Wilhelm Schneemelcher

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Wilhelm Schneemelcher was born on 21 August 1914 in Berlin and died on 6 August 2003 in Bad Honnef. He was a German Protestant theologian and an expert on the New Testament Apocrypha, a field about early Christian writings that did not become part of the Bible.

He worked with Hans Lietzmann researching Latin and Greek manuscripts for the Church Fathers Commission, but in 1938 the Nazi authorities, who saw him as politically unreliable because of his ties to the Confessing Church, removed him from the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He then worked for a while as a bookseller’s assistant. In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. After the war, he served as a village pastor in Stöckheim near Northeim.

From 1954 to 1979 he was a professor of patristics at the University of Bonn. He edited a Festschrift in honor of the anti-Nazi pastor Günther Dehn. Schneemelcher completely revised and expanded Edgar Hennecke’s older collection to produce Neutestamentlichen Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung in 1964, which was translated into English in 1965 as The New Testament Apocrypha by R. McL. Wilson. As editor, he coordinated the work of many scholars, including Philip Vielhauer and Georg Streck. His edition is widely regarded as the standard edition of the New Testament Apocrypha. In later years his co-editor was Joachim Jeremias.