It was a time when things were beginning to settle. The dust stirred up by the great reformers of three centuries prior, was starting to float back down to earth. The Western World was slowly reconciling themselves to the fact that there were now two main Churches in the Christian world. Germany, ever the hotbed of religious happenings, was about stir up more controversy. During the 1830's when much of the Eastern and American people were in heated debate about which church was the historically true one, a German theologian took his research a step further. He doubted the very historicity of the whole Christian religion itself. Was Jesus a personage of fact, or religious fiction?

David Friedrich Strauss was born into a religious family in the Swabian town of Ludwigsburg, just six miles north of Stuttgart, on 27 January 1808. After excelling in all of his religious schooling, which had the unintended affect of putting Strauss' convictions into doubt rather than strengthening them, Strauss set out to answer the questions and face the contradictions he and other theologians had regarding the factual history of the Biblical works, and of the actual life of Jesus himself. In a massive volume of personal reflection and religious expose, Strauss attempted to come to terms with the very essence of Christianity's reality. The Life of Jesus: Critically Examined is Strauss' personal attempt at answering the questions and exposing the contradictions which were ignored and passed over for so long.

Other theologians might go only half-way; he could not. For him it was all or nothing and no half-and-half solution for the theological problems of the time could satisfy him. He ruthlessly and relentlessly exposed the often inadequate solutions which the orthodox theology had provided to the biblical problems; he mercilessly flayed the answers of the rationalists; but his hardest strictures were reserved for those who stood half-way, for those who hobbled between the old faith and the new - between the old obsolete orthodoxy and the new scientific criticism. [1]

The affects of Strauss' work were phenomenal. Some scholars separate the chronology of Germany's theology as "before 1835" and "after 1835" (the year of Strauss' publication). Strauss was "not merely the most notorious theologian of the century;" writes the scholar Horton Harris, "he was also unquestionably the most consequent." Harris traces much of the religious criticism which followed to Strauss' work. Harris claims that "the rise of historical criticism owes more to Strauss than to any other theologian, for it was as a result of his book that the critical path was opened up in a way which had not been previously possible." [2] Marilyn Massey adds to Strauss importance by stating that "political and social historians consider that, by its influence on the left-wing Hegelians and Karl Marx(1818-83), the book changed the course of European and world history." [3]

This project will look at the historical setting in which The Life of Jesus was written, the religious atmosphere in which it was accepted or critiqued, and following a path taken by Massey in her book Christ Unmasked, find and analyze and correlations between the religious uproar caused by Strauss' book and the political turmoil soon to befall Germany.

1   Harris, Horton. David Friedrich Strauss: And His Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, ix.

2   Harris, ix

3   Massey, Marilyn Chapin. Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of The Life of Jesus in German Politics. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 3.