Strauss's Life of Jesus: Publication and the Politics of the German Public Sphere

The furor which greeted David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus upon its publication in 1835 has always been something of a mystery. This essay argues that the ferocity of the reaction can be traced to the contravention of a widely shared expectation in nineteenth-century Germany that theological scholarship would and should be read exclusively by theologians. The reception of the book in the 1830s and subsequent decades shows that this expectation increasingly conflicted with the liberal vision of a public sphere governed by universal reason. By the end of the century, the formerly controversial Strauss had become a venerated figure in Germany, which suggests the extent to which the liberal vision of the public sphere ultimately triumphed.