German-Norwegian theologian of Jewish descent. Parents: Merchant Joseph Caspari (died after 1861) and Rebekka Schwabe (died 1859). Married August 1849 to Marie Caroline Constance von Zezschwitz (3.10.1830–14.3.1918), daughter of President of the Court of Appeal Carl August von Zezschwitz and Constanze Friederike von Polenz. Father of Theodor Caspari (1853–1948).
Carl Paul Caspari was a professor of Old Testament theology at the University of Christiania for 35 years. In his younger years, he made important contributions to the study of the prophets. He was also an outstanding connoisseur of Oriental languages, and made a pioneering effort in researching the ancient baptisms and creeds. Next to Gisle Johnson, Caspari stands as the foremost representative of Lutheran Orthodoxy in Norway in the second half of the 19th century; each in their own way, they came to shape the church's view and theological point of view in several generations of Norwegian priests and theological scholars.
When Caspari, as a newly appointed associate professor of theology, gave his inaugural lecture at the University of Christiania in January 1848, he was no small sensation. That a German Jew, an internationally known Orientalist, of all things should act as a spokesman and apologist for Lutheran pietism in Norway, was no less startling. “We [were] excited to hear a Lutheran theologian who, born and raised as a Jew and fanatical of his ancestral faith, at a mature age and standing on the heights of science, had been seized by the gospel he had hated as a Jew, and , as it was called, had studied to contest it, ”said one of the students who heard his first lecture (the later Minister of State Nils Hertzberg).
His story of conversion, as he himself told it, is, however, less dramatic, and for that time also not unique. The parents did not belong to the traditional, strongly church- and Christian-critical Talmudic Judaism, but rather to the Jewish Enlightenment movement, which had as its program to adapt Judaism to the Christian Enlightenment culture in Europe. At the University of Leipzig, where Caspari studied Oriental languages, his Jewish Enlightenment philosophy was met and challenged by a pietistic revival movement among his Christian classmates. He was now convinced that the Enlightenment's human view was far too shallow. He had early acquired Kant's life motto: "You can, because you must!"; now he realized that he just could not, and that the message of Christ's vicarious suffering and death was the answer he needed. He was baptized in 1838, aged 24, and took "Paul" as his baptismal name. He was not alone in this conversion process; two of his siblings were baptized soon after, and among Jews who wholeheartedly joined the Enlightenment movement's assimilation program, this process was not at all unusual.
As a Christian, Caspari also changed his academic career; he now studied theology, including in Berlin under the great conservative apologist E. W. Hengstenberg. Before this change of course, he had published an exercise book in Arabic for students (1838). He crowned his efforts as an Arabist with the publication of a large Arabic grammar in two volumes (1844 and 1848); this is still the basis for the most used handbook in the subject.
As an Old Testament researcher, Caspari worked closely with a former fellow student from Leipzig, Professor Franz Delitzsch (1813–90). The two developed an entire research program, which aimed to disprove the thesis put forward by W. de Wette (1780–1849) and JKW Vatke (1806–82): that the Mosaic Law did not originate from the time of Moses, but was written down just before and during the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BC. Consequently, the Law of Moses presupposes the prophets, not the other way around. This had far-reaching consequences for the view of Israel's history and the Old Testament canon.
The main point of his counter-evidence had Caspari learned from Hengstenberg, but he developed it further with great philological accuracy and learning: Within the Old Testament canon it can be shown that the later books always presuppose and to some extent quote the previous ones. This means that the prophets in their books quote and presuppose the law of Moses. Virtually all of Caspari's articles and books in the Old Testament field of study form sub-studies of this research program, which he also continued with after his transfer to Christiania in the late fall of 1847. But after a major book on the Prophet Micah (1852), his Old Testament research subsides; after that he gives most popular theological lectures on biblical figures, and repeats his Old Testament lectures to ever new cohort of students. This is because from 1851 he had devoted himself to a completely new scientific task, which eventually came to devour him completely.
It was not to refute Old Testament Bible critics that Caspari had been brought to the pulpit in Christiania, but to another task. The person who had visited him in Leipzig and persuaded him to apply for the vacant associate professor post in Christiania, was then a fellow, later Professor Gisle Johnson, and he had his own agenda, also for Caspari. Johnson needed his help to refute Grundtvig's "incomparable Discovery" of 1825, namely that the most authentic words from the mouth of Christ - and thus the foundation of the church - are not the words of Jesus in the Gospels, but the creed at baptism. The risen Christ himself had, according to Grundtvig, communicated to the apostles the Apostles' Creed word for word, and since then these "words of faith" had been handed down without the slightest change throughout the centuries.
Caspari began to disprove this purely historically, through an in-depth examination of the origins and history of the creed. In the years 1853-57 he was in a kind of research quarantine and published almost nothing. But then, from 1858, there was a steady stream of major and minor studies of the history of the creeds, in addition to a number of publications of source texts. Through these publications, Caspari founded the modern exploration of the history of confessions, and his German publications are constantly cited as fundamental in the field. He eventually became so caught up in his church history studies that he went beyond the history of confessions in the strict sense and published texts and studies in the general ancient church and medieval history. While at first he was very concerned with the controversy against Grundtvig, this was strongly toned down in his later years, and when liberal German theology in the 1870s and 1880s attacked the apostolic confession as an imperfect expression of the faith, Caspari ended up expressing his sympathy for Grundtvig's affair.
Caspari was knighted by St. The Order of Olav in 1862 and became commander of the 1st class in 1876. He was also a knight of the Swedish Order of the North Star, and from 1849 a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. In 1857 he co-founded the Science Society in Christiania (now the Norwegian Academy of Sciences), where he was president in 1873, and contributed diligently both in the academy's meetings and in its publication series.
In addition to his work as an academic teacher for two or three generations of Norwegian priests - they remembered him as the eminent and spiritual lecturer - Carl Paul Caspari was from 1859 until his death active as a member of the Bible Society's Central Committee, and he was the leading professional force in general worked to provide Norway with the first Norwegian translation of the Bible. In 1861 he co-founded the Central Committee for the Jewish Mission in Christiania, and was chairman of the committee from 1866 until his death in 1892.
Works
- The Prophet Obadja, Leipzig 1842
- Arabica grammar in usum scholarum academicarum, 2 bd., Leipzig 1844–48
- Contributions to the introduction to the book Jesaia and the history of the Jesaian period, Berlin 1848
- About Mica the Morasthite and his prophetic scripture, 1852
- Unprinted, unnoticed and little-noticed sources on the history of the baptismal symbol and the rule of faith, 3 bd., 1866-75
- Old and new sources on the history of the baptismal symbol and the rule of faith, 1879
- Historical-Critical Theses over a Part Real and Probably Oriental Daabsbekjendelser, 1881
- Martin von Bracara's writing De correctione rusticorum, 1883
- Kirchenhistorische Anecdota, 1883
- An Augustin falsely enclosed Homilia de sacrilegiis, 1886
- Letters, treatises and sermons from the last two centuries of the ecclesiastical alteration and the beginning of the Middle Ages, 1890
Papers left behind
- Letters in Staatsbibliothek preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, in RA, Oslo, and in Handwritingsaml., NBO
- 70 letters to and from Carl Paul Caspari,in transcribed photostatcopy in the Faculty of Church Science, Oslo
Sources and literature
- Biografi i NFL, bd. 2, 1888
- T. G. B. Odland: "Prof. Dr. C. P. Caspari," in 76. Account of the Norwegian Bible Seal, 1892, p. 78–120
- G. H. Dalman: "Carl Paul Caspari", in Evangelical Lutheran Church Time, Decorah 1893, p. 195–201 and 209–212
- J. Belsheim: "Caspari, Carl Paul", i Real-Encyklopädie für Protestant Theology and Church, vol. 3, Leipzig 1897
- A. Brandrud: "Theology of the Norwegian University 1811–1911", in the Norwegian Theological Journal, 1911, p. 201–280 (about Caspari p. 236–251)
- A. Brandrud: biography in NBL1, bd. 2, 1925
- T. Caspari: From My Young Aar, 1929
- O. Skarsaune: "A Scholar of The Naade of God". Carl Paul Caspari 1814–1892. A biography, unpublished. and unfinished manuscript for biography (with extensive bibliography by and about Caspari), 1989, Faculty of Church, Oslo
