REITHMAYR, Franz Xavier. – New Testament exegete, born in Ilkofen (Regensburg) to poor artisans on 16 March 1809, died in Munich on 26 January 1872. Ordained priest in 1832, he taught religion in Regensburg and later in Munich, where he attended lectures by A. DÖLLINGER, IGNÁZ VON (v.) and J. A. Möhler (v.), graduating in theology in 1836. From 1837 he was an extraordinary professor, and in 1841 became ordinary professor of New Testament exegesis (the first to hold such a chair in Munich).
Möhler stimulated in him a love for patristics and the dogmatic content of Holy Scripture. Volume I of Möhler’s Patrologie (1840) is half his work. In 1842 he valiantly defended the Catholic position against D. Strauss’s (v.) mythicism in the Historisch-politische Blätter. Other works: Commentar zu dem Briefe an die Römer (Regensburg 1847: rich in patristic information but diffuse and philologically inexact); Nov. Test. Graecae et Latine (Munich 1847: student edition, dependent on C. Lachmann); Einleitung in die canonischen Bücher des Neuen Bundes (Regensburg 1852); Commentar zum Briefe an die Galater (Munich 1865). His special merit lies in directing the Bibliothek der Kirchenväter from 1868 until his death. A posthumous work edited by V. THALHOFER, VALENTIN, Lehrbuch der biblischen Hermeneutik (Kempten 1874), contains his biography (pp. VII–XLVII).
His position during the Faculty’s troubled decade (1861–71) remains not fully clarified. Though opposed to Dollinger’s liberalizing theology, he appears to have also opposed the Speyer Seminary; in 1869 he even subscribed to the Faculty majority’s Gutachten against papal infallibility. Yet he immediately submitted after the definition.