Bengel

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Westcott & Hort

THE NETWORKS OF WESTCOTT & HORT

Rudolph Kittel (his own Words) Available by Ebook

J.A. BENGEL

BENGEL, JOHANN ALBRECHT (1687—1752), officially a Lutheran divine and scholar, who used his influence and books to undermine Luther, Orthodox Christianity and the Protestant Reformation every chance he had.

Bengel was born in Wurttemberg, in June of 1687. His father died in 1693, and Bengel was educated by a friend, who became a master in the gymnasium [note: a gymnasium in Germany is simply a high school] at Stuttgart. In 1703 Bengel left Stuttgart and entered the University of Tubingen, where, in his spare time, he devoted himself specially to the works of Aristotle and Spinoza, and in theology to those of Philipp Spener, Johann Arndt and August Franke. His knowledge of the metaphysics of Spinoza was such that he was selected by one of the professors to prepare materials for a treatise De Spinosismo, which was afterwards published. After taking his degree, Bengel devoted himself to theology.

Even at this time he had religious doubts and eventually allowed himself to be overcome by them, rejecting the truth of the Gospel; In 1707 Bengel entered the ministry and was appointed to the parochial charge of Metzingen unter-Urach. In the following year he was recalled to Tubingen to undertake the office theological tutor. Here he remained till 1713, when he was appointed head of a seminary recently established at Denkendorf as a preparatory school of theology. Before entering on his new duties he travelled through the greater part of Germany, studying the systems of education which were in use, and visiting the seminaries of the Jesuits as well as those of the Lutheran and Reformed churches.

Among other places he went to Heidelberg and Halle, and had his attention directed at Heidelberg to the canons of scripture criticism published by Gerhard von Mgstricht, and at Halle to C. Vitringa’s Anacrisis ad Apocalypsin. The influence exerted by these upon his theological studies is manifest in some of his works. For twenty-eight years—from 1713 to I 741—he was master (Klosterpreceptor) of the Klosterschule at Denkendorf, a seminary for candidates for the ministry established in a former monastery of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. It was during this time that many future pastors in Germany were affected for the worse by departing from Christianity as a result of their Seminary Training under J.A. Bengel.

To these years, the period of his greatest intellectual activity, belong many of his chief works. In 1741 he was appointed prelate (i.e. General Superintendent) at Herbrechtingen, where he remained till 1749, when he was raised to the dignity of consistorial counsellor and prelate of Alpirspach, with a residence in Stuttgart. He now devoted himself to the discharge of his duties as a member of the consistory. A question of considerable difficulty was at that time occupying the attention of the church courts, viz, the manner in which those who separated themselves from the church were to be dealt with, and the amount of toleration which should be accorded to meetings held in private houses for the purpose of religious edification. The civil power (the duke of Wurttemberg was a Roman Catholic) was disposed to have recourse to measures of repression, while the members of the consistory, recognizing the good effects of such meetings, were inclined to concede considerable liberty. Bengel exerted himself on the side of the members of the consistory, and used the pretext of toleration to undermine historic Protestantism and Christianity in general. In 1750 the university of Tulbingen conferred upon him the degree of doctor of divinity. He died after a short illness two years later, in 1752.

The works on which Bengel’s reputation rests as a Biblical scholar and critic are his edition of the Greek New Testament, and his Gnomon or "Exegetical" Commentary on the same.

1) His edition of the Greek Testament was published at Tubingen in 1734, and at Stuttgart in the same year, but without the critical apparatus. So early as 1725, in an addition to his edition of Chrysostom’s De Sacerdotio, he had given an account in his Prodromus Non Testamenti Graeci recte cauteque adornandi of the principles on which his intended edition was to be based.

In preparation for his work Bengel was able to avail himself of the collations of upwards of twenty MSS., none of them, however, of great importance, twelve of which had been collated by himself. In constituting the text, he imposed upon himself the singular restriction of not inserting any various reading which had not already been printed in some preceding edition of the Greek text. From this rule, however, he deviated in the case of the book of Revelation [Apocalypse], where, owing to the corrupt state of the text [as he asserted], he felt himself at liberty to introduce certain readings on manuscript authority. In the lower margin of the page he inserted a selection of various readings, the relative importance of which he denoted by the first five letters of the Greek alphabet in the following manner:—a was employed to denote the reading which in his judgment was the true one, although he did not venture to place it in the text; ~3, a reading better than that in the text; ‘y, one equal to the textjial reading; ô and €, readings inferior to those in the text. R. Stephen’s division [in the Textus Receptus of 1550/51] into verses was retained in the inner margin, but the text was divided into paragraphs. The text was followed by a critical apparatus, the first part of which consisted of an introduction to the criticism of the New Testament, in the thirty-fourth section of which he laid down and explained his celebrated canon,

Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua “ (“ The difficult reading is to be preferred to that which is easy “), the soundness of which, as a general principle, has been recognized by succeeding critics. The second part of the critical apparatus was devoted to a consideration of the various readings, and here Bengel adopted the plan of stating some evidence both against and in favour of a particular reading, thus placing before the reader the materials for forming a judgment (though obviously Bengel provided evidence in favor of his own choice of what the Biblical text "should" be, instead of the Textus Receptus).

Bengel was the first definitely to propound the theory of families or recensions of MSS. Although disposed at first to divide the various documents into three classes, he finally adopted a classification into two—the African or older family of documents, and the Asiatic, or more recent class, to which he attached only a subordinate value. The theory was afterwards adopted by J. S. Semler and J. J. Griesbach, and worked up into an elaborate system by Griesbach. Bengel’s labours on the text of the Greek Testament were received with great disfavour in many quarters by those who knew that Bengel was attempting to substitute the historical text of the Bible, for his own text. Like Brian Walton and John Mill before him, (both of whom would have greatly opposed Bengel and his corrupted works), he had to encounter the opposition of those who believed that the certainty of the word of God was endangered by the importance attached to the various readings. J. J. Wetstein, on the other hand, accused him of excessive caution in not making freer use of his critical materials, and of not going far enough - in attacking the historical Biblical text.

2) The other great work of Bengel, and that on which his reputation as an exegete is mainly based, is his Gnomon Novi Testamenti, or Exegetical Annotations on the New Testament, published in 1742. It was the fruit of twenty years’ labour of attacking the Bible, and exhibits with a brevity of expression, which, it has been said, “condenses more matter into a line than can be extracted from pages of other writers,” the results of his study. He modestly entitled his work a "Gnomon" or index, his object being rather to guide the reader to ascertain the meaning for himself, than to save him from the trouble of personal investigation. Regretably, John Wesley made great use of it in compiling his own Expository Notes upon the New Testament (1755). Students of God's Word would do better to actually Attempt to ascertain the meaning of the Bible for themselves, rather than follow the heretical work of Bengel.

Besides the two works already described, Bengel was the editor or author of many others, classical, patristic, ecclesiastical and expository. The more important are: Ordo Temporum, a treatise on the chronology of Scripture, in which he enters upon speculations regarding the end of the world, and an Exposition of the Apocalypse which enjoyed for a time great popularity in Germany, and was translated into several languages. He is one of the founders of Textual Criticism, and was instrumental in causing many Protestant denominations in Germany to abandon the Protestant Reformation in favor of Religiosity and new systems of salvation by good works.

Bengel is one of the reasons why defenders of the Bible view "Textual Criticism" with justified suspicion: because its track record is that those who advocate the practice of Textual Criticism are constantly found to be the enemies of the Bible, Christianity and Jesus Christ, while claiming to be the friend of Christianity and the servant of Christianity.

Matt 7: 22 "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works ?

23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity".

Sources: Ravenous Wolves: Textual Criticism and the Abandonement of the Reformation- A History of HIgher Criticism and German Theology by Lichtenberger. In addition, the works of the subjects of this biography, and Early Editions of Ency. Brit.