Johannes Geffcken (philologist)

Not to be confused with the Lutheran pastor, also named Johannes Geffcken

File:Johannes Geffcken 1924 (Paul Moennich).jpg

Johannes Geffcken (oil drawing by Paul Moennich, 1924)

Karl Heinrich Johannes Geffcken (2 May 1861 – 11 June 1935) was a German classical philologist who served as a professor at the University of Rostock from 1907 to 1933.

Biography

Johannes Geffcken was born in Berlin, the son of noted jurist, diplomat and publicist Friedrich Heinrich Geffcken (1830–1896). His two sisters and three brothers included the jurist Otto Wilhelm Heinrich Geffcken. In keeping with the tradition of his family of Hamburg senators, Johannes Geffcken began studying law in Strasbourg in 1881. However, he soon switched to classical philology, which was represented in Strasbourg by Heinrich Nissen, among others.

In 1882, he moved to the University of Göttingen to study with Hermann Sauppe and Karl Dilthey. After a year in Bonn (1884–1885) with Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler, Geffcken completed his studies in Göttingen. At the suggestion of his teacher here, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, he wrote his dissertation De Stephano Byzantio, with which he received his doctorate in 1886.

In 1887, he passed the state examination and from 1889 worked at the Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hamburg. The commission to edit the Oracula Sibyllina for the Church Fathers Commission of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, which he received in 1897 and completed in 1901, led Geffcken to his main field of work: the study of Christian literature of antiquity and its relationship to pagan literature.

In the summer semester of 1907, Geffcken, who was not habilitated, accepted a call to the University of Rostock, where he worked until the end of his life. In 1916/1917 and 1924 he was rector of the university. Among the most significant works of his Rostock period were the new edition of Friedrich Lübker's Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums (together with Erich Ziebarth, 1914), various editions and monographs on the Church Fathers, and his unfinished Greek Literary History (1926–1934). In 1919, he received an honorary doctorate from the theological faculty of the University of Rostock.

Johannes Geffcken died in Rostock at 74 years of age.

Works

• De Stephano Byzantio (1886; dissertation)
• Timaios’ Geographie des Westens (1892)
• Komposition und Entstehungszeit der Oracula Sibyllina (1902; 1967)
• Die Oracula Sibyllina (1902; 1967)
• Aus der Werdezeit des Christentums. Studien und Charakteristiken (1904; new edition under the title Das Christentum im Kampf und Ausgleich mit der griechisch-römischen Welt. Studien und Charakteristiken aus seiner Werdezeit, 1920)
• Zwei griechische Apologeten (1907; 1970)
• Christliche Apokryphen (1908)
• Kaiser Julianus (1914)
• Friedrich Lübker, Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums (1914; editor, with Erich Ziebarth)
• Aus stiller Arbeit: Weihnachtsgabe der Rostocker Universitätslehrer an ihre Schüler im Felde (1916)
• Drei deutsche Universitätslehrer in großer Zeit (1916; address)
• Griechische Epigramme (1916; 1976)
• Deutschlands akademische Jugend 1813, 1870, 1914 (1917; address)
• Die griechische Tragödie (1918; 1921)
• Griechische Menschen (1919)
• Der Ausgang des griechisch-römischen Heidentums (1920; 1929; 1963; 1972; translated into English by Sabine MacCormack as The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism, 1978)
• Der Ausgang der Antike (1921)
• Religiöse Strömungen im 1. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (1922)
• Griechische Literaturgeschichte. Band 1: Von den Anfängen bis auf Sophistenzeit (1926)
• Der Brief an Diognetos (1928)
• Griechische Literaturgeschichte. Band 1: Von Demokritos bis Aristoteles (1934)

References

• Baader, Gerhard (1964). "Geffcken, (Karl Heinrich) Johannes". In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). 6. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, p. 128.

External links

• Geffcken, Johannes at Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium
• Works by Johannes Geffcken at German National Library