KAULEN, FRANZ PHILIPP. - German Catholic exegete, of broad theological, philological and historical culture, rigorously conservative, b. at Düsseldorf on 20 March 1827, d. at Bonn on 11 July 1907. A priest in 1850, he was a tutor in theology at Bonn in 1859 and took his doctorate at Würzburg (1862) with a thesis on Jonah; privatdozent (1863), extraordinary professor (1880) and ordinary professor (1883) of the Old Testament at Bonn; in 1882 he was named domestic prelate of His Holiness and in 1903 a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission; but in that same year he had to give up teaching because of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the first phase of his teaching, during the Kulturkampf, he was deserving of the Catholic cause, sustaining with Flosz and Th. Simar all the theological lectures at the University of Bonn.
His principal work as an exegete, published for the first time in 1876 and then in 5 editions (the last edited by G. Hoberg) up to 1911, is the Einleitung in die Hl. Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testamentes. The traditional material is abundantly set out in it; but modern problems are rather only touched upon, so that the characteristic of the work is to hold firm the line of traditional principles. Another great work concerns the Vulgate: Geschichte der Vulgata (1868), then Sprachliches Handbuch zur Vulgata (2nd ed., 1904); noteworthy is the distinction he made between the authentic character of the Vulgate in general, abstracting from particular manuscripts and editions, and the official character of the Sixto-Clementine edition. A third distinguished work occupied him from 1880 to 1901, namely the 2nd ed. of the Kirchenlexikon of H. J. Wetzer and B. Welte.
Other publications: Linguae Mandschuricae institutiones (1856); Die Sprachverwirrung zu Babel (1861); Liber Ienae (1862); Aphorismen über katholische Behandlung der Bibel (under a pseudonym, 1862); Assyrien und Babylonien nach den neuesten Entdeckungen (5th ed., 1899); Die Altertümer des Flavius Josephus (3rd ed., 1892); Der biblische Schöpfungsbericht (1902).
Bibliography
Raimondo Köbert