Is the account of Jesus in the Gospels a reliable portrait of a historical figure, or an invention that needs to be demythologized? Because of the rise of higher criticism and the antisupernaturalistic presuppositions that often accompany that enterprise, modern biblical scholarship has raised the question of the historical Jesus.

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In this important work, Lessing presents some of the writings of Reimarus, the father of the quest for the historical Jesus. Found in the library of the Duke of Brunswick, these fragments represent the genesis of historical Jesus studies, which would shape centuries of biblical and theological scholarship. In these fragments, Reimarus argued that Jesus was a pious Jew who desired to see the coming of God’s kingdom and eventually reached the point where he felt he could force God’s hand to bring ...