David Strauss - Later Works

Later Works

Strauss returned to theology in 1862, when he published a biography of H. S. Reimarus. Two years later in 1864, he published the Life of Jesus for the German People (Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet) (13th ed., 1904). It failed to produce an effect comparable to that of the first Life, but it garnered numerous critical responses, which Strauss answered in his pamphlet Die Halben und die Ganzen (1865), directed specially against Daniel Schenkel (1813–1885) and Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–1869).

His The Christ of Belief and the Jesus of History (Der Christus 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. From 1865 to 1872, Strauss lived in Darmstadt, and in 1870 he published his lectures on Voltaire. His last work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872; 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 an Afterword as Foreword (Nachwort als Vorwort) (1873). Soon thereafter, Strauss fell ill, and he died on February 8, 1874.