SODEN, HERMANN FREIHERR von. - New Testament critic, b. in Cincinnati (United States) on 16 Aug. 1852, d. in Berlin on 15 Jan. 1914. He attended the University of Tübingen; he was an "evangelical" minister in Württemberg (1845-80), pastor in Dresden (1881), in Chemnitz (1882), in Berlin (1887), Privatdozent (1889), honorary full professor in Berlin (1893).
He wrote on exegesis, on Palestine, on social questions, on ancient Christian literature and other subjects. He devoted talent and energy to the study of the textual sources of the New
Testament and published its 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; manual ed.: Text mit kurzem Apparat, ibid. 1913). This monumental work, although inevitably not perfect, assured its author a place of high honor in the history of biblical sciences. He proposed a new system of sigla for the manuscripts, indicating their content: c = Gospels, o = Acts and Epistles, δ = the whole New Testament; for the choice of number, the presence or absence of the Apocalypse (for manuscripts from the 11th century onward) and the age (from the 10th century onward) are indicated. But these advantages were diminished by the complexity and the difficult handling of the system, which was not accepted. S.'s work was less [successful] with regard to the minuscules and the secondary sources. He distinguished the following forms of text: H (= more or less the "neutral" + "Alexandrian" of Westcott-Hort, without distinction). K (= "Syro-Antiochene"), and I (= the rest, to which the "Western" also belongs insofar as it can be fitted into this classification). He reconstructed the hypothetical ancestors of these recensions, explaining the variants found in ancient sources as corruptions originating from the Diatessaron of Tatian. His classification of textual forms, the methods he employed in the reconstruction of the text and his results were justly criticized, but his work remains to date the fundamental edition of the entire textual tradition of the New Testament.
Giuseppe Smith