CORNELY, Karl Joseph Rudolph. — Eminent German Jesuit exegete, b. at Breyell in the Rhineland on 19 April 1830, d. at Trier on 3 March 1908. He spent three years in Lebanon, studied in Paris in 1865–66, and from 1867 to 1872 taught at the college of Maria-Laach. Forced into exile with his brethren, from 1879 to 1889 he held with great distinction the chair of exegesis at the Roman College (Gregorian University). Before and after assuming this chair he directed the periodical Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (1872–1879); in 1873 he founded another journal, Katholische Missionen; and in 1885 he began publishing in Paris the Cursus Sacrae Scripturae.
Besides two biographies of blessed members of the Society of Jesus, Carlo Spinola (1868) and Pietro Favre (2nd ed., Freiburg in Br. 1900), and some preparatory works (Analysis), between 1885 and 1887 he published his principal work in three volumes: Historica et critica Introductio in utrosque Testamenti libros sacros. A few years later (1894–97) the second edition appeared. For school use he compiled a Compendium Introductio, in which he condensed his four large volumes; he himself supervised five editions of the Compendium. Three further editions were edited by Martin Hagen, and subsequent ones (9th–12th) by A. Merk; a French version by Mazoyer also exists (Paris 1907–1908). Finally, Cornely published important commentaries on the four major Pauline epistles: 1 Cor. (1890, 2nd ed. 1909); 2 Cor. and Gal. (1892); Rom. (1896, 2nd ed. 1925); and, together with F. Zorell, In librum Sapientiae (1900).