Christoph Hoffmann

Gottlob Christoph Jonathan Hoffmann (December 2, 1815 – December 8, 1885) was born in Leonberg in the Kingdom of Württemberg, Germany. His parents were Beate Baumann (1774-1852) and Gottieb Wilhelm Hoffmann (1771-1846), chairman of the Unitas Fratrum congregation in Korntal.

Christoph Hoffmann had a Pietist-Christian background and enjoyed a Christian education with the Brethren congregation in Korntal. As a young man he studied theology in Tübingen. An opponent of the much better known liberal theologian David Friedrich Strauss, Hoffmann was elected to the First National German Parliament, which met in Frankfurt am Main in 1848.

The failure of his efforts to create a better Christian State through politics caused him to return to the roots of Christianity as expressed by Jesus. He became convinced that Jesus had called for a radical change of attitude in people. The better state of being after such a change of attitude he saw as the Kingdom of God which was to be established. To this end he applied for the position of a missionary inspector with the Protestant St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission of Basel in 1853, but left the position after two years.

Hoffmann dedicated his life to collecting people striving for such a "kingdom" and setting up communities in which their striving would express itself in daily life. Initially (1854) known as the Friends of Jerusalem, the group in June 1861 formed itself into an independent Christian religious organisation known as Deutscher Tempel, its members identified themselves as Templers. In 1868 the Templers started to create settlements in Palestine.

The Templers could buy in Jaffa some houses and land from failed colonists around George Adams, returning to the USA in 1869. On 5 March 1869 also Peter Martin Metzler, a missionary of St. Chrischona and personal acquaintance of Hoffmann from his times at the Pilgrims' Mission, sold his Jaffa-based mission station, including an infirmary and most of his real estate and other enterprises to the new colonists, before he left Jaffa.

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