The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss

First published:Das Leben Jesu, 1835 (English translation, 1846)

Edition(s) used:The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson and David Friedrich Strauss. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Biblical studies; critical analysis; hermeneutics

Core issue(s): Gospels; Jesus Christ; myths; reason

Overview

When David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, there were two ways in which the life of Jesus was commonly interpreted. The traditional approach, followed by many, including J. T. Beck at the University of Tübingen in Germany, was to simply take the Gospels at face value. Even though many of the events in the Gospels were contrary to modern understandings of the natural world, readers were called on to accept them through faith. Therefore the supernatural events in the Gospels, such as virgin birth, miracles, and the resurrection of the dead, were taken literally.

The second approach was a rationalist one that often led to an outright rejection of the Gospels. In 1778, Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger (The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples, 1970) began with the assumption that the supernatural events mentioned in the Gospels were simply incorrect perceptions or mistaken interpretations. Therefore the virgin birth must be explained by a young woman trying to cover up an unwanted pregnancy; the miracle of Jesus’ walking on water by confusion caused by fog hiding the shoreline, and the resurrection by the disciples’ removal of the body of Jesus. Reimarus sought to show that the aim of the disciples was a grand deception and that the role of Jesus was that of a deluded eschatological visionary. Heinrich Paulus followed in 1828 with his own rationalist life of Jesus, as did Karl Hase in 1829.

In The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Strauss sought a middle ground between the traditional literalist view and the Enlightenment rationalist view. Four years earlier he had traveled to Berlin to study with the systematic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who stressed that critical scholarship could be employed for the Church in a positive way. The key was to focus authority on the person of Jesus rather than on Scripture itself. As Schleiermacher’s Das Leben Jesu (1864; The Life of Jesus, 1975) would not be published for another thirty years, Strauss was the first to publish a major work incorporating this approach.

Strauss had hoped to study with the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but he arrived in Berlin in 1831 to news that the philosopher was on his deathbed, and his goal was never fulfilled. One of Strauss’s earlier teachers, Ferdinand Christian Bauer, had taken Hegel’s dialectical approach to explain the progress of early church history. Bauer saw the thesis and antithesis of the early church in the Jewish Jesus and the Gentile Pauline church that synthesized in early Catholicism. In Bauer’s view, the evangelists were not deceptive in their presentations of Jesus, as many of the rationalists had claimed. Rather they were simply passing on the truths of the eternal Christ as couched in the language of the first century worldview—a layer that needed to be stripped away through critical historical methodology.

Here Strauss introduces the idea of myth to Gospel studies. This was a concept relatively new to the scholarly world, attributed to Christian Gottlob Heyne, who in the late eighteenth century used “myth” to understand how preliterate people preserved their beliefs and ideas. Georg Lorenz Bauer in his “Entwurf einer Hermeneutik des Alten und Neuen Testamentes” (1799; hermeneutics of the Old and New Testaments) then introduced the concept to New Testament study, arguing that careful analysis can lead to a discovery of the truth beyond the plain meaning of words. For Strauss, myth was present in the Gospels in the messianic portrait that derived from the Old Testament and in the aspirations of the early Christian community. For Strauss, the recovery of the mythical level meant the truth of Christianity. Yet myth left historicity an open question.

The Life of Jesus Critically Examined is divided into five main parts. In the introduction, Strauss explains his understanding of myth, and in the conclusion, he turns to systematic theology to describe the importance of Jesus’ life. The three main sections cover first the birth and childhood of Jesus, then his Galilean ministry, and finally his passion, death, and resurrection.

One by one, Strauss treats the various episodes of the Gospels, paying close attention to the details of the text. First, he gives the traditional supernatural interpretation, including his critique of various errors and contradictions that make such a view untenable. Then, he introduces the characteristic rationalistic explanations. In the same way that he discounts the supernatural interpretations, he ridicules the rationalist proposals as no better. He argues that only with the mythical interpretation, which he then presents, can one understand the meaning and purpose of the four evangelists. It becomes clear that, for Strauss, myth is rooted in the Old Testament story. The Gospels were written to show the fulfillment of the biblical message in the person and work of Jesus.

Strauss’s treatment of the episode of Jesus’ transfiguration on a hillside in Galilee illustrates his approach. Strauss sees the difficulties of taking the story literally because the episode presents supernatural elements, including the voice of God speaking from Heaven, a spectacular change in the appearance of Jesus, and the visitation of Elijah and Moses back from the dead. Such things simply do not happen in the modern worldview. However, the rationalists’ explanation, that such details arose out of the confusion of newly awakened disciples who were fooled by the reflection of the early morning sun shining on Jesus’ face, were perceived by Strauss as lacking in credibility. Rather Strauss argues that the meaning must be found in the Old Testament stories in which Moses had been transfigured on a mountaintop and that the evangelists were using this mythic language to proclaim that Jesus was indeed superior to Moses.

Albert Schweitzer was later to describe Strauss’s contribution to biblical scholarship as “one of the most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature,” noting that in spite of the size of his work—more than fourteen hundred pages—“he has not a superfluous phrase.” With a simple and picturesque style, as Schweitzer noted, Strauss still was able to include the most minute details about the gospel texts.

Christian Themes

From the title, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, the reader would expect a healthy historical skepticism about what one can know about the historical Jesus. Yet the contribution of Strauss to the study of the Gospels was that behind the words, there exists Jesus the Messiah. In his introduction, Strauss announced to the reader that no matter what the outcome of his critical examination, the significance of Jesus’ life would remain inviolate—a claim not accepted by his contemporaries.

In his conclusion, Strauss demonstrated that he was very uncomfortable with the various rationalist descriptions of Jesus as merely a hero or a great teacher or the exemplary moral leader. Likewise, he was to reject his own teacher Schleiermacher’s description of Jesus as a man possessing the highest God-consciousness. These were far from the orthodox confession of Jesus as true God and true man. Yet Strauss was not satisfied with the supernatural explanations of the incarnation.

The key to Christology for Strauss was in the nature of God. Strauss preferred to see God as the impersonal spirit manifested in the world and dwelling in humankind rather than as the transcendent creator figure. Christology then is not about a single individual, Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal idea. The divine spirit manifesting itself in Jesus also manifests itself in all humanity, negating the material and sensual side and freeing the spirit for a higher life. What happens in Jesus is not supernatural but natural. What the Gospels proclaim in Jesus, according to Strauss, is not unique but that which occurs in all humankind.

Sources for Further Study

Borg, Marcus. “David Friedrich Strauss: Miracle and Myth.” The Fourth R 4, no. 3 (May/June 1991). Borg treats the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes to illustrate Strauss’s approach to miracle and myth.

Grant, Robert M., and David Tracy. A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible. Rev. ed. London: SCM, 1996. Historical survey of approaches to biblical interpretation. Chapters 12 and 13 treat the nineteenth century.

Harris, Horton. David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Described by the author as a theological biography with a survey of Strauss’s career and an assessment of his theology. Includes numerous quotations from correspondence of Strauss’s contemporaries.

Krentz, Edgar. The Historical-Critical Method. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Discusses the roots of modern historical criticism in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment. Strauss is treated briefly.

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Edited by John Bowden. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2001. Originally published in 1906, this is considered the next significant work on the life of Jesus after that of Strauss, which is critiqued directly in chapters 7 and 8.