SODEN, HERMANN FREIHERR von. – New Testament critic, born in Cincinnati (United States) on 16 August 1852, died in Berlin on 15 January 1914. He attended the University of Tübingen; he was an « evangelical » minister in Württemberg (1845–80), pastor in Dresden (1881), in Chemnitz (1882), and in Berlin (1887), privat-docent (1889), and honorary ordinary professor in Berlin (1893).
He wrote on exegesis, Palestine, social questions, ancient Christian literature, and other subjects. He devoted talent and energy to the study of the textual sources of the New
Testament and published the results in Die Schriften des Neuen Testament in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Gestaltung (I. Untersuchungen; 1. Textzeugen, Berlin 1902; 2. Textformen: A. Evangelien, ibid. 1909; 3. Textformen: B. Apostolos und Apokalypsis, ibid. 1910; II. Text, Apparat, Ergänzungen zu Teil I., Göttingen 1913; handbook edition: Text mit kurzem Apparat, ibid. 1913). This monumental work, although inevitably imperfect, secured for its author a place of high distinction in the history of biblical scholarship. He proposed a new system of sigla for manuscripts, indicating their contents: c = Gospels, o = Acts and Epistles, δ = the entire New Testament; in the choice of the number, the presence or absence of the Apocalypse (for manuscripts from the eleventh century onward) and the age (from the tenth century onward) are indicated. But these advantages were diminished by the complexity and difficult handling of the system, which was not accepted. S.’s work on minuscules and secondary sources was no less immense. He distinguished the following text-forms: H (= more or less Westcott-Hort’s « neutral » + « Alexandrian », without distinction), K (= « Syro-Antiochene »), and I (= the remainder, to which the « Western » also belongs insofar as it can be included in this classification). He reconstructed the hypothetical ancestors of these recensions, explaining the variants found in ancient sources as corruptions originating from Tatian’s Diatessaron. His classification of textual forms, the methods he employed in reconstructing the text, and his results were rightly criticized, but his work remains to this day the fundamental edition of the entire textual tradition of the New Testament. Giuseppe Smith