The Problem of the Lord's Supper according to the Scholarly Research of the Nineteenth Century and the Historical Accounts

The first part (Erstes Heft) of Schweitzer's planned study Das Abendmahl im Zusammenhang mit dem Leben Jesu und der Geschichte des Urchristentums, published by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen and Leipzig in 1901. It surveys how nineteenth-century scholarship had explained the Lord's Supper and sets those explanations against the historical accounts in the Gospels and in Paul. Schweitzer's verdict is that none of the existing views accounts for what the narratives actually report, so that the meaning of the Supper can only be found within the life of Jesus itself; the second part, Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis, published the same year, offers that sketch. An earlier printing of part of the material served as his theological dissertation. The method of this book, a history of research used to clear the ground for a historical thesis, is the one he later applied on a much larger scale to the lives of Jesus and to Paul.