The Quest of the Historical Jesus / A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede

“This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... XIX THOROUGHGOING SCEPTICISM AND THOROUGHGOING ESCHATOLOGY W. Wrede. Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien. Zugleich rin Beitrag zum Verstandnis des Markusevangeliums. (The Messianic Secret in the Gospels. Forming a contribution also to the understanding of the Gospel of Mark.) Gbttingen, 1901. 286 pp. Albert Schweitzer. Das Messianitats- und Leidensgeheimnis. Eine Skizze ties Lebens Jesu. (The Secret of the Messiahship and the Passion. A Sketch of the Life of Jesus.) Tubingen and Leipzig, 1901. 109 pp. The coincidence between the work of Wrede1 and the \"Sketch of the Life of Jesus\" is not more surprising in regard to the time of their appearance than in regard to the character of their contents. They appeared upon the self-same day, their titles are almost identical, and their agreement in the criticism of the modern historical conception of the life of Jesus extends sometimes to the very phraseology. And yet they are written from quite different standpoints, one from the point of view of literary criticism, the other from that of the historical recognition of eschatology. It seems to be the fate of the Marcan hypothesis that at the decisive periods its problems should always be attacked simultaneously and independently from the literary and the historical sides, and the results declared in two different forms which corroborate each other. So it was in the case of Weisse and Wilke; so it is again now, when, retaining the assumption of the priority of Mark, the historicity of the hitherto accepted view of the life of Jesus, based upon the Marcan narrative, is called in question. 1 William Wrede, born in 1859 at Biicken in Hanover, was Professor at Breslau. (He died in 1907.) Wrede names as his real predecessors on the same lines Bruno...”