page_title: The Christ Myth
section_title: 19th-century historical criticism
hierarchical_section_title: The Christ Myth / History / 19th-century historical criticism
caption_attribution_description: David Strauß - Bild vor 1874 erstellt und daher Public Domain de:ja:画像:David Friedrich Strauss.jpg
context_page_description: The Christ Myth, first published in 1909, was a book by Arthur Drews on the Christ myth theory. Drews, along with Bruno Bauer and Albert Kalthoff, is one of the three German pioneers of the denial of the existence of a historical Jesus.
context_section_description: Drews emphatically argues that no independent evidence for the historical existence of Jesus has ever been found outside the New Testament writings. He denounces the Romanticism of the liberal cult of Jesus (Der liberale Jesuskultus) as a violation of historical method, and the naive sentimentalism of historical theology which attributes the formation of Christianity to Jesus's "great personality".
  He mentions the key names of historical criticism that emerged in the late 18th century and blossomed in the 19th century in Germany.
  Charles-François Dupuis (1742–1809) and Comte Constantin-François de Volney (1757–1820), the two French critical thinkers of the Enlightenment, who were the first to deny the historicity of Jesus on astromythical grounds, which they saw as key factors in the formation of religions including Christianity.
  David Strauss (1808–1874), who, at 27, pioneered the Search for the Historical Jesus with his Life of Jesus in 1835 (of 1,400 pages) by rejecting all the supernatural events as mythical elaborations.
  Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), the first academic theologian to affirm the non-historicity of Jesus. He claimed that Mark was the original Gospel, and the inventor of the historicity of Jesus. He traced the impact of major Greco-Roman ideas on the formation of the NT, especially the influence of Stoic philosophy (Seneca). Bruno Bauer's scholarship was buried by German academia, and he remained a pariah, until Albert Kalthoff rescued him from neglect and obscurity.
  Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), an expert scholar of the Torah/Pentateuch, who was a leader in historical and source criticism;
  William Wrede (1859–1906), the promoter of the Messianic Secret in Mark, and who confirmed Bruno Bauer's claim that Mark was the real creator of Christianity;
  Johannes Weiss (1863–1914), the first exegete of the Gospels to attribute an apocalyptic vision to Jesus, accepted by Schweitzer and many others. He initiated form criticism later developed by Rudolf Bultmann. Weiss gave the name of Q to the "sayings of the Lord" common to Matthew and Luke. He was considered the highest authority in his time.
  G.J.P.J. Bolland (1854–1922), a Dutch autodidact radical, interested in Hegel and von Hartmann (letters from Drews to Bolland were published in German from 1890 to 1904), who saw the origin of Christianity in syncretism by Hellenized Jews in Alexandria;
  Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), a historian of theology, who presented an important critical review of the history of the search for Jesus's life in The Quest of the Historical Jesus – From Reimarus to Wrede (1906, first edition), denouncing the subjectivity of the various writers who injected their own preferences in Jesus's character. Schweitzer devotes three chapters to David Strauss (Ch. 7, 8, and 9), and a full chapter to Bruno Bauer (Ch. 11). Ch. 10 discusses the Priority of Mark hypothesis of Christian H. Weisse and Christian G. Wilke advanced in 1838.
caption: David Strauss
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