hermann Gunkel in Berlin, and in 1921 a full professorship. He had refused a call to Giessen. In Berlin, he finally took over the management of the Institutum Judaicum there and initiated a change of direction - away from the mission to the Jews and towards a purely scientific perspective. To this end, he recognized the need for Jewish research without prejudice and invited important Jewish scholars such as Ismar Elbogen , Julius Guttmann and Leo Baeck to give lectures. These contacts also resulted in an invitation to a visiting professorship at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in the spring of 1927. On further lecture tours in the USA, he fell ill with pneumonia and died in Chicago.

In his work, Gressmann was next to Gunkel one of the most outstanding representatives of the school of religious history , inspired not least by the church historian Albert Eichhorn . To this he also dedicated the work The Origin of Israelite-Jewish Eschatology , which Wellhausen is said to have described as a "rather silly book". In 1924, Gressmann took over the publication of the journal for Old Testament science from Karl Marti . Programmatically, this also meant a new start for the magazine. Instead of the previously dominant literary criticism, the methodology of the history of religion began to prevail here as well.

Grave in the Nikolassee cemetery

His grave is in the Nikolassee cemetery and bears the biblical quote "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" ( John 4:24).

Publications (selection)

• The origin of the Israelite-Jewish eschatology. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1905.
• Moses and His Time: A Commentary on the Moses sagas. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1913.
• The magic wand of Moses and the brazen serpent. In: Journal of the Association for Folklore 23, 1913, pp. 18–35.
• (Ed.) Ancient Near Eastern texts and images for the Old Testament 1909 Digitized I ; 2nd, completely redesigned and greatly increased edition Berlin and Leipzig 1926.
• The Messiah. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1929 (revision of the Israelite-Jewish eschatology, edited from the estate by Hans Schmidt)

literature

• GW Ittel: Primitive Christianity and Foreign Religions in the Judgment of the School of Religious History . Inaugural dissertation Erlangen, 1956, pp. 33-34.
• Kurt Galling :  Greßmann, Hugo Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 50 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Rudolf Smend : Hugo Gressmann , in: German Old Testament scholars in three centuries. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1989, pp. 173-181.
• Reinhard Wonneberger: Greßmann, Hugo . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie Vol. 14 (1985), Col. 212-213.
• Sascha Gebauer: Hugo Gressmann as a Palestine researcher . In: Journal of the German Palestine Association , 129, 2013, pp. 217–233.

Web links

Wikisource: Hugo Gressmann  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Hugo Gressmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Georg Freuling:  Greßmann, Hugo. In: Michaela Bauks, Klaus Koenen, Stefan Alkier (Eds.): The Scientific Biblical Lexicon on the Internet (WiBiLex), Stuttgart 2006 ff.

Remarks

1. ^ Hermann Goebel (ed.): Directory of members of the Schwarzburgbund. 8th edition, Frankfurt am Main 1930, p. 177 No. 72.
2. ↑ See Smend, Gressmann, 174.
3. ↑ See Smend, Gressmann, 177.