Over the course of thirty years, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) secretly drafted what would become the most thorough attack on revelation to date, ushering the quest for the historical Jesus and foreshadowing the religious criticism of the new atheism of the twentieth century. Peeling away the layers of Reimarus’s radical work by looking at hitherto unpublished manuscript evidence, Ulrich Groetsch shows that the Radical Enlightenment was more than just an international philosophical movement. By demonstrating the importance philology, antiquarianism, and Semitic languages played in Reimarus’s upbringing, scholarship, and teaching, this new study provides a vivid portrayal of an Enlightenment radical at the cusp of the secular age, whose debt to earlier traditions of scholarship remains undisputed.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), a German deist and rationalist, inaugurated modern critical investigation into the life of Jesus. He asserted that much of the New Testament record was a pious fabrication and that Jesus was primarily a political revolutionary. Albert Schweitzer has said of Reimarus: His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological. This edition contains Reimarus' writings, On the Resurrection and On the Intention of Jesus and His Disciples, as well as a portion of D. F. Strauss's evaluation of Reimarus. Dr. Talbert, Professor of Religion at Wake Forest University, offers a critical introduction to the book. This new translation of the two writings was done by Ralph S. Fraser, Professor of German at Wake Forest.

Knowledge and Profanation offers numerous instances of profoundly religious polemicists profanizing other religions ad majorem gloriam Dei, as well as sincere adherents of their own religion, whose reflective scholarly undertakings were perceived as profanizing transgressions – occasionally with good reason. In the history of knowledge of religion and profanation unintended consequences often play a decisive role. Can too much knowledge of religion be harmful? Could the profanation of a foreign religion turn out to be a double-edged sword? How much profanating knowledge of other religions could be tolerated in a premodern world? In eleven contributions, internationally renowned scholars analyze cases of learned profanation, committed by scholars ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, as well as several antique predecessors. Contributors are: Asaph Ben-Tov, Ulrich Groetsch, Andreas Mahler, Karl Morrison, Martin Mulsow, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Wolfgang Spickermann, Riccarda Suitner, John Woodbridge, Azzan Yadin, and Holger Zellentin.

The advent of the modern, historical, and critical methods of reading Scripture is one of the most significant events in the last five hundred years of Christian history and theology. New questions arose in the course of that history that led to new, sometimes troubling answers. New ways of considering Scripture were articulated. The crisis in which academic Christian theology has found itself for approximately two hundred years is directly related to the emergence of new ways of studying--and criticizing--the Bible. The Challenge of History traces the trajectory of these developments, presenting key readings from over thirty-five theologians--from Erasmus to Pannenberg--whose writings relate to the birth of modern historical and critical exegesis and, more broadly, to the emergence, among theologians and biblical scholars, of a certain historical consciousness that characterizes vast segments of modernity. How did the historical and critical methods arise? How did they impact the study of Scripture? What are their implications for Christian theology? Scripture is read--and needs to be read--differently in a parish, in a monastery, and in an academic setting. But the various ways of approaching Scripture should not be cordoned off from one another. This volume is an ideal textbook for in-depth study of one of the most important topics in modern theology.

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One of the most independent thinkers in German intellectual history, the Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to literature, philosophy, theology, criticism, and drama theory. Lessing invented the brgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy) and wrote one of the first successful German tragedies as well as one of the finest German comedies. In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise, he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious tolerance and intolerance and the clash of civilizations. Lessing's dramas are the oldest German theater pieces still regularly performed (both in Germany and internationally), and both his plays and his drama theory have influenced such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Hebbel, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg, Schnitzler, and Brecht. Addressing an audience ranging from graduate students to seasoned scholars, this volume introduces Lessing's life and times and places him within the broader context of the European Enlightenment. It discusses his pathbreaking dramas, his equally revolutionary theoretical, critical, and aesthetic writings, his original fables, his innovative work in philosophy and theology, and his significant contributions to Jewish emancipation. The volume concludes by examining 20th-century reception of Lessing and his oeuvre. Contributors: Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox, Steven D. Martinson, Klaus L. Berghahn, John Pizer, Beate Allert, H. B. Nisbet, Arno Schilson, Willi Goetschel, Peter Hyng, Karin A. Wurst, Ann Schmiesing, Reinhart Meyer, Hans-Joachim Kertscher, Hinrich C. Seeba, Dieter Fratzke, Helmut Berthold, Herbert Rowland. Barbara Fischer is associateprofessor of German and Thomas C. Fox is professor of German, both at the University of Alabama.

Drawing on new manuscript sources, this volume offers seven contributions on Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the most significant biblical critic in eighteenth-century Germany, as well as an eminent Enlightenment philosopher, a renowned classicist, and expert on Judaism.