Joachim Jeremias


Joachim Jeremias was a German Lutheran theologian, scholar of Near Eastern Studies and university professor for New Testament studies. He was abbot of Bursfelde, 1968–1971.
He was born in Dresden and spent his formative years in Jerusalem, where between 1910 and 1918 his father, Friedrich Jeremias, worked as Provost of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. He studied Lutheran theology and Oriental languages at the universities of Tübingen and Leipzig. In Leipzig he obtained both a "Doctor philosophiae " and a "Doctor theologiae " degree, followed by his Habilitation. His mentor was the renowned Gustaf Dalman.
After other teaching assignments, Jeremias was appointed in 1935 to the chair of New Testament studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, where he taught until his retirement in 1968. In 1976, Jeremias moved from Göttingen to Tübingen, where he died in 1979.

Academic work

His research and publications covered a wide field, ranging from historical and archaeological to literary and philosophical studies. They concentrate on the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts relevant for a critical analysis of the New Testament in order to reconstruct the historical environment of Jesus in all its complexity, to provide a deeper understanding of his life and teachings.
His achievements found national and international acknowledgment, recognized by the admission into the Göttingen Academy of Sciences in 1948 and the award of honorary doctorates from the universities of Leipzig, St Andrews, Uppsala, and Oxford. He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. He was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 1973. Finally, in 1970 he was made an honorary fellow of the Deutsche Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas.

Jeremias on the New Testament Apocrypha

He worked with Wilhelm Schneemelcher in revisions of the Hennecke-Schneemelcher collection of New Testament Apocrypha.

Jeremias on Jesus in the Talmud

Jeremias took a stand on the passages generally regarded as relating to Jesus in the Talmud which supported medieval rabbinical defences that the Yeshu the deceiver mentioned in the Talmud was a different Jesus from the Jesus of Christianity. Related to this he also supported David Flusser's suggestion that the name Yeshu itself was in no way abusive, but 'almost certainly' a Galilean dialect form of Yeshua. Jeremias himself recounted in 1966 that he had discovered the only known confirmed inscription of the spelling Yeshu in Bethesda, but that this inscription was now covered.

Legacy

Jeremias’s work on the New Testament was renowned globally, and a symposium was held at the 40th anniversary of his death at the University of Gottingen in 2019. Martin Hengel dedicated The Atonement: The Origins of the Doctrine in the New Testament to Jeremias, praising him as the most important German New Testament scholar of his generation.

Publications in English