BACH, JOSEPH. - Positive theologian, born on 4 March 1833 at Aislingen (Bavaria) and died at Monaco di Baviera on 24 Sept. 1901. Ordained priest in 1856, he took his degree in 1859. In 1867 he was appointed extraordinary professor and in 1872 full professor at the University of Monaco. He devoted himself to a deeper study of medieval dogmatic thought, and especially of the Christological problem in German authors, composing a splendid history of it, to which he added a series of unpublished documents, thus giving us a work that is still consulted with profit.
He published: Meister Eckardt der Vater der deutschen Spekulation (Vienna 1864); Die Siebenzahl der Sakramente (Ratisbona 1864); his article on Gerhoch von Reichersberg (1093-1169), in Oesterreichische Vierteljahrschrift für Kath. Theologie, 1865, pp. 19-118, attracted much attention; Die Dogmengeschichte der Mittelalters vom christologischen Standpunkt oder die mittelalterliche Christologie vom XIII-XIV Jahrhundert (2 vols., Vienna 1873-75); Albertus Magnus Verhältniss zur Erkenntnislehre der Griechen, Lateiner und Juden (Vienna 1881).