Reimarus,Schweitzer,and Modern Theology

Albert Schweitzer judged Reimarus’ reconstruction of Jesus and Christian origins ‘perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus.…’ ¹ Schweitzer’s original German title Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906) was understandably relegated to the sub-title in W. Montgomery’s English translation, but his book set Reimarus on a pedestal alongside Strauss as stand-out figures in modern historical Jesus research. John Bowden’s version of Schweitzer’s expanded second edition (here called Quest B) revises Montgomery (Quest A) and takes some of the shine off his purple passages, but neither Schweitzer nor Bowden much altered the chapter on Reimarus. It remains one of the most scintillating chapters in an intermittently dazzling book.

A memorial for Reimarus (b.1694) on the 250^th anniversary of his death on 1^st March, 1768 needs again to challenge Schweitzer’s account of the seventh Wolfenbüttel fragment ‘Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger (On the Aim of Jesus and that of his Disciples)’, published by Lessing in 1778 from an earlier version of what became the then still anonymous manuscript, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für vernünftige Verehrer Gottes (Apologia or Defence for Rational Worshippers of God).

This masterpiece of early biblical criticism is the reason for celebrating Reimarus today. He was an outstanding Enlightenment scholar in several fields, but it is as the author of a text which anticipated some nineteenth- and more twentieth-century New Testament scholarship and raised issues which continue to pose challenges, that he is a landmark. Those who read him in G. W. Buchanan’s translation ² or Charles Talbert’s edition ³ of Lessing’s seventh Fragment (manuscript now lost) should be aware that Reimarus’ rather different final version of the whole Apologie was at last published in 1972. ⁴

The tendentiousness of Schweitzer’s account was at once noted, and has been explored in new ways by Michael J. Thate. ⁵ But the Quest is deservedly still read and parts of it continue to bewitch its readers. Both Reimarus and Wrede are made foils to Schweitzer’s own ‘consistent eschatological’ sketch of the life of Jesus, but this unhidden agenda does not prevent him from giving a stimulating account of their work. He is blind to (or rather rejects) some of what are now widely seen as the merits of Reimarus and Wrede, but rightly highlights the significance of both in his original title.

Schweitzer begins with a rhetorical flourish about German theology whose ‘greatest achievement … is the critical investigation of the life of Jesus’. ⁶ Such high praise might appear ironic given that the Quest is a partial demolition of most German life-of-Jesus research (plus Renan) for its modernizing of the first-century Jesus; but Schweitzer means what he says. In words which Barth and Bultmann would shortly challenge, he calls the whole enterprise of which he is part ‘the most tremendous thing which the religious consciousness has ever dared or done’, ⁷ and sees his own 1901 ‘sketch of the life of Jesus’ as solving ‘the problem’ and so ending a period in the history of religious thought. Paul Wernle’s caustic comment that the Quest could better be called Von Reimarus zu Schweitzer is not wrong. ⁸

The title of Schweitzer’s earlier book, The Secret of Messiahship and Suffering (1901), contained two chance contacts with Wrede’s title, The Messianic Secret in the Gospels (1901) lost in its translation as The Mystery of the Kingdom of God (1914). Wrede’s Messianic Secret is a landmark in gospel criticism, pioneering the history of traditions method, which sharpened historical scepticism about Mark’s portrait of Jesus. Schweitzer contrasts its ‘thoroughgoing scepticism’ with the ‘thoroughgoing eschatology’ of Johannes Weiss and himself. All three set aside the christological dogma, and they also agree in criticizing on historical grounds most liberal protestant historical portraits of Jesus. Their historical criticisms of religiously slanted modernizations of Jesus overlap, but Schweitzer sees in Wrede’s and his own book two different keys for unlocking the gates that hinder a historical understanding of Jesus and the Gospels.

It is more of a matter of different locks, because they see the main problem in different places: Wrede in the texts themselves, Schweitzer in the historical reality behind them. Each problem requires a different method or key. The Gospel texts can be unpicked by a history of traditions analysis, their subject-matter illuminated by history of religions research. It is now widely agreed that both the development of the synoptic tradition from Jesus to the Gospels, and the eschatological ideas of Jesus and the early church, have to be clarified. Reimarus anticipated Weiss and Schweitzer in contributing to the latter, but he also adumbrated Wrede on the former.

These achievements should not be overshadowed by his one clear mistake: explaining the origin of resurrection belief in a fraud. This daring but highly improbable hypothesis could be brushed aside by Schweitzer. It had already been superseded by that of Strauss. ⁹ But resurrection faith was the central issue between Reimarus and his opponents, and it remains central to Christian theology. His explanation must remain on the table as the significance of his Apologie is explored by reference to his successors Strauss, Schweitzer, Wrede, and Bultmann. None of these accepted his fraud hypothesis, but they did not object in principle to his looking for a non-supernaturalist, historical account of the emergence of resurrection faith.

Schweitzer praises Reimarus and Strauss for recognizing the importance of eschatology, but those two pioneers also anticipated the historical scepticism of Wrede and Bultmann. These four all saw traces of two distinct systems in the Gospels: what Jesus believed and did, and what the early church thought about him. Few scholars would now disagree. Reimarus was not the first to see this. His achievement lies in his detailed historical argumentation and in what he assigned to each ‘system’. His explanation of the second is easily refuted, and was rightly dismissed by Schweitzer.

These differences between Jesus and gospel records were minimized by most later liberals as they were by the orthodox. Both made historical judgments about Jesus which supported their own theologies, the liberals drawing on Mark and Q, the orthodox more from John. But those differences between Jesus and the Synoptic Gospels, especially Matthew, were also minimized by Schweitzer whose historical construction of Jesus posed even deeper problems for liberal protestantism than the historical scepticism of Wrede and Bultmann. The differences seen by Reimarus, Strauss, and Wrede can be explained and justified as stemming from the difference between pre- and post-resurrection faith perspectives. But Reimarus denied both the resurrection and the apostles’ good faith. All four saw differences between Jesus and the post-resurrection community, but only Reimarus explained them in a way that would falsify Christianity. Bultmann and his pupils recognized that these differences were more serious than generally recognized, but answered the threat by showing that the historical discontinuities between Jesus and the early church were outweighed by the theological continuities.

Schweitzer thought the ‘two systems’ of Jesus and the early church coalesced when their shared eschatological world of thought was recognized, but that this undermined liberal protestant life-of-Jesus theology. The weaknesses of most modern writing on Jesus lay (he thought) in its failure to recognize and make sense of this alien phenomenon. There is substantial truth in Schweitzer’s diagnosis, but his denial, shared by conservatives, of any great chasm between Jesus and the earliest church, and their optimistic view of the historicity of Matthew, had already been undermined by Reimarus, Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Holtzmann, and Wrede, and would be further disputed by Wellhausen and Bultmann.

Schweitzer had no more interest than Reimarus in defending Christian belief in the resurrection by appealing to Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb, as Sherlock had done to great acclaim in 1729, ¹⁰ but his dependence on Matthew’s timing of the mission of the Twelve (Matt. 10), and also the eschatological Son of Man sayings, had been questionable in Strasbourg since the 1860s. ¹¹ Schweitzer knew that critical evaluation of the sources must precede the construction of historical portraits of Jesus, but was less suspicious than Reimarus. The contradictions that, as Reimarus and Strauss showed, cannot be harmonized are less significant than they and their orthodox opponents thought. However, they did suggest some distance between Jesus and the Gospels. Wrede’s history of traditions approach would confirm that and create belated appreciation for the intuitions and arguments of Reimarus and Strauss.

Reimarus was surely wrong in some respects about both Jesus and the early church. Writing prior to the achievements of gospel criticism in the late eighteenth century he thought Matthew’s gospel was early and apostolic. The story of the guard at the tomb, uncorroborated by the other apostolic Gospel, Paul, Mark, or Luke, looked suspicious. Such strong evidence for the truth of resurrection belief would surely have been adduced if available. Reimarus’ conclusion that the gospels are not as they stand reliable history was strengthened in 1835 by Strauss’s clinical dissection of the four gospels and in 1921 by Bultmann’s analysis of each item in the synoptic tradition.

Contradictions are not conclusive. One account might be accurate, and where it is the only account it is not contradicted. But the story of the guard is clear. Even N. T. Wright’s impressive Sherlockian defence of resurrection belief by appeal to historical evidence allows us ‘historically speaking’ to

raise our eyebrows a bit at the easy collaboration of the Pharisees and chief priests, and of the two together with Pilate.… The story, obviously, is part of an apologia for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is an attempt to ward off any suggestion that the disciples had in fact stolen the body, which must have seemed the most natural explanation for the emptiness of the tomb. ¹²

Few would now disagree, ¹³ or even blame the late first-century evangelist for including the story, but like Reimarus’ assumption that the cousins knew each other leading him to suggest collusion between John the Baptist and Jesus, pre-critical dating and authorship suggested the fraud theory. The apostle Matthew must have known he was inventing.

This mistaken explanation of resurrection ‘faith’ does not discredit historians’ non-supernaturalist explanations in general. Those who accept the empty tomb story (as many do not) may leave it unexplained or may with Mary and Renan guess that the gardener had removed the body. That is also perhaps improbable, but it is not open to the obvious historical objections facing the fraud theory, proposed already in the second century by Celsus, and more recently by the English deists Woolston and Annet. Strauss’ naturalistic account is more persuasive (see n. 9, above).

Schweitzer praised Strauss for pressing Reimarus’ alternative between the modern historian’s natural, and the orthodox believer’s supernaturalist explanations. Among the former, the fraud theory had a short shelf life, but the historical arguments adduced in support of the supernaturalist explanation of the divine event did not convince Annet or Reimarus. They took Sherlock’s arguments seriously enough to examine them and find them wanting.

That argument about possible historical evidence for resurrection belief held no interest for Schweitzer, whose Christianity centred on the historical figure of Jesus and his influence, without reference to his resurrection. For most Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is central, but that need not imply the historicity of the gospel endings. In denying the latter Reimarus thought he was falsifying resurrection belief, but 1 Cor. 15 suggests otherwise. The origins and basis of resurrection faith are less clear than either he or his opponents thought.

Schweitzer’s devotion to Jesus differed from both the unbelief of Reimarus and the belief of orthodox Christianity. His distaste for mystery and dogma motivated his historical research, but his results were as uncomfortable for his own inherited liberal protestantism as for Christian orthodoxy. He saw in Reimarus a ‘piece of Deistical polemics’, but also ‘a historical performance of no mean order’, and painted him in his own image as valiant for a ‘historical truth’, which ‘had taken possession of his mind with such overwhelming force’ that he could not believe that his contemporaries’ religious ‘beliefs were, as they professed to be, directly derived from the preaching of Jesus’. ¹⁴ That is surely autobiographical, but whereas Reimarus was undermining all Christianity, Schweitzer’s target was smaller and did not need Reimarus’ construction. He thought the eschatology of Jesus was shared by his disciples after his death. If it is impossible for modern Christians, that calls for theological revision, not a rejection of Christianity.

Reimarus’ ‘historical truth’ about (1) the political messianism of Jesus, and (2) the fraudulent basis of Christian origins, was not Schweitzer’s, and his target was traditional Christian orthodoxy, not liberal protestant lives of Jesus. Schweitzer enlisted Reimarus’ support in his own campaign by adopting but modifying or (supposedly) correcting the historical argument that was central to Reimarus’ account of Jesus, and he dismisses as ‘makeshift’ what Reimarus thought decisive. He emphasized that Reimarus (1) ‘was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological’, but added (2) that ‘he saw the eschatology in a wrong perspective. He held that the Messianic ideal which dominated the preaching of Jesus was that of a political ruler’. ¹⁵ But Schweitzer then asserted (3) that ‘all (Reimarus’) other mistakes are the consequence of this fundamental error’, especially his ‘mere makeshift hypothesis to derive the beginnings of Christianity from an imposture’. ¹⁶

Schweitzer’s first point is important, and his second point arguable, but the third is the circular product of his own agenda. The fraud hypothesis can be seen as a consequence of Reimarus’ picture of Jesus only if (as Schweitzer thought) there was no real difference between the message of Jesus and that of his disciples soon after his death, and therefore no ‘chasm’ for historians to bridge by this or any other suggestion. But as Reimarus rightly insisted, the resurrection of Jesus was a new and central element in the apostles’ earliest preaching and subsequent Christian faith, and historians can try to explain the emergence of this belief in a non-supernatural way. Historical explanations need not conflict with believers’ religious accounts which speak of God, but Reimarus’ explanation did. Scepticism about the Gospels’ Easter narratives is compatible with their belief shared by every New Testament writer, in Jesus crucified and risen, but Reimarus’ impugning the first witnesses’ honesty is not. If his ‘makeshift hypothesis’ were correct, traditional Christianity would be finished, as he assumed.

Reimarus, Strauss, and Schweitzer have much in common as critical historians who set aside supernaturalist explanations and who also recognized the importance of messianism or eschatology for Jesus and early Christianity—while themselves, as modern theologians, rejecting it. Reimarus does not use the word ‘eschatology’, but Jewish messianism can be classified as part of ‘prophetic eschatology’. However, as Schweitzer insists, Reimarus’ this-worldly and political eschatology is quite different from the end of this world scenario which he himself attributed to Jesus, following Johannes Weiss, who also understood ‘the events related to God’s establishment of the Kingdom’ in apocalyptic terms, especially the appearance of the heavenly, Danielic Son of man, the Parousia, cosmic transformation, or a rebirth (Matt. 19:28) bringing about a new heaven and a new earth, the last judgment, hell, and heaven. ¹⁷ In a footnote added in his second edition (1913) Schweitzer explained that in historical study, unlike dogmatics, ‘eschatology’ serves ‘to express the special colouring which is given to the world view of Jesus and his followers by the expectation of an imminent end to the world.’ ¹⁸ That is different from Reimarus, who in the early version available to Lessing suggested that Jesus envisaged a return in the clouds, but only at the Last Supper, when martyrdom seemed inevitable. ¹⁹

Schweitzer’s third judgment, that Reimarus’ fraud theory was ‘the consequence of this fundamental error’ about Jesus’ eschatology, reflected his own focus on eschatology and his lack of interest in Reimarus’ supernaturalist target (biblical revealed religion), which for Schweitzer was long dead. Schweitzer judged Reimarus’ need for a bridge over the ‘chasm’ between Jesus and the church as the consequence of a failure to see that Jesus at a turning-point in his ministry, and his disciples after his death, agreed about the Parousia. Reimarus thought they did not, and he also saw other substantial differences between the earthly messianic beliefs of Jesus and the spiritual salvation promised by the earliest church. If he was even partly right, these differences need explaining historically and justifying theologically. Christian orthodoxy might welcome Schweitzer’s dismissal of Reimarus’ ‘chasm’ along with his religiously damaging historical explanation of that, but the former is not so easily disputed as the latter, and Schweitzer himself saw a chasm between Jesus (and his first followers) and the later New Testament writings where eschatology receded as Christianity became hellenized. He also as a historian insists on the chasm between Jesus and early Christianity (including Paul), who expected the Parousia, and on the other hand modern people who do not. But unlike Reimarus, who was content to see Christianity wither, he (like Bultmann) wanted to bridge this second chasm. ²⁰

Schweitzer’s primary goal was to understand Jesus historically, but the Quest is structured and argued to support his historical conclusions about Jesus by means of a history of some modern theology. Reimarus’ historical construction of Christian origins had sought to demonstrate the radical difference between Jesus’ nationalistic Jewish messianism and the apostles’ spiritual religion of redemption which became Christianity. It saw the apostles’ promise of Jesus’ imminent return on the clouds as bogus support for a new religion and a way of gaining converts, not the mother of early Christian theology that it was for Schweitzer and, later, Käsemann. Reimarus’ placing the two Jewish eschatologies in sequence, attributing one to Jesus, the other to the apostolic church, was contradicted by Schweitzer who conflated them in Jesus’ mind and saw the apostles maintaining this until the delay of the parousia rendered it implausible.

These two historians of Christian origins agreed that eschatology was important for Jesus and the early church, but disagreed about both the character of Jesus’ eschatology and the reasons for the apocalyptic eschatology of the early church. Schweitzer’s claim that Reimarus’ work ‘rests on a recognition of the exclusive importance of eschatology, such as only recurs again in Johannes Weiss’ ²¹ is tendentious. His narrative account of some 18^th- and 19^th-century theology, like Barth’s, ²² reinforces his own theory about Jesus, but it inadequately represents Reimarus’ intentions. Unlike Weiss in 1892, these three very different theologians intended their historical work to support their (different) modern religious interests. Schweitzer inherited Reimarus’ weapon against Christian orthodoxy (critical historical investigation of the Bible) and sharpened it by the increased knowledge of early (apocalyptic) Judaism. His account of Jesus wielded this weapon against a new target: recent liberal protestant lives of Jesus. This ‘apocalyptic Jesus’ theory may contain more truth than some recent scholarship allows, and Schweitzer’s campaign against what Henry Cadbury later called ‘the peril of modernizing Jesus’ has theological as well as historical merit, ²³ but Reimarus was frying different fish. Schweitzer’s agenda led to flaws in his history of modern theology.

Historians select evidence they consider relevant and are more focussed on their historical argument than on their debates with other scholars. Schweitzer provides some reliable information about Reimarus and his successors in gripping vignettes but he was not writing a Quest of the Historical Reimarus, and his perspective is apparent in a few eccentric judgments and in what is not explained. The deist Reimarus constructed a history of Jesus and of Christian origins which made a case against revealed religion and ecclesiastical Christianity. Schweitzer wrote some modern history of theology to reinforce a different historical thesis about Jesus. ²⁴ Neither intentionally bends the biblical evidence, and Reimarus’ treatment of it is astonishingly perceptive for its time, whereas Schweitzer was vulnerable (as Weiss was not) to the criticisms of Holtzmann and others. ²⁵

What Schweitzer made of Reimarus is still worth reading. The great Alsacian beat the great Hamburger’s sword against an outdated theology into part of a ploughshare that ‘cleared the site for a new edifice of religious thought.’ ²⁶ He saw that this clearance work had a ‘negative’ role in the history of theology: ‘There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus.’ ²⁷ His conclusion that his own and Weiss’ work, and that of Wrede ‘have only completed the work of destruction’ ²⁸ which Reimarus (and his English deist predecessors) had begun was deleted from the second edition, but retains its partial truth. All four giants had been radicalized by historical study of the Bible and seen how destructive of some contemporary Christianity their results were. The pioneer Reimarus did not choose martyrdom by publishing them, but he was confident that truth would prevail and so ensured the posthumous publication of his manuscripts.

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For a Christian theology which takes biblical scholarship seriously both eschatology and the question of the gospels’ historicity matter. In recognizing the difference between Jesus and early Christianity subsequent research has given more credit to Reimarus as corrected by Strauss and developed by Wrede than to Schweitzer’s trust in the reliability of so much Matthean material. The relative importance for Jesus of prophetic messianism, apocalyptic, and cosmic eschatology is still debated, but many have judged the theory of Weiss and Schweitzer one-sided. The case for interpreting Jesus’ key phrase ‘the kingdom of God’ in terms of Dan. 7 or other apocalypses would be strong if the eschatological Son of man sayings stem from Jesus himself, as Mark 8:38 may do, but as the Danielic 13:26 and 14:62 probably do not. If the key Matthean sayings are the product of post-resurrection prophecy or reflection, ²⁹ Jesus’ kingdom proclamation may, as Reimarus thought, refer to God’s rule over his people and their earthly hope of restoration, which was sometimes expressed in messianic terms. Its non-violent messianic and moral dimensions may originally have been more earthly and political than cosmic, however valid their expansion to embrace the whole creation must have seemed to those convinced of the resurrection or heavenly exaltation of Jesus. There is no denying the eschatological dimension of Jesus’ and Christians’ talk of God, but Schweitzer’s making it the key to everything might have been a mistake. As historians, we do not know for sure and as theologians we have several options.

Most talk of God is metaphorical or analogical and has doxological, moral, political, and eschatological aspects. The promise of God’s ultimate victory empowers believers to engage with confidence in God’s project for this world and to express their joyful hope in community praise and thanksgiving, but personal moral transformation is also required as individuals respond to the God of Israel, whom they acknowledge in Jesus’ word and deed. Reimarus’ theory of a failed political messiah left him room to admire the moral challenge of Jesus whereas Schweitzer had to look beyond his ‘historical Jesus’, deluded by chiliastic fantasies, in order to retain and be inspired by his heroic example, some of his aphorisms, and his ‘spirit’.

Both historians deserve moral admiration and may even have a theological point. Matthew emphasizes God’s judgment in order to reinforce Jesus’ moral demands, and the end of this present evil age was surely anticipated in Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom that God will soon establish. These expressions of human accountability and the urgency of God’s challenge were taken as seriously by Reimarus as by Schweitzer. ³⁰ They do not depend on Jesus imagining a destructive end of the world inflicted by his heavenly Father, whose good providence he inhabited and taught. But Jesus foresaw historical disaster resulting from human failure to acknowledge God, and that again looks credible.

Reimarus’ resurrection fraud hypothesis did not affect his messianic picture of Jesus. He thought Jesus was more reticent about the revolutionary political implications of the soon to be realized worldly deliverance of Israel than the apostles with their ‘two swords’ (Luke 22:38) were, ³¹ and he regretted the shadow they cast over Jesus’ wonderful moral teaching. His mistaken historical judgments are as outdated as the arguments of his theological opponents. His achievement, confirmed by Strauss and Wrede (among others) but disputed by Schweitzer, lay in confirming the English deists’ recognition of differences between Jesus and the religion of the apostolic church, and finding both ‘systems’ embedded in the gospels. This posed the problem which Bultmann considered central for New Testament theology: how the Proclaimer became the Proclaimed. It is implied in Wellhausen’s truism that ‘Jesus was not a Christian; he was a Jew’, and in Loisy’s remark that ‘Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God; it was the church that came.’ None of these formulations does full justice to the historical and theological continuities between Jesus and the earliest church, but they all acknowledge Reimarus’ contrast without entertaining his explanation of it. 250 years have nuanced the issue as it has been explored through various topics still central to New Testament study and so to Christian theology, notably the differences between Jesus and Paul, sharpened by Wrede, and the distinction between the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ, from Strauss and Kähler to the ‘new quest of the historical Jesus’.

These theologically loaded historical discussions lost traction where biblical studies diversified into less theological channels, but Reimarus marked out a territory that was to become more prominent in the late twentieth century: the Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers. That had rarely been denied, but was often ignored. Reimarus made it clear long before Geiger, Wellhausen, or Geza Vermes, albeit in terms that did not inspire successors for about a century. Few would now dispute that New Testament study requires specialists who are more competent in Judaica than most theologians have been, as well as familiar with the classical world. Reimarus and later Colani made that clear in contradictory historical arguments based on the variety in Jewish messianism. He was like Wellhausen an orientalist and Old Testament scholar, and what he achieved in gospel criticism owed much to his knowledge of canonical and non-canonical Jewish writings.

He did not draw the theological consequences that most Christians have drawn: that the Old Testament is foundational to Christian talk of God even though it does not define the identity of Christianity in the same way as the New, or does so mainly as mediated by the New and understood from that perspective. His moral and rational criticism of the Hebrew Bible (which following convention he still called the Old Testament) shows little of the antisemitism common in the Enlightenment. His language describing early Judaism contains anti-Semitic potential, but he is far more hostile to the apostles who reinvented Jesus than to those (including Jesus) who followed the law of Moses. His own deist God was not the God of the Old Testament or the New, and he saw here an either/or where most theologians have found more room for combination and compromise. His deepest theological question to a contemporary Christianity that sides with the Hamburg Hauptpastor, Goetze against Lessing is whether that stark alternative between tradition and modernity is appropriate, or whether historical study of the theological spectrum with its diverse moral, doctrinal, and liturgical strands can encourage religious communities to live with disagreements about some issues which still appear hopelessly divisive.

Reimarus and his orthodox opponents were agreed that belief in Jesus’ resurrection was pivotal to New Testament faith and to most subsequent Christianity. They agreed (against Schweitzer) in assuming that this is axiomatic for Christianity while disagreeing about its truth. In their historical argument about the reliability of the gospel accounts of the empty tomb and resurrection appearances Reimarus got more right than his contemporaries. The contradictions and fictional elements are palpable, though they do leave open the possibility of the earliest (pre-Markan) tradition containing some historical evidence for women discovering an empty tomb. The gospels’ theological explanation of this are widely agreed to lie outside the historian’s remit. Reimarus agreed with his orthodox opponents on how physically the supposed supernatural event standing behind the biblical witness is to be understood, but he disputed the historical reliability of the stories and discounted their divine interventionist explanation of what most Christians still insist was a divine event.

Successors on both sides of this divide have contributed to some convergence, with nearly everyone now granting the good faith of the disciples, and many Christians being open-minded or agnostic about the precise historical origins and character of their resurrection faith while continuing to affirm it. Many allow that the first disciples probably understood it differently from themselves on account of differing worldviews. Some Christians question the ‘physicality’ of Jesus’ resurrection as sounding too like a resuscitation, and prefer St. Paul’s spiritual bodies to the materialistic language of Luke and perhaps John. Others insist on the theological content implied by a physical resurrection and consequent empty tomb regardless of the historical evidence. Whether the truth of Christian resurrection belief depends on this physical ‘sign’ is disputed. Some are reluctant to risk a collision between their axiom that ‘with God all things are possible’, and a worldview which makes some things sound incredible.

These historical and theological disagreements among Christians are compatible with all sides confessing (against Reimarus) that the crucified Jesus is ‘risen’, but understanding the implications of this metaphorical language differently. Metaphorical language can have truth-conditions attached. Modern theologians who disagree about the historical and physical entailments of Jesus’ resurrection, while insisting on its centrality to their faith, can agree in disagreeing with Reimarus, and in wanting to say more than Strauss or Schweitzer could about this mysterious divine event.

A theological discussion with these three giants may not get far because Christian talk of the ‘resurrection’ of the crucified Jesus, or his ‘exaltation’ (to change the metaphor for the same reality) is talk of God, and here the three owed more to modern philosophy than to the biblical witness. But whether talk of God requires historical or metaphysical foundations may be suggestive about Jesus’ resurrection. Recognizing that this language is related to a future hope for humanity as well as to confidence in a crucified Messiah and his present operations through divine Spirit invites the question how far language creates as well as communicating reality. Can the story alone persuade anyone of its truth when narrated by committed members of the Christian community? How far does it require supporting evidence or arguments?

When it comes to believing impossible things before breakfast, Reimarus had a low pain threshold. He and Strauss were more comfortable discussing ‘fate, foreknowledge and free-will’. As a student Schweitzer promised himself that luxury only up to the age of 30. Rather than losing himself in the ‘endless maze’ of a university career he would then follow Jesus in more practical ways. None of the three could know that more recent understandings of the language of faith and of the resurrection itself would soften their disagreements with orthodox Christianity. Reimarus posed the challenge of what constitutes a true continuity between Jesus and the early church, and between the New Testament faith and modern Christianity. Strauss and Schweitzer (and Wrede and Bultmann) answered that challenge in different ways. Reimarus would probably think they took the resurrection of Jesus less seriously than the Christians he knew. Bultmann would disagree, while understanding it quite differently from Reimarus and his more orthodox opponents. He recognized its centrality for all the New Testament witnesses and thought that Jesus was ‘raised into the kerygma’ whether the tomb was empty or not.

Bultmann also gave an answer to Reimarus’ challenge about the theological continuity between Jesus and his church, how the Proclaimer became the Proclaimed. Some of his pupils, notably Käsemann and Bornkamm, thought they could improve on his answers. Those three agreed with Reimarus, and against the radical liberal protestantism of Schweitzer and Wrede, that the resurrection of the crucified Jesus remains central to Christianity, but they understood it differently from St Luke or Reimarus. Bultmann and those pupils remained on the conservative end of the liberal protestant spectrum, claiming to be true to scripture and tradition, and preserving as integral to the structure of Christian faith the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the saving revelation of God, while understanding those five loci in new ways. Other liberal Protestants come closer to Reimarus by shifting the centre to the moral teaching and example of Jesus. This doctrinal division is often relativized by Christians with different theologies worshipping together and engaging in collaborative action. If Schweitzer could become an icon of Christian discipleship, however loose his allegiance to the confessional statements of his denomination (he remained an ordained minister), a Christian faith owing so much to the Enlightenment and Kant can surely continue to reach out to those other Enlightenment heirs to the Christian tradition, Lessing and Reimarus, despite the unattractive polemics of the Herr Hauptpastor Goetze. Christian humanism has flowered in the soil of a more strictly defined religious identity and may wither without it, but the gathered community has also needed free thought and Sachkritik for its message to be good news.