Kurt Rudolph

Kurt Rudolph (born April 3, 1929 in Dresden ; † May 13, 2020 ) was a German religious scholar who dealt in particular with Gnosis and Manichaeism .

Life

Kurt Rudolph's high school attendance was interrupted by the Second World War. He then completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter until 1946; He passed his Abitur in 1948. He then began studying religious history , Protestant theology and Semitic studies at the University of Greifswald , and from 1950 at the University of Leipzig . During his studies, Rudolph was an assistant at the Department of Religious History from 1952 to 1953, and after his theological state examination in 1953, he became a research assistant at the Religious History Institute of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig. During this time he worked on two doctorates in parallelTheology and history of religion. From 1954 Rudolph was a lecturer in the history of religion. The theological doctorate took place in 1956 with a thesis on The Mandaeans I - The Mandaean Problem , followed in April 1957 the religious-historical doctorate, which was based directly on the theological dissertation with the thesis The Mandaeans II - The Cult . Reviewers were Johannes Leipoldt and Walter Baetke . In 1960 he became a senior research assistant. In May 1961 the habilitation in the history of religion and comparative religious studies followed with a thesis on theogony, cosmogony and anthropogony in the Mandaean writings. A literary-critical and tradition-historical investigation , experts were besides Leipoldt and Baetke Siegfried Morenz and Ernst Werner .

In June 1961, Rudolph became a lecturer in the history of religion and comparative religious studies, and in September he became a professor with a teaching position at the University of Leipzig. In 1974 he became a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences . In 1984 he did not return to the GDR from a trip to the USA, whereupon he was fired and he was expelled from the Saxon Academy. Between 1984 and 1986, Rudolph taught as visiting professor at the University of Chicago and at the University of California, Santa Barbara . In Germany, Rudolph became a professor at the University of Marburg in 1986 until he retired in 1994. In 1991 he became a corresponding member of the Saxon Academy again. After his retirement in 1994, Kurt Rudolph received honorary doctorates from Aarhus and Leipzig ; before that he received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1983 .

During his work at the religious studies institutes of the universities in Leipzig, Chicago and Marburg, he gained an international reputation as a connoisseur of Gnosis and Manichaeism . In addition, he was also concerned with Islam and methodological questions in religious studies . The Koran translation by Max Henning , published by Reclam in Leipzig, was enriched by Kurt Rudoph with an introduction, text review, notes and registers.

In religious studies, Rudolph was primarily concerned with establishing a research on religion that was independent of theology. Rudolph emphasized that religious studies were rational science and therefore committed to methodical atheism . This thesis, initially fiercely contested in German-speaking religious studies, with which Rudolph opposed the phenomenology of religion that dominated until the 1960s , is now largely consensus.

Fonts (selection)

• The Mandaeans I - The Mandaeans Problem Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1960, DNB 454219946 .
• The Mandaeans II - The Cult Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1961, DNB 454219954 .
• The history of religion at Leipzig University and the development of religious studies. A contribution to the history of science and the problem of religious studies . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1962.
• Theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in the Mandaean scriptures . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1965, ISBN 3-525-53182-6 .
• with Martin Krause (ed.): Coptic and Mandaean sources (= Die Gnosis. Volume 2). Artemis-Verlag, Zurich / Stuttgart 1971
  • = Coptic and Mandaean sources (= The Gnosis. Volume 2). Artemis-Verlag, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-7608-1106-X .
  • = Coptic and Mandaean sources (= The Gnosis. Volume 2). Patmos, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 349169146X .
• Gnosis - the essence and history of a religion of late antiquity . Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1977, ISBN 3-525-52154-5 ( digitized version ); 3rd edition Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1990, ISBN 3-8252-1577-6 .
• Gnosis and Religious History of Late Antiquity . Brill, Leiden 1997, ISBN 90-04-10625-1 (collected articles).

literature

• Hans Rollmann: Gnosis and Logos. The Contribution of Kurt Rudolph to the Study of Religion . In: Religious Studies Review 8, 1982, pp. 350-352.
• Gerald Wiemers: Kurt Rudolph and the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig . In: Holger Preißler, Hubert Seiwert, Hubert (eds.): Gnosis research and history of religion. Festschrift for Kurt Rudolph on his 65th birthday . Marburg 1994, pp. 35-40.
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. KG Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , pp. 516f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Rudolph in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig , also as a PDF
• Tabular CV

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mandaean Library - المكتبة المندائية. Retrieved May 17, 2020 .