Horst R. Moehring

I owe a great deal to Horst Moehring. A great deal. It would be no exaggeration to say that if I had not met Horst, I would not be where I am today. At the very least, I would, in all liklihood, not have gotten a PhD. Who knows what direction my life would have taken? I met Horst in Chicago, in 1956. I decided, in my last year of seminary, to study Greek, and Horst was my teacher. As a result, he and his wife, Constance, became friends of Shirley and myself. The day I graduated from seminary, we had supper with Horst and Constance at a German restaurant in downtown Chicago (the Heidelberger Fass), and then drove together to Vermont. Horst joined the faculty of Brown University. During the time we lived in Dummerston, they visited us, driving up from Providence more than once in their very unusual but also very cute DKW automobile, which had a 3-cylinder engine and ran on a gas/oil mix!

1957 DKW ********************************************* Both Horst and Constance were amateur photographers, and they gave us two “castoff” cameras: a Rolleicord and a Topcon. (My granddaughter, Katie, eventually got the Rolleicord).

Rolleicord camera******************************************** It was Horst who wrote in 1959 or early 1960 to inform me that the Department of Religious Studies at Brown had several NDEA fellowships available, and would I be interested in applying for one? This created a very real motivation to leave the parish ministry and get a PhD. I thought a lot about it, prayed about it, and eventually applied, got the fellowship, and entered Brown in the fall of 1960. Once we came to Providence, Horst was one of my professors - mainly in reading Hellenistic Greek, and also in textual criticism. We also often got together with Horst and Constance socially. We enjoyed them, but there were also strains in the relationship. The most important of these was that both of them were agnostics, and not only that, Horst carried on a running diatribe against the more fundamentalist manifestations of Christianity. It was almost an obsession with him. I had my own problems with fundamentalist Christianity, but at times his attitude made me uncomfortable. Horst also had very narrow academic interests. His primary interests were textual and linguistic. He was devoting his career primarily to preparing a concordance to the writings of the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus. This was incredibly detailed and tedious work, and it was not what I wanted to give my life to. There was another professsor in Biblical Studies in the Department: William Schoedel. Bill Schoedel had broader interests—he was a scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity, and his curiosity and interests were wide-ranging. I felt I could learn a great deal from him. Shirley and I also became friends with him and his wife Grace, and we developed a “tradition” of getting together every Friday evening to have pizza and play hearts. The Schoedels also had three children, two of whom were close in age to ours. And spiritually I felt a deeper kinship with Bill. He was a “preachers kid” like me, his father was a Lutheran pastor and Bill was an active member of the Lutheran church. Like me, he had both an underlying ground of faith and also a very open and questioning mind. For all these reasons, and perhaps others I am unaware of, I cast my lot with Bill as a thesis advisor. It was a good choice and I have never regretted it. But I think it was a disappointment to Horst, and it put a distance between him and me that never really healed. Since graduating from Brown, I kept in touch with Bill and Grace (to this day), but not with Horst and Constance. Horst died in 1986. He was only 58 years old. I don't know whether Constance is still alive or not. I've searched for her but cannot find contemporary information. Having the luxary of WiFi here at K&S's house, I "Googled" Horst's name, and found two articles: one written by him in which he excoriates a fundamentalist author (who is excoriating the translators of the RSV), and another written by Daniel Schwartz, an historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in which Schwartz excoriates Horst Moehring! Reading these articles from the vantage of age 88, I'll have to say that I am grateful not to have spent my life excoriating other scholars. I know it's all part of the game, but it's one I opted out of back in 1970 when I essentially gave up the role of professional bible scholar and became the Dean of Men at Lawrence University and in effect, became an amateur scholar, one who studies the Bible and loves the study, but no longer publishes critiques of other people's scholarship. I did publish one article before then in which I did critique another scholar's work, but I did so respectfully (I hope). Horst's article has to do with a fine point in Greek grammer, i.e., with the verb AKOUEIN "to hear." In classical Greek, the verb AKOUEIN with the object in the genitive case, means "to hear a sound," but with the object in the accusative case, means "to understand a voice." In Acts there are two versions of the coversion experience of the apostle Paul: Acts 9:7: "The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one." Acts 22:9: "Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me." RSV This appears to create a contradiction: did the men with Paul hear the voice or didn't they? For a fundamentalist who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, this is a problem. BUT, Luke uses the genitive case with akouein in Acts 22.9 and the accusative case in Acts 9:7. Thus Acts 9:7 could read "hearing the sound" and Acts 22.9 "they did not understand the voice," which would amount to the same thing. Horst quotes the fundamentalist W. C. Taylor, who wrote a diatribe against the RSV translation: "It is a commonplace in Greek grammar that the verb "to hear" with one construction may mean to hear the sound without understanding it, but with another construction may mean to hear and understand. The translators well knew this but refused to let the harmony appear that is in Luke's narrative, choosing rather to promote Disharmony. So they translate, in Acts ix 7, "hearing the voice and in xxii 9, "did not hear the voice." That is lack of good will or even respect for the Word of God. .... It falsifies the witness, in hatred of Harmony, in love of Disharmony in the Bible. It is an insult to the memory of the great historian Luke, a disservice of truth and manifest haughty attitude of contempt for the Bible." Horst's article takes the position that, pace W. C. Tylor, in Luke's time, the distinction between the genitive and the accusative in this instance had disappeared, and he does a thorough analysis of other Grrek authors, including Epictetus (a contemporary of Paul) and the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) to make his point. Schwarz's article about Horst is more complicated. It is titled, "On Abraham Schalit, Herod, Josephus, the Holocaust, Horst R. Moehring, and the Study of Ancient Jewish History," and has to do with Schalit's change in attitude toward Josephus's relation to the Roman government. I'll try to see if I can grasp the gist of the argument! ************************************************************* I have a photo of Horst on the other computer, but I am suddenly unable to boot up that computer. I get a flashing question-mark instead of the Apple Icon. I guess I'll have to go to the computer shop. ************************************************************* Katie and Savanna have returned, we just had supper, we are going to watch the Red Sox in their first game against the Astros, and then go home. Phil McKean just called and will probably visit us on Sunday evening - Monday morning. Another busy weekend! I did go to the computer shop and there was a broken cable inside the computer connecting the hard drive with the computer. So that had to be replaced and fortunately all my data was preserved. I did have a back up drive also. So I found the photograph of Horst Moehring, and here it is.

Horst R. Moehring (1927-1986)