The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (The Albert Schweitzer Library)

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.

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.