Johann Jakob Bachofen

Johann Jakob Bachofen , 1815-87, Swiss legal historian and antiquarian. Bachofen studied in Berlin, Göttingen, Paris, and Cambridge, and accepted only honorary offices in order to safeguard his independence. He analyzed myths and archaeological artifacts in an attempt to reconstruct the spiritual and social worlds of ancient societies. He postulated an evolutionary sequence of symbolical, mythical, and logical modes of thought. He also demonstrated that marriage, family, and kinship take on different forms in different societies, and assumed an evolutionary sequence of primitive promiscuity, leading to matriarchal, and finally patriarchal forms of social organization. See matriarchy . Bachofen's selected writings are included in Myth, Religion and Mother Right (1967).

Griesbach, Johann Jakob (1745–1812), NT scholar. From 1775 he was professor of the New Testament at Jena. In 1775–7 he published an edition of the Greek NT in which, for the first time in Germany, the ‘Textus Receptus’ was abandoned, and thereby laid the foundations of all subsequent work on the Greek text. His theory that St Mark was the latest of the Synoptic Evangelists was revived in the 20th cent., but is accepted by few scholars.