Weiße was born in Neiße and attended the Pfarrgymnasium there. From 1504, he studied at the University of Cracow and became a Franciscan friar in Breslau in 1510. He and colleagues Johannes Zeising and Johann Mönch converted to the teaching of Martin Luther, and were expelled from Breslau around 1517. In 1518 they were admitted to the Bohemian Brethren. Weiße was elected as Prediger and Vorsteher of the German community of brethren in Landskron in 1522. The same year he was sent as part of a delegation to Wittenberg, to compare the Brethren's creed with that of Martin Luther. From 1525, Weiße, Zeising and Mönch favoured and promoted the teaching of Ulrich Zwingli, which caused conflict with the bishop of Prague. While Weiße and Mönch submitted to the bishop, Zeising joined the Anabaptists and was burned in Brünn in 1528 on a decree of the Holy Roman EmperorFerdinand I. In 1531, Weiße was ordained as a priest of the Unity of the Brethren on a synod in Brandeis, and at the same time made Vorsteher of the German congregations in Landskron and Fulnek. He died in Landskron in 1534.
Works
Weiße wrote theological tracts and hymn lyrics, which he partially set to music himself. He published in 1531 the hymnal of the Brethren, Ein New Gesengbuchlein, in Jungbunzlau in 1531. The first hymnal of the Brethren in German contained 157 hymns, 137 written or adapted by Weiße, on melodies mostly from the Bohemian tradition of the Brethren. Then the most extensive Protestant hymnal, it influenced other collections. It was the first hymnal structured by topics, eight sections for times of the liturgical year, praise, prayer, teaching, times of the day, children, penitence, funeral, last judgement, saints and testament. One of Weiße's hymns was used in Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion. Part II and the third scene, of the court hearing, is opened by the first stanza of a hymn for Passiontide, "Christus, der uns selig macht", summarizing what Jesus has to endure although innocent. The scene of the crucifixion ends with stanza 8 of this hymn, "O hilf, Christ, Gottes Sohn". Seven of the eight stanzas of this hymn are also used in the mid-18th-century pasticcioPassion oratorioWer ist der, so von Edom kömmt. Mauricio Kagel quoted the hymn, paraphrased to "Bach, der uns selig macht" in his oratorio Sankt-Bach-Passion telling Bach's life, composed for the tricentenary of Bach's birth in 1985. Eight hymns by Weiße are part of the current German Protestant hymnal Evangelisches Gesangbuch, including his Easter hymn "Gelobt sei Gott im höchsten Thron". His hymnal was reprinted by Konrad Ameln in 1957 as a facsimile, titled Gesangbuch der Böhmischen Brüder 1531.
Literature
Petr Hlaváček: Die Franziskaner-Observanten zwischen böhmischer und europäischer Reformation. In: Winfried Eberhard und Franz Machilek : Kirchliche Reformimpulse des 14./14. Jahrhunderts in Ostmitteleuropa. Böhlau-Verlag 2006,, pp. 321f.
