Congratulations to George van Kooten on his election as a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities

GeorgevanKooten.jpg

George van Kooten is among the twenty-four new members elected to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, who were installed during its Summer session. The Göttingen Academy is the oldest continuously existing institution of its kind in Germany, founded in 1751 by the British King George II in his capacity as Elector of Hanover. Past members include Goethe, Einstein, and Heisenberg, and among its theologians were numbered Rudolf Bultmann, Kurt Aland, and earlier Wilhelm Bousset, the co-founder of the History of Religions School.

Last year, as featured in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 21 August 2024 (‘Heiligung der Literatur’), van Kooten, with an interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Richard Rex, clarified the importance and nature of Erasmus’s work during his Cambridge years (1511–14) and solved the mystery of Erasmus’s relation to the Lady Margaret’s chair in Cambridge.

Van Kooten’s latest research proposes a radical re-dating of the Gospel of John to the period before the Jewish Revolt (66–70 CE). This would make the Gospel of John the earliest of the four New Testament Gospels. This challenges the current consensus on the development of the Gospels, which is still based on 19th-century evolutionist models and assumes that the Gospels developed from the allegedly simple Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, to the more sophisticated Gospel of John. An early dating of John, however, undermines this notion of development and suggests instead that the Gospel of John is very much part of the Judaism of the highly sophisticated era of Herod the Great (40–4 BCE) and his early Roman successors before the Jewish Revolt, an era in which Jerusalem reached an apogee in terms of wealth, population, and civic and sacred architecture.

George van Kooten is Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity and Fellow of Clare Hall, studied in Leiden, Durham, and Oxford, and has been a Visiting Fellow at Göttingen. He is an expert on the Graeco-Roman context of the New Testament writings.