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.

Engraved portrait of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at Hamburg. — eighteenth-century engraving, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He was born in Hamburg on 22 December 1694 and died there on 1 March 1768, having spent almost his whole working life in the one city. His first teacher was his father; his second, and decisively, was Johann Albert Fabricius, the great bibliographer and cataloger of Greek and Christian antiquity, whose pupil Reimarus became and whose son-in-law he later was. From Fabricius he took both a method — the patient collation of texts and the testing of a document against its own internal seams — and a library. He studied theology and the ancient languages at Jena, lectured as a Privatdozent at Wittenberg from 1716, and in 1720–21 traveled through the Netherlands and England, where the open argument of English Deism was further along than anything tolerated in Lutheran Germany. After a few years as rector of the school at Wismar he returned home in 1727 to the chair of Hebrew and Oriental languages at Hamburg’s academic gymnasium, and held it, declining better-paid offers, until he died. His public name rested on unimpeachable learning: an edition of the Roman historian Dio Cassius (1750–52), assembled from materials his father-in-law had gathered, and Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere (1760), a wide study of the instincts of animals. None of it was dangerous. The danger he kept in a drawer.

The defensible public face

What Reimarus published openly was the Deism of his century, stated with care. His Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion (1754) — the principal truths of natural religion, set out in ten treatises — argued that the existence and providence of God could be established by reason alone, from the order and contrivance of the world, without recourse to revelation or miracle. This was physico-theology: the long catalog of fitness in nature — the eye made for seeing, the instincts of the beasts, the balance of the whole — read as the signature of a wise and benevolent designer. The argument moved within the rationalist idiom of Christian Wolff then dominant in the German schools, and in public Reimarus pressed it as the friend of faith, not its enemy: natural religion lays the foundation, and a revealed religion that is true will agree with it. He took the design proof further than mere pious gesture, marshalling the new natural history and his own study of the instincts of animals into a sustained demonstration that purpose runs through the world to its smallest joints, and that purpose entails a purposer. Where the materialists of his day argued chance into the place of contrivance, he answered with the sheer density of fitness; where the enthusiasts argued from the inward witness of the spirit, he answered with a public, checkable order any rational mind could read. The book ran to many editions, was translated, and threatened him not at all. It was the kind of apologetics a careful professor could offer against the materialism on one side and, on the other, the fervor of pietism, the heart-religion that distrusted exactly this cool architecture of proof. A reasoned God behind a law-governed world was, in 1754, a posture one could defend.

The manuscript in the drawer

Behind that public face Reimarus worked for some three decades, from the 1730s to the year of his death, on a manuscript he showed to almost no one: the Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes — an apology, a defense, for the rational worshippers of God. The fair copy ran past fourteen hundred pages and grew through successive layers toward something far larger; it survives in the Hamburg town library still. Its title is exact and double-edged. It is a defense — of those who worship God by reason — and what it defends them against is the claim that they must accept, as the price of salvation, a body of historical reports it judged to be untrue. The work opens with the same positive natural religion he had printed, then turns to demolition. It sets out the moral and historical inconsistencies it finds in the Bible; it argues that miracles cannot stand as evidence, since a violation of nature’s uniform order can never be better attested than the order it suspends; it contends that the messianic prophecies were not fulfilled; and it reads the New Testament as a set of human documents at war with itself. He called those who worship by reason the true worshippers and asked, in effect, to be left in peace by a theology that would damn them.

The method throughout is the philologist’s, turned against the holiest text in his world. Reimarus reads the way Fabricius had taught him to read the historians of antiquity: he sets passage against passage, asks who is reporting and to whom and with what stake, and counts the places where a narrative cannot hold its own seams together. Applied to the Old Testament it yields a chronicle he finds morally and historically strained — a people led by a priesthood, a covenant short on the immortality and reward a rational religion would require. Applied to the miracle reports it yields the evidentiary argument that a suspension of nature’s settled course can never be better established by witnesses than the course it is said to break. Applied to prophecy it yields a tally of predictions he judges unmet. The whole is built to a single end: to clear the rational worshipper of the charge of impiety by showing that the historical claims pressed on him will not survive the tests any serious reader brings to any other ancient book. He never printed a line of it. The orthodoxy he was answering held the pulpits, the censorship, and the schools, and he had a family and a chair to lose. Caution was not cowardice but the condition of saying anything at all; the manuscript is the record of a man thinking, at full stretch, in a room with the door shut.

Through the family to Lessing

After his death the manuscript passed into the keeping of his children — the physician Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus, and the daughter Elise Reimarus, a woman of the Hamburg learned world and a friend and correspondent of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Lessing, appointed in 1770 librarian to the duke at Wolfenbüttel, obtained a copy. Between 1774 and 1778 he printed portions of it as the work of an unnamed author, presenting them as anonymous papers turned up among the ducal library’s holdings — a fiction that protected the living and the dead alike. The first piece, in 1774, pleaded for the toleration of Deists. Five more followed in 1777, among them a dismantling of the crossing of the Red Sea and a catalog of the contradictions Reimarus found in the resurrection narratives. They became known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, and Reimarus’s name stayed off them for decades.

The publication set off one of the fiercest theological quarrels of the German Enlightenment, the Fragmentenstreit. The chief pastor of Hamburg, Johann Melchior Goeze, fell on the fragments and on the librarian who had loosed them; Lessing answered with a string of polemical tracts — eleven of them, the Anti-Goeze — in which the abstract question of how a religion can rest on the accidents of history began to take the shape of his own thought. What was at issue between Lessing and Goeze was not only whether the fragments were true. It was whether the faith could be made to stand or fall with the historical accuracy of its records at all — whether, as Lessing put it in his own voice, a necessary truth of reason could ever be hostage to a contingent truth of history. That question, which the anonymous papers had forced, outran their author’s flat denials and became the property of the controversy itself. The duke, pressed by the guardians of orthodoxy, withdrew the exemption from censorship that Lessing’s office had carried, and the printing stopped. By then the most explosive piece was already out.

The aims of Jesus and his disciples

The last and gravest fragment, published in 1778 and now read in English in the Talbert and Fraser edition, 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, stood wholly within the religion of his people: a Jewish teacher who preached repentance and an earthly, this-worldly kingdom of God about to break in upon Israel, who meant no new religion and no abolition of the law, and whose cry of dereliction on the cross marked the moment the hope failed and he died as a man whose cause had collapsed. The resurrection, the universal mission, the suffering and divine Christ of doctrine — these, Reimarus argued, were the second construction of disciples who had staked everything on their master and could not let the cause die with him: they put the body out of sight, waited, and preached a returning, spiritual messiah whose kingdom was now deferred to a second coming. On this account the Gospels were not the record of what happened but the deposit of that second system, to be read, like any human testimony, against itself and against the motives of its authors.

The thesis was corrosive, and to its readers blasphemous — the apostles cast as fabricators, the central miracle of the faith as a managed deception. Yet the specific charge of fraud is not what carried forward. Two things in the method did. The first was that it treated the records of Christianity as historical sources to be questioned like any others, subject to the same tests of contradiction and interest. The second was its insistence that the Jesus who could be reached by history and the Christ confessed by faith might not be the same figure — that a gap could open between the man and the dogma, and that the gap was itself a subject for inquiry. Reimarus had pulled the question into the open whether or not his answers held.

Scholarship and afterlife

Reimarus’s authorship of the fragments remained a half-secret for a generation; it was David Friedrich Strauss who, in a study of 1862, finally fixed the Apologie and its author at the head of the critical tradition. The judgment that organized everything came later still. When Albert Schweitzer wrote his history of the long effort to recover the historical Jesus — Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906), carried into English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910 text, ch. II) — he began the whole story with Reimarus, and praised the fragment on the aims of Jesus and his disciples as one of the greatest events in the history of criticism. Schweitzer’s deeper debt was particular: Reimarus, he held, was the first to see that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was through and through an eschatological one — a perception that survived even after its first form was discarded. Schweitzer’s own reconstruction, which made Jesus a figure consumed by an imminent end that did not arrive, is in this sense a chastened heir of the fragment: it kept the eschatological frame and the gap between the preacher and the later church while abandoning the charge of fraud. The line from the drawer in Hamburg to the lecture hall thus runs through the very category — a Jesus belonging first to the apocalyptic hopes of first-century Judaism, not to the metaphysics of the creeds — that Reimarus had been the first to name.

For the form was discarded. Later scholarship rejected almost all of Reimarus’s own conclusions, and the theft-and-deception reconstruction of the resurrection hardly any historian now defends. What was credited to him was the distinction itself: the Jesus of history set over against the Christ of faith, as the axis on which the question would turn for two centuries. The recovery of him has, in turn, complicated the radical caricature. Scholars working from the full Apologie — among them Jonathan Birch, whose study of Reimarus and the religious Enlightenment reads the destructive fragments back into the natural-religion project they grew out of — have argued that Reimarus is best understood not as a man bent on ending Christianity but as a defender of a rational worship of God who came to think the historical scaffolding of revealed religion could not bear weight. In that, his lineage runs back to the natural theologians of the earlier century, including Samuel Clarke, whose demonstration of a reasoned God from the order of things Reimarus shared even as he turned the same instrument against the texts. He was, by the same token, the harder twin of more cautious contemporaries who handled scripture as an object of criticism without his open enmity — the source-dividing physician Jean Astruc, or Ludovico Antonio Muratori, the canon-historian whose work on the early lists of accepted books touched the same documents from a wholly different intent.

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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