BENGEL, JOHANN ALBRECHT. - Protestant scholar, b. at Winnenden, in Württemberg, in 1687, d. at Stuttgart in 1752. He served as a Lutheran minister at Metzingen and elsewhere, was a seminary professor, as well as court and consistorial councillor.
Above all, he distinguished himself as an exegete, having previously edited the Letters of Cicero (Stuttgart 1719), the Panegyric of Origen by St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (1722), and the books On the Priesthood by Bocadoro (1725). In the biblical field, B. gained fame for his works on the New Testament text. In 1734, he published an Apparatus criticus and a revised edition of the Greek New Testament. His exegetical criterion was to "explain Scripture by Scripture without adding anything, but drawing from it all that it contains, without omitting anything." His masterpiece, dating to 1742, was the Gnomon Novi Testamenti in quo ex nativa verborum vi, simplicitas, profunditas, concinnitas, salubritas sensuum coelestinum indicatur, repeatedly reprinted and translated into German by Werner (Stuttgart 1853). Both with the Apparatus and the Gnomon, B. earned a reputation as the first author in Protestantism to have treated New Testament exegesis with a keen critical sense, thereby laying the foundations for a science whose further developments he certainly did not foresee. Upon reading the Gnomon, John Wesley abandoned his own commentary.