Abstract

Via the figure of the German poet Eduard Mörike, this chapter opens by reviewing the significance of the liberal Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauß, a figure described by his recent biographer, Frederick Beiser, as “one of the most controversial thinkers of nineteenth-century Germany” and “a seminal figure of his age,” yet as someone whose legacy is “on the brink of oblivion in the anglophone world” (David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography, 2020). One of Strauß’s most important works was his Life of Jesus, a book that is likely to have had a profound effect on Nietzsche as a young man and to have been bound up with his crisis of faith experienced when he was twenty years old. The central argument behind Strauß’s approach in his Life of Jesus can be found in his preface to the first German edition, where Strauß announces the attempt to consider the life of Jesus in a way that is neither supranaturalist (i.e., the miracles reported in the New Testament took place exactly as described) nor naturalist (i.e., rationalist), but mythical—an approach which arises through his engagement with the supranatural and rationalist approaches and their “respective refutations,” and involves the idea of “historical myth.” As a result, Strauß did not see himself as sweeping away Christianity but rather as, in a quasi-Hegelian mode, uncovering and rediscovering its truth: replacing the traditional, historical foundation of Christianity, that had been swept away by historical criticism, with a new (quasi-Hegelian) speculative foundation. This resoundingly Hegelian conclusion was one that Nietzsche was bound to reject: yet already in 1873, when Nietzsche published the first of his Untimely Observations entitled “David Strauß, the Confessor and the Writer,” one can find intimations of the direction his thinking was to take in the form of his ferocious attack on Strauß in this work. A short analytical survey of the post-Straussian tradition of Eduard von Hartmann, William Wrede, and Albert Schweitzer brings the “quest for the historical Jesus” into the nineteenth century and to the time of Nietzsche himself. Thus the philological concerns of The Anti-Christ and other works are shown to have been anticipated already by Nietzsche in his engagement with Strauß in the first of his Untimely Observations; without this intellectual-historical contextualization, the significance of Nietzsche’s later work in general and The Anti-Christ in particular, is—so it is argued—impossible to grasp.