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 “Evangelical” minister in Württemberg (1845-86), pastor in Dresden (1881), in Chemnitz (1882), in Berlin (1887), privatdocent (1889), honorary ordinary 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 the results in *Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Gestaltung* (I. Untersuchungen; I. Textzeugen, Berlin 1902; 2. Textformen: A. Evangelien, ibid. 1909; 3. Textformen: B. Apostolos und Apokalypse, ibid. 1910; II. Text, Apparat, Ergänzungen zu Teil I., Göttingen 1913; manual edition: *Text mit kurzem Apparat*, ibid. 1913). This monumental work, though inevitably imperfect, secured for its author a place of high honor in the history of biblical scholarship.
He proposed a new system of sigla for manuscripts, indicating their contents: “Vangeli, a” Acts and Epistles, “b” 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 unwieldiness of the system, which was not accepted.
Immense was S.’s work regarding 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 also the “Western” 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 deriving from Tatian’s Diatessaron.
His classification of textual forms, the methods he used in reconstructing the text, and his results were justly criticized, but his work remains to this day as the fundamental edition of the entire textual tradition of the New Testament.