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 born in 1877 in Mölln the son of a station manager. After childhood in Travemünde and attending school in Lübeck, he began to study theology at Greifswald and later in Göttingen, Marburg, and of Oriental languages ​​at the places mentioned and in Kiel. During his studies in Greifswald he was in 1896 a member of the Black Castle covenant connection Sedinia in Göttingen 1897 Schwarzburg covenant connection fraternity Germania and Marburg in 1898, the Black Castle covenant connection Franconia. Among his teachers were Friedrich Giese Brecht, Julius Wellhausen, Rudolf Smend, Wilhelm Bousset, Otto Baumgarten and Mark Lidzbarski. A price object of Göttingen faculty for the 1897 /98 still young Bernhard Duhm's thesis on the adoption of Third Isaiah in Isaiah 56-66 won Gressmann. The work preceding motto was "Be a talker - and see | disappear all difficulties. " Referring thereto shall Wellhausen have expressed " The one with the cheeky slogan has Judiz. " What finally tipped the scales for Gress 's work. The runner-up was the later Hanoverian Bishop August Marahrens. With this work - with virtually no literature information - he was phil of the Göttingen faculty in 1899, Dr.. doctorate. The theological doctorate (studies to Eusebius Theophany Leipzig. Hinrichs 1903) took place in 1902 in Kiel, shortly after the Habilitation ( music and musical instruments in the Old Testament. ). In 1906 Gressmann stayed at the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in the Holy Land under the leadership Gustaf Dalman. He received an associate professorship in 1907 as the successor to Hermann Gunkel in Berlin, in 1921 a full professorship. A call for casting he had refused. In Berlin, he finally took Judaicum also the management of the local Institutum and initiated a change of direction - away from the mission to the Jews, towards the purely scientific view - a. To this end, he recognized without prejudice to the need for Jewish Research and invited important Jewish scholars like Ismar Elbogen, Julius Guttmann, and Leo Baeck to lectures. These contacts resulted in an invitation for a visiting professor at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in the spring of 1927. In the United States on further lecture tours, he contracted pneumonia and died in Chicago.

In his work Gressmann Gunkel was next to one of the most outstanding representatives of the History of Religions School, inspired not least by the church historian Albert Eichhorn. This he dedicated the work The Origin of Israelite- Jewish eschatology, which Wellhausen said to have referred to as a " pretty stupid audacious book". Gressmann took over in 1924 by Karl Marti the publication of the Journal of Old Testament scholarship. Programmatically, it meant also for the magazine a new start. Instead of the previously dominant literary-critical issues, here too the religious-historical methodology began to enforce.

Publications (selection)

• The origin of the Israelite- Jewish eschatology. Cambridge University Press, Göttingen 1905.
• Moses and His Time: A Commentary on the Moses Agen. Cambridge University Press, Göttingen 1913.
• (Ed.) Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Images for Old Testament 1909; Second, entirely revised and greatly enlarged edition of Berlin and Leipzig 1926.
• The Messiah. Cambridge University Press, Göttingen 1929. ( Revision of Israelite- Jewish eschatology, from the estate edited by Hans Schmidt)