Adolf Jülicher (26 January 1857 – 2 August 1938) was a German

scholar A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a termina ...

and

biblical The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) biblical languages ...

exegete Exegesis ( ; from the Greek , from , "to lead out") is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The term is traditionally applied to the interpretation of Biblical works. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretation ...

. Specifically, he was the Professor of Church History and New Testament Exegesis, at the University of Marburg. He was born in

Falkenberg Falkenberg is a locality and the seat of Falkenberg Municipality, Halland County, Sweden, with 27,813 inhabitants in 2019 (out of a municipal total of about 45,000). It is located at the mouth of river Ätran. The name consists of the Swedish ...

near

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

and died in Marburg. Jülicher differentiated between

Jesus Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Chris ...

' parables and allegories. His "one-point' analysis identified parables as having a single point of reference to the real world, rather than several, as in an allegory. His approach has not held up completely to later research, but it remains foundational to all investigations of parables and allegories.

Ideas

The Messianic Secret

Jülicher, along with Johannes Weiss, was instrumental in forging a consensus position on the new theory of " Messianic Secret" motif in the

Gospel of Mark The Gospel of Mark is the second of the four canonical Gospels and one of the three synoptic Gospels, synoptic Gospels. It tells of the ministry of Jesus from baptism of Jesus, his baptism by John the Baptist to his death, the Burial of Jesus, ...

. Before Jülicher, William Wrede had theorized that the historical

had not claimed to be the

Messiah In Abrahamic religions, a messiah or messias (; , ; , ; ) is a saviour or liberator of a group of people. The concepts of '' mashiach'', messianism, and of a Messianic Age originated in Judaism, and in the Hebrew Bible, in which a ''mashiach ...

, but that the early church had claimed that he was. According to this theory, the author of Mark's gospel had invented the idea of the "Messianic Secret", whereby Jesus attempted to hide his identity, and only revealed it to a very few insiders. Conservative interpreters of Mark's gospel, exemplified by William Sanday and

Albert Schweitzer Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer (; 14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was a German and French polymath from Alsace. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. As a Lutheran minister, ...

, believed instead that Mark's portrayal of Jesus was largely historical. Scholarship was strictly divided for a time, with neither side considering the other's views at all valid.John M. DePoe, ''The Messianic Secret In The Gospel of Mark: Historical Development and Value of Wrede's Theory'', http://www.johndepoe.com/Messianic_secret.pdf . Jülicher helped to bridge this divide by suggesting that while many of Wrede's suggestions were correct, other aspects of the Messianic Secret may have been historical. He called Mark's portrayal of Jesus as a taciturn Messiah "half-historical", and allowed for the analysis of some of Mark's presentation as an accurate depiction (while, at the same time, warning against an uncritical acceptance of these same statements). This helped pave the way to many post-Bultmann theories in the 1950s.

Parables

Jülicher also helped to change the understanding of the

parables of Jesus The parables of Jesus are found in the Synoptic Gospels and some of the non-canonical gospels. They form approximately one third of his recorded teachings. Christians place great emphasis on these parables, which they generally regard as the word ...

among scholars, emphasizing that there was usually a single point of comparison between the story and what it represented.Adolf Jülicher, ''Die Gleichnisreden Jesu'' (2 vols; Tübingen: Mohr iebeck 1888, 1899). He made a distinction between

parable A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whe ...

and

allegory As a List of narrative techniques, literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a wikt:narrative, narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a meaning with moral or political signi ...

, claiming that a true allegory was a literary type of which Jesus was not aware and did not use. All specific allegorical interpretations of the parables, whether by later church fathers or in the gospels themselves, must have come from sources other than the historical Jesus. In contrast, most

Medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...

scholars saw the parables as elaborate

allegories As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory throughou ...

, with each aspect representing something specific. John P. Meier, ''

A Marginal Jew John Paul Meier (August 8, 1942 – October 18, 2022) was an American biblical scholar and Priesthood in the Catholic Church, Roman Catholic priest. He was author of the series ''A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus'' (5 v.), six othe ...

'' Volume II, Doubleday, 1994. Later, scholars such as C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias built on Jülicher's work, emphasizing each parable's significance in regard to the "

Kingdom of God The concept of the kingship of God appears in all Abrahamic religions, where in some cases the terms kingdom of God and kingdom of Heaven are also used. The notion of God's kingship goes back to the Hebrew Bible, which refers to "his kingdom" ...

". Nearly all subsequent scholarship has followed Jülicher's ideas in this, although some have seen a slightly wider range of comparisons that he proposed.

Other Ideas

In his thorough ''Introduction to the New Testament'', composed in 1904, Jülicher wrote at length about many aspects of

Biblical criticism Modern Biblical criticism (as opposed to pre-Modern criticism) is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as ''historical-biblical c ...

. This influential work was still being discussed as contemporary thirty years later. In this text, he gives support to the two-source hypothesis, referring to Q as "a collection of the sayings of Jesus, composed without any exercise in conscious art." He held that parts were devised before Mark, and parts after Mark, with no standard version ever existing. Although scholarship on Q is deeply divided and still without consensus, most researchers today believe Q to have been organized, either according to a series of catchwords or as a primitive liturgy, and later editions acknowledge this fact.Alan K. Kirk, ''The Composition of the Sayings Source: Genre, Synchrony, and Wisdom Redaction in Q'' (BRILL, 1998). His ''Introduction'' was also of interest in its very late dating of the

Epistle of James The Epistle of James is a Catholic epistles, general epistle and one of the 21 epistles (didactic letters) in the New Testament. It was written originally in Koine Greek. The epistle aims to reach a wide Jewish audience. It survives in manusc ...

, arguing that it was a disorganized collection of ethical exhortations written after even I Clement. Most of the body of ''An Introduction'' succinctly described the latest biblical scholarship of its day.

Works in English

*''An introduction to the New Testament'' (translated by Janet Penrose Ward, 1904) *'' Encyclopaedia Biblica'' (1903) - contributor

References