Johann August Ernesti

Johann August Ernesti (4 August 1707 – 11 September 1781) was a German Rationalist theologian and philologist. Ernesti was the first who formally separated the hermeneutics of the Old Testament from those of the New.

Ernesti was born in Tennstedt in present-day Thuringia, where his father, Johann Christoph Ernesti, was pastor, besides being superintendent of the electoral dioceses of Thuringia, Salz and Sangerhausen. At the age of sixteen he was sent to the celebrated Saxon cloister school of Pforta (Schulpforta). At twenty he entered the University of Wittenberg, and studied afterwards at the University of Leipzig. In 1730 he was made master in the faculty of philosophy. In the following year he accepted the office of conrector in the Thomas school of Leipzig, of which Johann Matthias Gesner was then rector, an office to which Ernesti succeeded in 1734. He was, in 1742, named professor extraordinarius of ancient literature in the university of Leipzig, and in 1756 professor ordinarius of rhetoric. In the same year he received the degree of doctor of theology, and in 1759 was appointed professor ordinarius in the faculty of theology. Through his learning and his manner of discussion, he co-operated with S. J. Baumgarten of Halle (1706–1757) in disengaging the current dogmatic theology from Lutheran Orthodoxy, along with any Lutheran scholastic or mystical influences, and thus paved a way for a Rationalist revolution in theology. He died in Leipzig, after a short illness, in his seventy-sixth year.

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