August Neander

Origins and early life

August Neander was born David Mendel on 17 January 1789 in Göttingen, into a Jewish family, and grew up in Hamburg in poverty after his parents separated.

Work and career

In 1806, at seventeen, he was baptized a Lutheran and took the name Neander, Greek for 'new man' — this fiche says so plainly; he figures in this directory by his documented Jewish birth, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica itself records him as 'church historian and convert'. The Jewish boy who had loved Plato became the greatest church historian of his century: on Schleiermacher's recommendation he was called in 1813, at twenty-four, to the new University of Berlin, and held its chair of church history for thirty-seven years.

His General History of the Christian Religion and Church, in six volumes, was the first to tell the story of Christianity as the history of the inner life of persons rather than of doctrines and institutions — 'the heart makes the theologian', he liked to say — and it earned him the title of father of modern church history. His Life of Jesus of 1837 answered Strauss's skeptical one. Beloved by students who found him absent-minded and saintly, he died in Berlin on 14 July 1850.