Gerhard Kittel

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Revision as of 21:32, 26 February 2010

Gerhard Kittel (September 23, 1888, Breslau - July 11, 1948) was a German Protestant theologian and an ardent anti-Semite.^[1] Kittel was named as an official theologian by the Nazi party and the Nazi's often appealed to some of his works as an excuse for their anti-Semitic eugenic policies.

Nazi Involvement

He wrote Nazi-influenced articles about Christianity and until his disclosure of or conversion to anti-Semitism, he had been a well respected scholar. He was so well-respected that secular and Christian Liberals within the academy denied or obscured his Third Reich work until Robert P. Ericksen's published work on Kittel, Theologians Under Hitler, in 1985 made such liberal denialism no longer possible.

Herbert Lowewe, a Cambridge University professor, wrote this to Kittel in August 1933:

“ It gives me great pain to find that so great an authority and leader of thought should give expression to such views. I have read your previous books with pleasure and profit, and I have learned much from them. ... your present pronouncement is quite incompatible with your previous teaching, and it is as unjust to Christianity as it is to Judaism. ... It is a grievous disillusionment to find that one's idol has feet of clay.

Hitler wanted Kittel, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda to do a new German Bible translation to replace Martin Luther’s Bible, which at that time most German’s still used at that time. After the Second World War, Kittel was jailed for his Nazi war crimes. During his war crimes trial, Kittel claimed that his acts were “imposed on him by God,” and Gerhard Kittel argued that “agreement with the State and with the Fuhrer was obedience towards the law of God.”

Kittel wrote a 10 volume Biblical Greek Lexicon. The first 7 volumes were written while Kittel was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, while the last three volumes of his Biblical Greek Lexicon were done while he was in jail for his War Crimes.

He was a son of Rudolf Kittel.

Literary works

• Die Oden Salomos überarbeitet oder einheitlich, 1914
• Jesus und die Rabbinen, 1914
• Jesus als Seelsorger, 1917
• Rabbinica; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920
• Das Religionslehrer-Seminar in Leipzig. Aufbau und Ziele im Auftrag des Christl. Volksdienstes dargestellt; Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1921
• Die religiöse und die kirchliche Lage in Deutschland. Dörffling & Franke, Leipzig 1921
• Seelsorge an jungen Mädchen, 1925
• Die Probleme des palästinensischen Spätjudentums und das Urchristentum, 1926
• Urchristentum, Spätjudentum, Hellenismus, 1926
• Jesus und die Juden; Berlin: Furche, 1926
• Die Religionsgeschichte und das Urchristentum, 1932
• An editor of the "Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament", 5 vols., after 1933
• Die Judenfrage, 1933
• Ein theologischer Briefwechsel mit Karl Barth, 1934
• Christus und Imperator, 1939
• Die historischen Voraussetzungen der jüdischen Rassenmischung, 1939
• Dichter, Bibel und Bibelrevision, 1939
• Zus. mit Eugen Fischer: Das antike Weltjudentum. Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder; Forschungen zur Judenfrage des "Reichsinstituts zur Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands von Walter Frank, Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage, Band 7; Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943
• Meine Verteidigung. Neue, erweiterte Niederschrift, 1946
• Der Jakobusbrief und die Apostolischen Väter. Aus dem Nachlaß veröffentlicht von Karl Heinrich Rengstorf; in: ZNW 43 (1950/51), S. 54-112

References

• 1. Ericksen, Robert P. 1987. Theologians Under Hitler. Yale University Press.

External links

• Wikipedia Article on Gerhard Kittel
• Biography in German

Online works

• Der "historische Jesus" (1932)
• Greek language, Biblical -- Dictionaries German (no date)
• Greek language, Biblical -- Dictionaries German (1960)

Critical

• The NIV Nazi Connection
• Kittles's Cookies