Founders of Old Testament Criticism Author:Thomas Kelly Cheyne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE OPENING OF METHODICAL CRITICISM IN GERMANY—EICHHORN AND ILGEN. My own series of portraits of Old Testament critics begins with J. G. Eichho... more »rn, whom, for reasons which I will give presently, I venture to call the founder of modern Old Testament criticism. I wish to show that he was not merely a " dry rationalist," as Mr. Addis represents, but a man of many-sided culture, and not without Church-feeling, a friend of science, and also a servant of religion, sensitive to the best influences of his time, though not in advance of his age. Eichhorn was born Oct. 16, 1752, and was the son of a pastor in a small principality now absorbed in the kingdom of Wurtemberg. At Easter 1770 he went to Gottingen, where the wise liberality of our George II., stimulated by his minister Munchhausen, had founded (in 1734) the famous Georgia Augusta university. There it was only natural that he should be profoundly affected by the genius loci. The spirit of classical literature and of historical research, equally with that of a moderate orthodox theology, could not fail to pass into his sensitive mind. These were allsubjects which Miinchhausen as a statesman desired to foster, and they were cultivated with pre-eminent success in the old Gottingen university. In theology Eichhorn had among his teachers J. D. Michaelis, the Biblical scholar, and Walch, the not-yet-forgotten Church historian ; classical philology he studied under Heyne, who admitted him into his Seminar, and obtained for him in 1774 his first appointment as rector of the gymnasium at Ohrdruff, in the duchy of Gotha. How Eichhorn came to be smitten with the love of the East, it is not so easy to say. But the titles of his earliest works (from 1774 onwards) sufficiently prove that Mohammedan history, and Arabic and Syriac...« less