The Written Gisle

Nils Herzberg once wrote, "When I compared my notes and others’ notes after Caspari’s and Johnson’s lectures, there was a strange difference: it was difficult to follow Caspari’s lively and rambling speech; the notes were therefore often defective and incoherent; Johnson’s notes, on the other hand, were kept in good context and in good language. With Johnson’s strictly logical and rigid form, however, there was a less beneficial side for us students for which he could not be blamed—namely, that we could not free ourselves from the form he gave us. We therefore had no other choice but to swallow everything from him with skin and hair: his form was so adequate that we could not find an alternative. We therefore learned his lectures almost by heart from cover to cover, so it was not without reason when the theological students and candidates from that time were characterized as pocket editions of Gisle Johnson."

This collection explores the handwritten notes found in the Gjermunde Hoyme Papers from the NAHA Archive (https://norwegianamericanhistory.org/catalog/items/show/12291), which contain Gjermunde's first-person notes from Gisle's lectures. These notes are from 1850-1851, and are thus from within a year of Gisle's start as a lecturer at the Universitet i Kristiana. In addition to the notes on Dogmatics, Gjermunde has also preserved notes from Gisle's Pauline Concept of Doctrine and his History of Newer Theology, which are heretofore unpublished.