Albert Schweitzer

Background

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was an Alsatian theologian, Bach scholar and organist, and — after retraining as a physician — founder of the hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa; he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. For this wiki he matters as the historian who ended an era: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906; expanded 3rd ed. with a new introduction) surveyed every major life of Jesus from Reimarus onward and concluded that the liberal "lives" had painted their own reflection. His constructive alternative, thoroughgoing eschatology, reads Jesus as a genuinely first-century apocalyptic figure — strange to modernity, but historically solid.

Schweitzer is this corpus's principal witness for the whole radical-critical school: his chapters on Bruno Bauer and Kalthoff, and his third-edition introduction on Arthur Drews, both preserve and rebut the classical mythicist case. His periodization made David Friedrich Strauss the discipline's watershed: the critical study of the life of Jesus "falls, immediately, into two periods, that before Strauss and that after Strauss" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. I).

Positions held in this wiki

• Jesus Mythicism Assessed — the classical refutation of mythicism. Against Bauer: "The transference of the Epistles to the second century is effected in so arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI, p.157). Against Drews: the mythical theory must "show how this fictitious non-Jewish figure was introduced into the Judaism of the early Roman Empire — a hopeless undertaking"; eschatological interpretation "has dealt the death-blow to the mythical Jesus" (Schweitzer, Introduction to the Third Edition, p.xiii).
• Historian of the debate in The Empty Tomb: Arguments and Critiques and The Pre-Pauline Creed in 1 Cor 15:3-8 — the Quest supplies the corpus record of Paulus's swoon rationalism, W. Brandt's Galilee-priority thesis, and the fate of every naturalistic half-measure between miracle and myth.

Key works in our corpus

• The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) — in corpus (rough OCR; quote sparingly and verify against the scan). Load-bearing sections: ch. I (periodization), ch. V (Paulus and rationalism), ch. XI (Bruno Bauer), ch. XVIII (Kalthoff), Introduction to the Third Edition (Drews and the Christ-myth debate).
• His studies of Paul (Paul and His Interpreters; The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle) — not in corpus.

Principal critics

• J. Gresham Machen — the evidentialist line holds that Schweitzer's purely eschatological Jesus underplays the early resurrection tradition that Machen 1921 anchors in 1 Cor 15:3-8 (bib).
• N. T. Wright — the contemporary maximalist quest accepts Schweitzer's Jewish-eschatological frame while rejecting his verdict that the quest yields no usable historical foundation; primary works not in corpus.

See also

• David Friedrich Strauss — the watershed figure of Schweitzer's periodization.
• Bruno Bauer and Arthur Drews — the mythicists whom the Quest both preserves and answers.
• Adolf von Harnack — the liberal contemporary whose "essence of Christianity" Schweitzer's eschatology undercut.