Weiss, Johannes

(1863–1914)

   Biblical Theologian.

   Weiss was the son of Bernhard Weiss, the conservative German New Testament critic. He was educated at the Universities of Marburg, Berlin, Göttingen and Breslau. Subsequently he taught at Göttingen, Marburg and Heidelberg. He maintained that Jesus’s mission should be understood in eschatological terms, that it was a proclamation of the immanence of the Kingdom of God and his own Messiahship. Weiss’s best-known work was Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes. His work, together with that of schweitzer and wrede, is considered to mark the end of the liberal interpretation of the Christian message, commonly characterised as ‘the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man’. Weiss also produced Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, which outlined the principles of biblical form criticism and Das Urchristentum, a history of early Christianity. bultmann was one of his students.

   F.C. Burkitt, ‘Johannes Weiss: In Memoriam’, Harvard Theological Review, viii (1915);

   H. Palmer, The Logic of Gospel Criticism (1968).