1808–1874 · German Protestant theologian & biblical scholar
David Friedrich Strauss was a German theologian who detonated nineteenth-century biblical scholarship with Das Leben Jesu (1835–36), arguing that the Gospel miracle narratives were mythical in character — not lies, but imaginative religious expression. Albert Schweitzer later divided the entire quest for the historical Jesus into the periods before and after him. His final major work, Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872), turned toward materialism and science, and it is there — in a passage on humanity’s duties to animals — that the idea now pinned on Gandhi appears in print.