Otto Bardenhewer

Bertram Otto Bardenhewer (Mönchengladbach, 16 March 1851 – Munich, 23 March 1935) was a German Catholic patrologist. His Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur is a standard work, re-issued in 2008.^[1] For Bardenhewer, a patrologist was not a literary historian of the Church Fathers, but a historian of dogmatic definitions.^[2]

Photo and signature of Otto Bardenhewer

Life

He was educated at the University of Bonn (Ph.D., 1873) and University of Würzburg, and in 1879 became privat-docent of theology at the University of Munich. In 1884 he accepted a call to Münster as professor of Old Testament. Two years later he returned to Munich, as a professor for New Testament exegesis and Biblical hermeneutics, a position he held to 1924.

Works

• Hermetis Trismegisti qui apud Arabes fertur de castigatione animæ libellus (Bonn, 1873)
• Des heiligen Hippolytus von Rom Kommentar zum Buche Daniel (Freiburg, 1877)
• Polychronius, Bruder Theodors von Mopsuestia and Bischof von Apamea (1879)
• Die pseudo-aristotelische Schrift über die reine Gute, bekannt unter dem Namen "Liber de Causis" (1882)
• Patrologie (1894)
• Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur (5 vols., 1902 to 1932).