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

Schweitzer's history of the attempts to write a life of Jesus, from Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the eighteenth century to William Wrede's Messianic Secret of 1901, published by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen in 1906. Chapter by chapter he examines the rationalist, liberal and sceptical lives and finds that each scholar reconstructed a Jesus in his own image. He closes the field with a choice between Wrede's thoroughgoing scepticism and his own thoroughgoing eschatology, and argues for the second: Jesus expected the imminent end of the world and acted to bring it, and was crushed by the wheel of history. The book ends with the famous passage in which Jesus comes to us as one unknown. William Montgomery's English translation, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, appeared in 1910. Schweitzer enlarged the work for a second edition in 1913 under the title Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung; that edition is catalogued here as the same work. It remains the most cited book in its field.