(++) The Quest of the Historical Jesus = Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1910 @1906 Schweitzer / Montgomery, Burkitt), book (English ed.)

<bibexternal title="The Quest for the Historical Jesus" author="Schweitzer"/> The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1910) is the English edition of Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906 Schweitzer), book. Translated from the German by William Montgomery, with a Preface by F. Crawford Burkitt.

Abstract

The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (1910) is the first English edition of Schweitzer's landmark text challenging the 19th century historians who reduced Jesus to a moralist. Schweitzer’s text marked the termination of the 19th century quest for the historical Jesus, a quest that began with Reimarus and ended with Wrede. Schweitzer defined Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet whom the Roman world crushed. The ethic of Jesus, so significant for 19th century scholars, was only an interim ethic that no longer binds the modern Christian. The meaning of Jesus for us is found not in his historical life, which turned out to be a failure, or in his ethics, which are transitory, but in the Jesus who rises in our hearts, enlivening us to do his will in the world. “Jesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time, but His spirit, which lies hidden in His words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct” (401). The Quest of the Historical Jesus is famous for its mystical musings and existential insights. Schweitzer concludes with the following oft-quoted lines: "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is." (p.401). -- Ronald Ruark, University of Michigan

“Dr. Schweitzer's book does not pretend to be an impartial survey. He has his own solution of the problems, and it is not to be expected that English students will endorse the whole of his view of the Gospel History, any more than his German fellow-workers have done. But valuable and suggestive as I believe his constructive work to be in its main outlines, I venture to think his grasp of the nature and complexity of the great Quest is even more remarkable, and his exposition of it cannot fail to stimulate us in England. Whatever we may think of Dr. Schweitzer's solution or that of his opponents, we too have to reckon with the Son of Man who was expected to come before the apostles had gone over the cities of Israel, the Son of Man who would come in His Kingdom before some that heard our Lord speak should taste death, the Son of Man who came to give His life a ransom for many, whom they would see hereafter coming with the clouds of heaven. "Who is this Son of Man?" Dr. Schweitzer's book is an attempt to give the full historical value and the true historical setting to these fundamental words of the Gospel of Jesus. Our first duty, with the Gospel as with every other ancient document, is to interpret it with reference to its own time. The true view of the Gospel will be that which explains the course of events in the first century and the second century, rather than that which seems to have spiritual and imaginative value for the twentieth century. Yet I cannot refrain from pointing out here one feature of the theory of thorough-going eschatology, which may appeal to those who are accustomed to the venerable forms of ancient Christian aspiration and worship. It may well be that absolute truth cannot be embodied in human thought and that its expression must always be clothed in symbols. It may be that we have to translate the hopes and fears of our spiritual ancestors into the language of our new world. We have to learn, as the Church in the second century had to learn, that the End is not yet, that New Jerusalem, like all other objects of sense, is an image of the truth rather than the truth itself. But at least we are beginning to see that the apocalytic vision, the New Age which God is to bring in, is no mere embroidery of Christianity, but the heart of its enthusiasm. And therefore the expectations of vindication and judgment to come, the imagery of the Messianic Feast, the 'other-worldliness' against which so many eloquent words were said in the nineteenth century, are not to be regarded as regrettable accretions foisted on by superstition to the pure morality of the original Gospel. These ideas are the Christian Hope, to be allegorised and 'spiritualized' by us for our own use whenever necessary, but not to be given up so long as we remain Christians at all. Books which teach us boldly to trust the evidence of our documents, and to accept the eschatology of the Christian Gospel as being historically the eschatology of Jesus, help us at the same time to retain a real meaning and use for the ancient phrases of the Te Deum, and for the mediaeval strain of 'Jerusalem the Golden.'"--F.C. Burkitt

Editions

Published in London [England]: Adam and Charles Black, 1910.

External links

Read Schweitzer's book on archive.org