KUNZE, REV. JOHANN CHRISTOPH (1744-1807)

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V23 2020 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 23, Number 8, February 23, 2020, Article 18

John Lupia submitted the following information from the online draft of his book of numismatic biographies for this week's installment of his series. Thanks! As always, this is an excerpt with the full article and bibliography available online. This week's subject is early American collector Rev. Johann Christoph Kunze. -Editor

Kunze, Rev. Johann Christoph (1744-1807), sometimes Anglicized and spelled in the literature as John Christopher Kunze. He is among the earliest known numismatists in 18th century America and a contemporary of Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere (q.v.).

A German scholar of Hebrew, Kunze came to America in 1770 from England where he sailed from Halle, Germany. He was a Lutheran pastor at the Friesburg Emanuel Lutheran Church, Philadelphia. In 1773 he founded and established a German secondary school (Seminarium). In 1780 the school became the German language department of the infant Pennsylvania University. Hebrew was added to the curriculum but no students enrolled for either language. Kunze's language institute disbanded and was superseded by Franklin College in Lancaster.

Kunze's 1781 edition of the Lutheran Catechism together with that of Henrich Miller's edition of 1774 laid the foundation for the first edition of the authorized version of the Pennsylvania Ministerium catechism.

He went to NY in 1784 to teach at Columbia College. In 1786 Johann Samuel Schwerdtfeger assisted Kunze and Heinrich Moller in organizing the New York Ministerium, the second Lutheran synod in the United States. As a New York coin collector he donated to the New York Historical Society. Unfortunately, according to Kelby in 1905, his coin collection was stolen from the New York Historical Society.

His coin cabinet contained 900 coins of which 30 are gold, 400 silver, 475 copper and bronze. Among his coins are included ancient Roman, medieval and modern European and various pieces of Early American colonial New England Bay Colony silver coinage of 1652, a St. Patrick farthing, a Rosa Americana, and a Voce Populi.

Kunze had a policy where he put his duplicate coins in a chest allowing anyone to take what they pleased as long as they replaced the coin with one not in his collection.

As a writer he is credited in Dr. Morris' Bibliotheca Lutherana with eight books of which he was the author or editor, from Hymns and Poems to A History of the Lutheran Church and A New Method of Calculating the Great Eclipse of 1806.

To read the complete article, see:
KUNZE, JOHANN CHRISTOPH (https://sites.google.com/a/numismaticmall.com/www/numismaticmall-com/kunze-johann-christoph)