GRABAU, JOHANN ANDREAS AUGUSTUS. See Lutherans, United States, Buffalo Synod.
GRABE, gra'be JOHANNES ERNST: Septuagint editor and patristic scholar; b. at Königsberg July 10, 1666; d. at Oxford Nov. 3, 1711. He received his master's degree at Königsberg in 1685, and then visited several other universities. At the close of 1687 he lectured on church history in Königsberg with great acceptance, but declined the offer of a theological chair because of lack of sympathy with Lutheranism. After 1694, with other Königsberg teachers and students, Grabe became involved in charges of leanings toward Romanism; and in the course of investigations which followed he accused Luther and the "Evangelicals" of apostasy from the true Church. For a time he was confined to his house, under arrest, but in May, 1695, he was allowed to leave Königsberg and went to Breslau. On the way he received tracts composed against him by electoral mandate by Baier, Spener, and Sanden. The last one prompted a defense (Abgenöthigte Ehrenrettung), but Spener, by his gentleness, won his confidence and dissuaded him from the step of transition to Rome. In 1697 he emigrated to England, where he found his ideal realized in the Anglican Church. He took up his residence at Oxford, and a royal pension and the income of an ecclesiastical office afforded him leisure for the scientific works that have rendered his
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He first published the incompleted Spicilegium patrum et hæticorum sæculorum i.-iii. (2 vols., Oxford, 1698-99), issued Justin's Apologia (1700) and Irenæus's Liber adversus hæreses (1702), and then proceeded to his most celebrated work, an edition of the Septuagint on the basis of the Codex Alexandrinus, which was preserved in England. Volumes i. and iv. were published by Grabe himself in 1707 and 1709; volumes ii. and iii., after his death, edited from his manuscript by F. Lee and G. Wigan respectively, in 1719 and 1720; the Annotationes designed in conclusion of the work remained unprinted. Grabe's comprehensive acquaintance with patristic writings proved greatly to his advantage. He sought to verify the three recensions of the Septuagint (Hesychius, Lucian, Origen) in the manuscripts of his acquaintance, and in this way marked out the course and aim of modern Septuagint researches. In his last years he felt a great longing for his home, and there is no doubt that he was a significant factor in the contemporary efforts to introduce there the Anglican hierarchy and liturgy (cf. G. J. Planck, Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, Göttingen, 1831, p. 355). His manuscript remains are preserved in the Bodleian Library.
Bibliography: P. J. Spener, Der evangelischen Kirchen Rettung, Frankfort, 1695; B. von Sanden, Beantwortung der dubiorum M. Graben, Königsberg, 1695; S. Schelwig. De eruditionis gloria in Anglia per advenas propagata in memoriam T. E. Grabii, 1712; Acta Borussica, vol. i., Königsberg, 1730; ADB ix. 536-537; DNB, xxii. 306-307; H. B. Swete, Introduction to the O. T. in Greek, pp. 125-126, 183 sqq., Cambridge, 1900.
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