Hermann Samuel Reimarus

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Hermann Samuel Reimarus was a German Enlightenment scholar — professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at the Hamburg academic gymnasium — whose private manuscript, published only after his death and under no name, is usually taken as the opening of the modern critical study of the historical Jesus. In his own lifetime he was a respected, unremarkable teacher and author. The work that made him a turning point he never dared print.

What he published openly was the Deism of his century, stated with care. His Principal Truths of Natural Religion (1754) argued that the existence and providence of God could be established by reason alone, from the design of the world, without recourse to revelation or miracle. That was a defensible position in the Germany of the time. The book did not threaten him.

The danger lay in a manuscript he worked on for decades and showed to almost no one — an Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God, a sustained assault on the historical reliability of the Bible. After his death the manuscript passed to his family, and through them to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, then librarian at the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel. Between 1774 and 1778 Lessing printed portions of it as the work of an unnamed author, claiming to have found them among the library’s holdings; the pieces became known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, and Reimarus’s authorship stayed hidden for decades. The publication set off one of the fiercest theological controversies of the German Enlightenment.

The last and most explosive fragment treated the aims of Jesus and his disciples. In it Reimarus drew a hard line between what Jesus himself intended and what the church afterward made of him. Jesus, on this reading, was a Jewish figure preaching an earthly, this-worldly kingdom to his own people, who died when that hope collapsed; the resurrection, the universal mission, and the divine Christ of doctrine were the later construction of disciples who had staked everything on him and could not let the cause die. The argument was corrosive and, to its readers, scandalous — but it did something that outlasted the scandal. It treated the Gospels as historical sources to be questioned like any others, and it insisted that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith might not be the same person.

That distinction is the one historians credit Reimarus with forcing into the open. When Albert Schweitzer wrote his history of the long effort to recover the historical Jesus, he began it with Reimarus, and the judgment has largely held: later scholars have rejected most of Reimarus’s particular conclusions while granting that he asked the question that organized everything after. His own positive religion was thin — a reasoned God behind a law-governed world, with the historical claims of Christianity stripped away. What survived him was not that creed but the method, and the unsettling possibility it opened.

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