BENGEL, JOHANN ALBRECHT. - Protestant scholar, born at Winnenden, in Württemberg, in 1687, died at Stuttgart in 1752. He was a minister of Lutheran worship at Metzingen and elsewhere, a seminary professor, as well as an aulic and consistory counsellor.
He distinguished himself above all as an exegete, after having edited Cicero’s Letters (Stuttgart 1719), the Panegyric of Origen by St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (1722), and the books On the Priesthood by Chrysostom (1725). In the biblical field, B. gained renown for his work on the New Testament text. In 1734 he published an Apparatus criticus and a revised edition of the Greek New Testament. His exegetical principle was that of “explaining Scripture by Scripture, without adding anything to it, but drawing from it all that it contains, without omitting anything.” His masterpiece, dating from 1742, was, however, the Gnomon Novi Testamenti in quo ex nativa verborum vi, simplicitas, profunditas, concinuitas, salubritas sensuum coelestium indicatur, repeatedly reprinted and translated into German by Werner (Stuttgart 1853). Both through the Apparatus and through the Gnomon, B. acquired a reputation as the first author within Protestantism to have treated New Testament exegesis with refined critical sense, thus becoming the founder of a discipline whose subsequent developments he certainly had not foreseen. Having become acquainted with the Gnomon, Giovanni Wesley abandoned a commentary of his own.