Schweitzer, Lagrange, and the German Roots of Historical Jesus Research

Abstract

This study helps critically distance future scholarship from the rhetorical and religious agenda of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus , with the corollary aim of problematizing the widespread ‘Three Quests’ heuristic, so dependent upon it. The pronounced ambitions and strongly marked German Protestant social location of Schweitzer’s project will be exposed by calling to witness a very early, yet widely neglected reception of his work: Marie-Joseph Lagrange’s The Meaning of Christianity according to German Exegesis (1917). The quite different, though no less contextualized socio-religious location of this French Catholic priest will serve to highlight some significant phenomena obscured by the standard picture of the history of Jesus research, above all its deep theoretical roots in the Radical Reformation.