DAVID STRAUSS
The Connection between the [Bible attacking] Textual Critics and Karl Marx
STRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH (1808—1874), German’ theologian , was born at near Stuttgart, in January 1808, a few years before the American War of 1812. In his thirteenth year he was sent to the evangelical seminary at Blaubeuren, near Ulm, to be prepared for the study of theology. Amongst the principal masters in the school were Professors Kern and F. C. Baur, who infused into their pupils above all a deep love of the ancient classics of Greek Philosophy. In 1825 Strauss passed from school to the university of Tubingen. By this time, he had been under the influence and teaching of the Textual Critic (i.e. Bible Attacker) F.C. Baur for five years.
(Because its never too early, to start undermining personal faith or historic Christianity).
The professors of philosophy there failed to interest him, but he was strongly attracted by the writings of Schleiermacher, which awoke his keen dialectical faculty and delivered him from the vagueness and exaggerations of romantic and somnambulistic mysticism. In 1830 he became assistant to a country clergyman, and nine months later accepted the post of professor in the high school at Maulbronn, having to teach Latin, history and Hebrew. In October 1831 he resigned his office in order to study under Schleiermacher and Hegel in Berlin. Hegel died just as Strauss arrived, and, though he regularly attended Schleiermacher’s lectures,it was only those on the Life of Jesus which exercised a very powerful influence upoil him. The Life of Jesus was the hottest topic on Campus, and was already under assault by many philosophers and theology professors, who were determined to undermine Christianity and its impact on the Germany.
It was amongst the followers of Hegel that he found kindred spirits. Under the leading of Hegel’s distinction, between Vorstellung and Begrifi, he had already conceived the idea of his two principal theological works—the Leben Jesu and the Christliche Dogmalik. In 1832 he returned to Tubingen and became a teacher at the university, lecturing on logic, history of philosophy, Plato, and history of ethics, with great success. But in the autumn of 1833 he resigned this position in order to devote all his time to the completion of his projected Leben Jesus [Life of Jesus] (1835).
The work produced an immense sensation and created a new epoch in the treatment of the rise of Christianity.
[You will notice that whenever Textual Critics think that they have found a fresh way of attacking Christianity, that they characterize the author of the new heresy as one who creates or innaugurates "a new epoch"].
In 1837 Strauss replied to his critics (Streuschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schr-ift über das Leben Jesu). In the third edition of the work (1839), and in Zwei friedliche Blatler, he made important concessions to his critics, which he withdrew, however, in the fourth edition (1840; translated into English by George Eliot, with Latin preface by Strauss, 1846). In 1840 and the following year he published his C/zristliche Glaubenslehre (2 vols.), the principle of which is that the history of Christian doctrines is their disintegration. Between the publication of this work and that of the Friedliche Blätter he had been elected to a chair of theology in the university of Zurich.
But the appointment provoked such a storm of popular ill will in the canton that the authorities considered it wise to pension him before he entered upon his duties, although this concession came too late to save the government. With his Glaubensiehre he took leave of theology for upwards of twenty years. In August 1841 he married Agnes Schebest, a cultivated and beautiful opera singer of high repute, but not adapted to be the wife of a scholar and literary man like Strauss.
Strauss resumed his literary activity by the publication of Der Romanliker auf dem T/zron der Cäsaren, in which he drew a satirical parallel between Julian the Apostate and Frederick William IV. of Prussia (1847). In. 1848 he was nominated as member of the Frankfort parliament, but was defeated. He was elected for the Wurttemberg chamber, but soon his constituents requested him to resign his seat. He forgot his political disappointments in the production of a series of biographical works, which secured for him a permanent place in German literature (Schubarts Leben, 2 vols., 1849; Chrisiian Mdrklin, .1851; Nikodemus Frischlin, 1855; Ulrich von Hutten, 3 vols., 1858—1860, 6th ed. 1895; H. S. Reimarus, 1862). With this last-named work he returned to theology, and two years afterwards (1864) published his Leben Jesu für des deirsche Volk (13th ed., 1904). It failed to produce an effect comparable with that of the first Life, but the replies to it were many, and Strauss answered them in his pamphlet Die Halben lend die Ganzen (1865), directed specially against Schenkel and Hengstenberg. His Chrisius des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (1865) is a severe criticism of Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus, which were then first published. (Both Strauss and Schleiermacher both attacked the Bible, Jesus and Christianity, but they came at from different positions).
From 1865 to 1872 Strauss resided in Darmstadt, and in 1870 published his lectures on Voltaire (9th ed., 1907). His last work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872; 16th ed, 19o4; English translation by M. Blind, 1873), produced almost as great a sensation as his Life of Jesus, and not least amongst Strauss’s own friends, who wondered at his one-sided view of Christianity and his professed abandonment of spiritual philosophy for the materialism of modern science. To the fourth edition of the book he added a Nachwort als Vorwort (1873). The same year symptoms of a fatal disease appeared, and death followed in February 1874.
Strauss’s mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy; his work was accordingly rarely constructive. His work Life of Jesus was directed against not only the traditional Christian Protestant orthodox view of the Gospel narratives, but likewise the rationalistic treatment of them, whether after the manner of Reimarus or that of Paulus. The mythical theory that the Christ of the Gospels, excepting the most meagre outline of personal history, was the unintentional creation of the early Christian Messianic expectation he applied with merciless rigour to the narratives. (In other words, the diciples of Jesus made stories up because they were delusional and "wanted" to believe)
Romans 1: 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man....
But his operations were based upon fatal defects, positive and negative. Hr held a narrow theory as to the miraculous, a still narrower as tc the relation of the divine to the, human, and he had no true idea of the nature of historical tradition, while, as F. C. Baur complained, his critique of the ‘Gospel history had not been preceded by the essential preliminary critique of the Gospels themselves.
To summarize, it was in 1835 that David Strauss published his most famous work "Life of Jesus" in German. One of the first to read it were the professors of a young Student named Karl Marx.
This work on the Life of Christ was designed to undermine the Faith of Christians by pointing to supposed contradictions in the Bible between the various Gospel accounts of the Life of Jesus. The premise was flawed as well as the conclusions. But the book did not have to be accurate. It was designed to De-Convert Christians. One of the more succesfull efforts of this project can be seen in the life of Engels and Marx.
Karl Marx was a young University Student in Germany, when his professors made sure that young Marx read this work by David Strauss. The results were not long in coming: Marx decided that Christianity was not real and that the Jesus of the Bible was not authentic. Marx was led astray - because he was willing to listen to those who based their careers on personal efforts against Christianity. The Result in this case was that Marx became an enemy of Christianity and a God-hater in every way. The result of Marx's mistakes in Logic and Biblical understanding were passed onto millions.
Even Karl Marx could not have invented Marxism and combined it with Atheism, if the Textual Critics has not helped him. Biographers of Marx will tell you that he could not be won over to his philosophical points, until his understanding of Jesus had been defeated. It was the book "life of Jesus" by David Strauss - a textual critic - that caused Marx to become an Atheist. Strauss was an academic and a German Textual Critic. His purpose was to assault the Bible and the claims of Jesus Christ to be God.
Textual Critics usually proclaim their innocent efforts, and tend to "confess" their innefectiveness to others, just loud enough so that Parents (of college students) will hear them. The Truth is that Textual Critics are very well trained to help parents feel comfortable in allowing their childrent to be deliberately misled into giving heed to doctrines of enemies of Jesus Christ and Christianity. After all, it takes effort and guile to mislead parents. But too many of them perceive their own influence on their children as remote - in anycase. In this sense, many parents set up their own children to be deceived while earning their college degree, and somehow still manage to express surprise, when their children adopt values which are totally alien to the values of the Parents.
Sources: Ravenous Wolves: Textual Criticism and the Abandonement of the Reformation- A History of HIgher Criticism and German Theology by Lichtenberger. In addition, the works of the subjects of this biography, and Early Editions of Ency. Brit.
Scofield Never Agreed with Westcott and Hort
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