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He was born at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. At twelve he was sent to the evangelical seminary at Blaubeuren, near Ulm, to be prepared for the study of theology. Amongst the principal masters in the school were Professors Kern and F.C. Baur, who taught their pupils a deep love of the ancient classics and the principles of textual criticism, which could be applied to texts in the scared tradition as well as to classical ones. In 1825 Strauss entered the University of Tübingen. The professors of philosophy there failed to interest him, but he was strongly attracted by the writings of Schleiermacher. In 1830 he became assistant to a country clergyman, and nine months later accepted the post of professor in the high school at Maulbronn, having to teach Latin, history and Hebrew.
In October 1831 he resigned his office in order to study under Schleiermacher and Georg Hegel in Berlin. Hegel died just as he arrived, and, though he regularly attended Schleiermacher's lectures,it was only those on the life of Jesus which exercised a very powerful influence upoil him. It was amongst the followers of Hegel that he found kindred spirits. Under the leading of Hegel's distinction, between Vorstellung and Begriff, he had already conceived the idea of his two principal theological works— the Leben Jesu ("Life of Jesus") and the Christliche Dogmatik ("Christian Dogma"). In 1832 he returned to Tübingen, lecturing on logic, history of philosophy, Plato, and history of ethics, with great success. But in the autumn of 1833 he resigned this position in order to devote all his time to the completion of his Leben Jesu. When it was published in 1835 he was 27 years old.
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2 Interlude, 1841 - 1860 3 Later works 4 Critique 5 External links |
The Leben Jesu
The Life of Jesus Critically Examined was a sensation. One reviewer called it "the Iscariotism of our days" and another "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell." When he was elected to a chair of theology in the University of Zürich, the appointment provoked such a storm of controversy that the authorities decided to pension him before he began his duties.
What made his book so controversial was his analysis of the miraculous elements in the gospels as "mythical" in character. The Leben Jesu closed a period in which scholars wrestled with the miraculous nature of the New Testament in the rational daylight of the Enlightenment, one group, "rationalists" finding logical rational explanations for the apparently miraculous occurences, the other group, the "supernaturalists" defending not only the historical accuracy of the biblical accounts, but also the element of direct divine intervention. Strauss. Straus dispels the actuality of the stories as "happenings" and reads them solely on their mythic level. Moving from miracle to miracle, he understood all as the product of the early church's use of Jewish ideas about what the Messiah would be like, in order to express the conviction that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. With time the book created a new epoch in the textual and historical treatment of the rise of Christianity. The reader may want to run a word search on his name to judge whether the controversy remains alive today.
In 1837 Strauss replied to his critics (Streuschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu). In the third edition of the work (1839), and in Zwei friedliche Blättler, he made important concessions to his critics, which he withdrew, however, in the fourth edition (1840). In 1846 the book found an outstanding English translator in George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who later wrote Middlemarch and other great novels. It was her first published book and has recently been republished (see Reference). In 1840 and the following year Strauss published his Christliche Glaubenslehre (2 vols.), the principle of which is that the history of Christian doctrines is their disintegration.
Interlude, 1841 - 1860
With his Glaubenslehre Strauss took leave of theology for over twenty years. In August 1841 he married Agnes Schebest, a cultivated and beautiful opera singer of high repute, who was not suited to becoming the wife of a scholar and literary man like Strauss. Five years afterwards, when two children had been born, they agreed to separate. Strauss resumed his literary activity by the publication of Der Romantiker auf dem Thron der Cäsaren, in which he drew a satirical parallel between Julian the Apostate and Frederick William IV of Prussia (1847).
In 1848 he was nominated member of the Frankfurt parliament, but was defeated. He was elected for the Württemberg chamber, but his action was so conservative that his constituents requested him to resign his seat. He forgot his political disappointments in the production of a series of biographical works, which secured for him a permanent place in German literature (Schubarts Leben, 2 vols., 1849; Christian Morklin, 1851; Nikodemus Frischlin, 1855; Ulrich von Hutten, 3 vols., 1858-1860, 6th ed. 1895.
Later works
In 1862, with a biography H.S. Reimarus he returned to theology, and two years afterwards (1864) published his Leben Jesu für des deutsche Volk (13th ed., 1904). It failed to produce an effect comparable with that of the first Life, but the replies to it were many, and Strauss answered them in his pamphlet Die Halben lend die Ganzen (1865), directed specially against Schenkel and Hengstenberg.
His Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (1865) is a severe criticism of Schleiermacher's lectures on the life of Jesus, which were then first published. From 1865 to 1872 Strauss lived in Darmstadt, and in 1870 published his lectures on Voltaire. His last work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872; English translation by M Blind, 1873), produced almost as great a sensation as his Life of Jesus, and not least amongst Strauss's own friends, who wondered at his one-sided view of Christianity and his professed abandonment of spiritual philosophy for the materialism of modern science. To the fourth edition of the book he added a Nachwort als Vorwort (1873). The same year symptoms of a fatal malady appeared, and death followed on the 8th of February 1874.
Critique
Strauss's approach was analytical and critical, without philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy; his work was rarely constructive. His Life of Jesus was directed against not only the traditional orthodox view of the Gospel narratives, but likewise the rationalistic treatment of them, whether after the manner of Reimarus, whose book The Aim of Jesus and His Disciples (1778), is often marked as beginning the historical study of Jesus and the Higher criticism or that of Paulus. The mythical theory that the Christ of the Gospels, built upon meager outlines of personal history, was the unintentional creation of early Christian Messianic expectations, Strauss applied with merciless rigour to the Gospel narratives. But his operations were based upon fatal defects, positive and negative. He held a narrow theory as to the miraculous, a still narrower as to the relation of the divine to the human, and he had no true idea of the nature of historical tradition, while, as F. C. Baur complained, his critique of the history reported in the gospels was not based on thorough examination of the manuscript traditions of the documents themselves.
As Albert Schweitzer wrote in The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906), Strauss's arguments "filled in the death-certificates of a whole series of explanations which, at first sight, have all the air of being alive, but are not really so."
"The details of Strauss's argument, his use of Hegelian philosophy, and even his definition of myth, have not had a lasting impact," Marcus Borg has suggested (see Links). "Yet his basic claims—that many of the gospel narratives are mythical in character, and that "myth" is not simply to be equated with "falsehood" — have become part of mainstream scholarship."
Strauss's works were published in a collected edition in 12 vols., by E Zeller (1876-1878), without his Christliche Dogmatik. His Ausgewahle Briefe appeared in 1895. On his life and works, see Zeller, David Friedrich Strauss in seinem Lebes und seinen Schriften (1874); A Hadsrath, D.F. Strauss und der Theologie seiner Zeit (2 vols., 1876-1878); FT Vischer, Kritische Gänge (1844), vol. i., and by the same writer, Altes und Neues (1882), vol. iii.; R Gottschall, Literarische Charakterkopfe (1896), vol. iv.; S Eck, D. F. Strauss (1899); K Harraeus, D. F. Strauss, sein Leben und seine Schriften (1901); and T Ziegler, D. F. Strauss (2 vols., 1908-1909).
This entry is still largely from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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