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

scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or research ...

and biblical exegete. Specifically, he was the Professor of Church History and New Testament Exegesis, at the

University of Marburg The Philipps University of Marburg (german: Philipps-Universität Marburg) was founded in 1527 by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, which makes it one of Germany's oldest universities and the oldest still operating Protestant university in the worl ...

. He was born in Falkenberg near

Berlin Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...

and died in

Marburg Marburg ( or ) is a university town in the German federal state (''Bundesland'') of Hesse, capital of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district (''Landkreis''). The town area spreads along the valley of the river Lahn and has a population of approx ...

. Jülicher differentiated between

Jesus Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religiou ...

' 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. Before Jülicher, William Wrede had theorized that the historical

had not claimed to be the Messiah, 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 an Alsatian-German/French polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schwei ...

, 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 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 and allegory, 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 late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...

scholars saw the parables as elaborate allegories, 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 Roman Catholic priest. He was author of the series ''A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus'' (5 v.), six other books, and more than 70 articles ...

'' 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". 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. 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 general epistle and one of the 21 epistles (didactic letters) in the New Testament. James 1:1 identifies the author as "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" who is writing to "the twelve tribes ...

, 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