The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer is one of the landmark works of modern New Testament scholarship and historical Jesus research. Originally published in German in 1906, the book examines the attempts of earlier scholars to reconstruct the life and teaching of Jesus using historical and critical methods rather than relying solely upon later theological interpretations.
Schweitzer surveys a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship, analysing how successive writers attempted to discover the "historical Jesus" behind the Gospel accounts. In doing so, he famously argues that many earlier portraits of Jesus revealed as much about the assumptions and ideals of their authors as they did about the historical figure they were attempting to reconstruct.
Central to Schweitzer's own interpretation is eschatology. He argued that Jesus must be understood within the Jewish apocalyptic expectations of his historical setting and that expectations concerning the coming Kingdom of God were fundamental to Jesus' message and ministry. This challenged approaches that presented Jesus primarily as a timeless ethical teacher whose outlook closely resembled modern liberal Christianity.
The book therefore represents an important turning point in biblical scholarship. Schweitzer did not simply offer another biography of Jesus; he critically examined the entire scholarly project of recovering the historical Jesus and questioned many of the assumptions upon which previous reconstructions had been built.
The book explores:
The search for the historical Jesus
The life and teaching of Jesus Christ
The Kingdom of God and Christian eschatology
Jewish apocalyptic thought in the time of Jesus
Nineteenth-century biblical scholarship
Historical and critical approaches to the Gospels
The development of modern New Testament studies
Faith, history and theological interpretation