SOHM, RUDOLF (1841–1917), was a German Lutheran jurist and church historian. Rudolf Sohm was a member of the law faculties at Göttingen, Freiburg, Strassburg, and Leipzig universities and published in the fields of Roman and Germanic law and of canon law and church history. As a renowned jurist he entered into the controversy regarding the character of authority and organization in the primitive Christian community. In 1892 he published the first volume of his masterwork, Kirchenrecht (Canon law); the second volume was published posthumously in 1923. Sohm was politically active and in 1896 he helped Friedrich Naumann found the National-Sozial Partei (not to be confused with the later Nazi Party).

In Kirchenrecht, Sohm argued that the early church had no legal constitution. He claimed that "ecclesiastical law stands in contradiction to the nature of Ecclesia." Legal concepts, he believed, are completely inappropriate when considering the early church, which was...