KITTEL, GERHARD. - Protestant biblical theologian, b. at Breslau on 23 Sept. 1888, d. at Tübingen on 11 July 1948. He studied theology and Oriental languages in Berlin, Tübingen and Halle, and in 1913 obtained his habilitation at Kiel. He took it up again in 1917 at Leipzig, where on 24 March 1921 he was promoted extraordinary professor for the sciences of the New Testament and of late Judaism; but already on 5 Aug. 1921 he was elected full professor of the same subject at Greifswald, whence on 1 Oct. 1926 he moved to Tübingen as full professor of New Testament theology. From 1939 to 1943 he lectured at Vienna. He was arrested on 3 May 1945 and transported to the camp of Balingen and afterwards, by concession, transferred to the abbey of Beuron.
Originator and editor of the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (5 vols.: A-O, Stuttgart 1932-51; continued under the editorship of G. Friedrich); he also edited the journal Deutsche Theologie (1934 ff.), and, succeeding his father, the founder, the Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament. Very useful are his works on the origins of Christianity, for the study of Jewish and Hellenistic matters, where K. vindicates the originality of primitive Christianity (cfr.: G. Messina, in Biblica, 15 [1934], p. 113 ff.).
Having devoted himself to the study of rabbinic texts, with his teacher Israel I. Kahan he edited an edition and translation of the midhrās Sifrē; he began the collection Rabbinische Texte (1933 ff.), recently taken up again. But, a decisively Lutheran theologian, he conceived the opposition between Judaism and Christianity in too irreconcilable a manner, and proposed to reduce, after emancipation, the Jews today dispersed among the nations to a kind of gērîm: citizens diminished in their general rights, but "esteemed in their own." And he even deemed it opportune to invite believing Jews to submit as to an activity of God. Yet not even the works compiled under such influence are devoid of scientific value; e.g., the Forschungen zur Judenfrage (1937 ff.) and the article in Theol. Lit. Zeitung, 69 (1944), coll. 10-20, contain useful collections of ancient Jewish epigraphs and of studies on them.
K. cannot be accused of having promoted vulgar Nazi (that is, racist) anti-Semitism. K. was not a member of A. Rosenberg's Institute for Research into the Jewish Problem. His ecclesiastical alignment was not connected with the "Deutsche Christen," but rather with the "Confessing Church," faithful to its persecuted "bishop." He joined the Hitlerite party, but did not make himself a slave of the party. His manner of considering the Jewish problem was quite different from that of official policy. His premature death, brought about by the sufferings, especially mental, of his arrest, was a most grave loss to international biblical scholarship.
Other works of K. on primitive Christianity: Oden Salomos (1914); Jesus und die Rabbinen (1914); Jesus als Seelsorger (1917); Rabbinica: Paulus im Talmud. Die "Macht" auf dem Haupte, Runde Zahlen (1920); Sifrē zu Deut., fasc. 1 (1922), illustrates the milieu of nascent Christianity; Urchristentum-Spätj (1926); Jesus und die Juden (1926); Die Probleme des palästinensischen Spätjudentums und das Urchristentum (1926); Die Lebenskräfte der ersten christlichen Gemeinden (1926); Die Religionsgeschichte und das Urchristentum (1932); Die Genealogiai der Pastoralbriefe, in Zeitschrift f. d. neutest. Wissenschaft, 20 (1921), pp. 49-69; Die Stellung des Jakobus zu Judentum und Heidenchristentum, ibid., 30 (1931), pp. 145-57; Christus und Imperator. Das Urteil der ersten Christenheit über den Staat (1939); Der geschichtliche Ort des Jakobusbriefes, in Zeitschrift f. d. neutest. Wissenschaft, 41 (1942), pp. 71-105. On the Jewish problem: Die Judenfrage. Mit 2 Beilagen: Antwort an M. Buber. Kirche und Judenchristentum (2nd ed. 1933); Ein theologischer Briefwechsel (1934), with K. Barth.