The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede

by Albert Schweitzer, Delbert R. Hillers

Overview

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, old arguments about what constituted true Christianity resumed with the newly refined tools and methods of linguistics, history, and comparative literature. The most sensitive questions sought to probe through the centuries and discover the original Jesus. Why, scholars asked, is the New Testament silent about most of Jesus's life? Why didn't Paul say more about the life of Jesus? To what extent was Jesus Jewish? How significant were the differences among the Gospels? What evidence could be trusted and what views justified? As scholars sought to discover and describe what they thought the "true" Jesus might be, they proved that Jesus could be many things.

In this broad survey of the efforts to establish, amend, or deny the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer presents the history of a debate about what mattered most to millions of people: If God had entered human history, what could history tell about it? Throughout the course of this heated and prolonged dispute, one retelling of the life of Jesus followed another, enjoying—in Schweitzer's phrase—“the immortality of revised editions."

Lesser writers might consider differences of opinion as signs of a hopeless enterprise, but Schweitzer instead finds immense value in the differences. Approaches and conclusions may differ, he concludes, but the quest for the historical Jesus has provided ample testimony to the importance of the effort and the rewards of the experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801859342
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	05/08/1998
Series:	The Albert Schweitzer Library
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	658,220
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.91(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952. Although he was highly gifted in science, theology, and music and as an author, Schweitzer dedicated the last six decades of his life to medicine and to a hospital he founded with his wife, Helene Breslau, in French Equatorial Africa, the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon. A true humanitarian, he used his Nobel Prize stipend to expand the hospital and to build new facilities for leprosy patients. The Johns Hopkins University Press published several of Schweitzer's books, including The Quest of the Historical Jesus, The Primeval Forest, and The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle.

Delbert R. Hillers is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. His books include Covenant: History of a Biblical Idea, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

	Foreword, 1998	ix
	Preface	xv
I	The Problem	1
II	Hermann Samuel Reimarus	13
III	The Lives of Jesus of the Earlier Rationalism	27
IV	The Earliest Fictitious Lives of Jesus	38
V	Fully Developed Rationalism--Paulus	48
VI	The Last Phase of Rationalism--Hase and Schleiermacher	58
VII	David Friedrich Strauss--The Man and His Fate	68
VIII	Strauss's First "Life of Jesus"	78
IX	Strauss's Opponents and Supporters	96
X	The Marcan Hypothesis	121
XI	Bruno Bauer	137
XII	Further Imaginative Lives of Jesus	161
XIII	Renan	180
XIV	The "Liberal" Lives of Jesus	193
XV	The Eschatological Question	223
XVI	The Struggle against Eschatology	242
XVII	Questions Regarding the Aramaic Language, Rabbinic Parallels, and Buddhistic Influence	270
XVIII	The Position of the Subject at the Close of the Nineteenth Century	294
XIX	Thoroughgoing Scepticism and Thoroughgoing Eschatology	330
XX	Results	398
	Index of Authors and Works, Including Reference to English Translations	405

Editorial Reviews

The best introduction to the subject . . . Scholarly and urbane . . . A fine example of critical exposition . . . A mystery story on the highest possible level, enlivened by Dr. Schweitzer's wit, and enriched by his effective command of simile and metaphor . . . Affords a wide view of the whole library of critical theology.
—Saturday Review

From the Publisher

The best introduction to the subject . . . Scholarly and urbane . . . A fine example of critical exposition . . . A mystery story on the highest possible level, enlivened by Dr. Schweitzer's wit, and enriched by his effective command of simile and metaphor . . . Affords a wide view of the whole library of critical theology.

Saturday Review