SCHÜRER, EMIL JOHANN. – Protestant historian, critic, and theologian Ritschl (v.), born in Augsburg on 2 May 1844, died in Göttingen on 30 April 1910.
He studied theology at Erlangen, Berlin, and Heidelberg in 1864–66, but received his doctorate in philosophy at Leipzig in 1868, where he obtained the venia docendi in 1869 and was appointed associate professor in 1873; transferred as full professor of the New Testament to the Faculty of Theology of the then newly established University of Giessen, in 1890 he moved to Kiel and in 1895 to Göttingen, where he remained until his death. His Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig 1874) went through several continually revised and expanded editions, based on a complete study of all the texts; it became a classic treatise under the title Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (Leipzig: I: 2nd ed. 1890, 3rd and 4th 1901, 5th 1925; II: 2nd ed. 1886, 4th 1907–1909; Register, 1902). The work, still useful, should today be supplemented by many specialized studies in the light of the new texts and documents. It deals not only with the external history of the Jewish people from the time of the Maccabees onward, but also with its culture, piety, and messianic ideas. Another merit of S. is that in 1876 he founded the Theologische Literaturzeitung (v.), which critically surveys the theological literature of the world and strives to be objective on the basis of criticism, and that he directed it from vol. 1 (1876) to vol. 36 (1910), except from 1881 to 1887, when, in order to prepare freely for the second edition of his great work, he entrusted it to A. HARAN (v.), his faithful friend and collaborator.