The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

About this film

LibriVox recording of Life of Jesus Critically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss, translated by George Eliot. Read by JoeD. Strauss was an early pioneer in the ongoing 'Quest of the Historical Jesus' held amongst New Testament scholars, and his Life of Jesus is one of the few landmarks in the field. The first edition of Strauss' book was published in Germany in 1835 when he was only 27 years old, and which by 1840 had gone through four editions. He focused his attention on battling two theological fronts which were current at the time - the traditional Orthodox who believed the miracles in the Gospels were to be taken as literal, yet supernatural, history; and the Rationalists, who believed that the Gospel miracles were all true but could be explained by natural and purely physical causes. Strauss rejected both camps and, in a scrupulous and detailed historical analysis of the Gospels, concluded that the Gospels are historically unreliable, not because the Evangelists were deceptive, but because they were preachers who wrote their Gospels as convictions of Faith in a mythological framework. Strauss further argued that anything that can be known of the Historical Jesus is hopeless…

Directors & creators

David Friedrich Strauss

Subjects

librivox; audiobook; religion; philosophy; criticism; jesus

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