Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | September/2020 |
Spalte: | 803–806 |
Kategorie: | Neues Testament |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Breytenbach, Cilliers, u. Christoph Markschies [Hrsg.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | Adolf Deissmann: Ein (zu Unrecht) fast vergessener Theologe und Philologe. |
Verlag: | Leiden u. a.: Brill 2019. XIX, 303 S. = Novum Testamentum. Supplements, 174. Geb. EUR 118,00. ISBN 978-90-04-39018-8. |
Rezensent: | James Carleton Paget |
Adolf Deissmann (1866–1937) taught New Testament at the universities of Heidelberg and (from 1908) Berlin, and he was Rector of the latter between 1930 and 1931. His scholarly reputation, contested during his own lifetime, was built mainly upon his work on Paul and his insistence that a key to interpreting the latter lay in realiz-ing that the language in which his letters were written had its origins in the world of which he was a part, and was best understood through comparison with non-literary Greek as this was found in papyri, inscriptions and ostraka broadly contemporaneous with him. These archaeological artefacts better reflected the essentially lower class world out of which Paul and his communities came. In Deissmann’s hands Paul emerged less as a theologian or intellectual but more a man of religion, a mystic of kinds. Many of his sig-nificant thoughts are found in his work of 1908, Licht vom Osten, which was consciously a more popularizing book, and whose success is reflected in the fact that it was translated into English in 1910. His convictions about the significance of the language of the New Testament for recreating its religious and social ethos meant that from an early stage in his career he had intended to write a lexicon of the New Testament but this project was never realized. Deissmann was also an ecumenist, particularly in the period fol-lowing World War One and became friends with clerics and schol-ars, who believed that a non-confessional form of Christianity could bring about international harmony.
It is the conviction of the editors of the volume under review that Deissmann has undeservedly become a forgotten figure in the history of theology and it is their aim to rectify this. To this effect the essays are concerned with the different facets of Deissmann’s life, both as scholar and as ecumenist and university administrator. Appropriately perhaps the volume opens with a piece on Deissmann’s so-called Wochenbriefe, produced between the beginning of the First World War and 1921, and concerned to promote international understanding. Albrecht Gerber has interesting remarks on the sources for these sometimes quite long communications and on what they show about Deissmann’s development from a German nationalist of sorts to an internationalist/ecumenical thinker. This internationalism was to be taken further after the war through Deissmann’s relationship with the Bishop of Uppsala, Nathan Söderblom, helpfully discussed by Dietz Lange, the latter’s biographer. Lange points up the broad similarities between the two in theological terms but plays up their differences, especially in their approaches to war. At the outbreak of the First World War, Söderblom emerges as a strong opponent of war, Deissmann as a nationalist of strong convictions (these are played up to a greater extent by Lange than by Gerber), who came to change his views gradually and in complex ways. Two other essays concern themselves with what one might term the non-theological side of Deissmann, One, by Karl Dienst, concerns his origins in Nassau and his work there as a parish priest, a time which he was to find helpful from a scholarly point of view as he found Pauline mysticism and the ethos of early Christianity brought to life by his rural parish-ioners. The second is the longest piece in the volume by Christoph Markschies on Deissmann’s time as Rector of the University of Berlin, which is richly furnished with archival as well as published evidence. In many ways this was not a happy time for Deissmann, in part because his election coincided with a perfervid period in German politics (the election of 1930 had seen considerable rises in vote share for the National Socialists and the Communists, and came in the midst of a period of considerable economic difficulty), which was inevitably reflected in the university’s life, where fre quent outbursts of violence between rival political groups re-gularly occurred. Deissmann, who supported the Weimar Republic, though not with enthusiasm, seemed ill equipped to deal with these difficulties; and Markschies records how this was recognized at the time, with some justification. The essay is not overwhelmingly critical, however, and among other things, it gives the reader a thoughtful insight into both the life of a Rector and the atmosphere of the time.
The five remaining essays concern themselves with aspects of Deissmann’s scholarly work. David du Toit gives a detailed account of his contribution to lexicography, and discusses his attempts to produce a lexicon of the New Testament, which persisted until the 1920s, when Bauer’s well-known Theologisches Wörterbuch ap-peared and to some extent removed the need for Deissmann’s work. Amongst many other claims in the essay, du Toit argues that Bauer owed Deissmann a good deal; and it is perhaps ironic that the final published piece Deissmann wrote was a review of the fourth edition of Bauer. Greg Horsley examines Deissmann’s work as a philologist, showing up the evolution of his thought through a number of publications, including his work on the Septuagint, con-tained within Bibelstudien of 1895 and the Septuaginta-Papyri of 1905. In the process he makes helpful observations on Deissmann’s relationship with James Moulton of Manchester University, shows up the place of Licht vom Osten in his thought and above all else notes the importance of the lexicon, which runs like a thread through much of his scholarly life, making its non-appearance somewhat tragic. Barbara Aland writes about Deissmann’s contribution to Pauline studies. His emphasis on Paul’s mysticism, already there in his work of 1892 on the ›en Christo‹ formula in Paul’s letters, influenced Albert Schweitzer, and in its insistence on the real nature of participation anticipates aspects of E. P. Sanders’ work. His view that Paul was a hero of religion made him skeptical of the formulations of theologies of Paul. Deissmann’s developed sense of the connections between Jesus and Paul contrasted with the work of Wrede and Bousset, who in various ways emphasized the dif-ference between Jesus and Paul. Deissmann’s sense that Paul’s mystical theology arose from forces inherent within the Christian movement, arising from Christ’s resurrection, meant that he never appealed to the mystery religions or the pagan cult to explain aspects of Pauline theology, distinguishing him in particular from Bousset but from other members of the ›Religionsgeschichtliche Schule‹ as well. Cilliers Breytenbach looks more generally at Deissmann’s contribution to the history of early Christianity. His work as one of the first religious and cultural historians of Christian origins means that his legacy is quite considerable, even if now un-derestimated, in part because of the complex fate of his pupils. The final essay by Alexander Weiß takes up a central thesis of Deissmann, namely the view that Christianity was a movement of the lower classes. He shows how this differed from other views of this kind which were promulgated at the time, for instance, Karl Kautsky’s Der Ursprung des Christentums, where early Christians were seen as working class revolutionaries. Weiß shows how by the time of the second edition of his book on Paul, dating from 1925, Deissmann had modified his views but not the extent that his central conviction had in any way disappeared.
Deissmann emerges from this volume as a multi-faceted human being, whose commitment to scholarship did not act as a buffer to more wide-ranging activity. Whether the authors of this volume have achieved one of the aims referred to by its editors, namely the quashing of a narrative of Deissmann’s life as one marked by theological scholarship up to the First World War and then by ecumenical activities thereafter, is a question, and it is interesting that this view of Deismman prevailed even in his own time (Markschies reports a conversation that he had with Wilhelm Schneemelcher in which the latter stated that he did not attend Deissmann’s inaugural address as Rector precisely because he saw the latter as having less interest in the New Testament). Certainly his major publications precede 1914, even if work on the never-to-appear lexicon continued and a new edition of the book on Paul appeared in 1925 (rather negatively reviewed by Rudolph Bultmann, interestingly). That work was, of course, significant, as this volume amply demonstrates, though it was not bereft of critics, in particular as this related to lexicography (a number of contributors highlight a very negative review of the book on Paul of 1911 by Eduard Schwartz); and Deissmann himself was not universally ad-mired, a fact made plain in his nickname ›Adolfus Mysticus‹. The fact that knowledge of Deissmann’s work faded so quickly after his death is accounted for in various ways in the volume. Breytenbach, for instance, argues that it is partially accounted for by the fate of Deissmann’s pupils, whose work was interrupted by the Second World War, and who either failed to exercise any influence through death (Dibelius), ill health (K.-L. Schmidt), or association with the Nazi Party (Georg Bertram). The dominance of Bultmann’s pupils in this period made Deissmann seem more irrelevant. Horsley suggests that part of the problem lay in Deissmann’s specialisation in a number of fields and »no one of these contexts provided a sufficiently deep legacy to ensure that the memory of him would live on.« Whatever the reason, this volume makes plain why Deissmann merits ongoing study. This is not simply, however, because he contributed to various areas of New Testament research which con-tinue to attract attention; but because his life, along a number his-torical planes, spanned a period of real interest in the history of German theology and culture, which in distinctive ways he reflects.