Hermann Samuel Reimarus

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (22 December 1694, Hamburg – 1 March 1768, Hamburg), was a German philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment who is remembered for his Deism, the doctrine that human reason can arrive at a knowledge of God and ethics from a study of nature and our own internal reality, thus eliminating the need for religions based on revelation. He denied the supernatural origin of Christianity, and was the first influential critic to investigate the historical Jesus. According to Reimarus, Jesus was a mortal Jewish prophet, and the apostles founded Christianity as a religion separate from Jesus’ own ministry.

Reimarus was educated by his father and by the scholar J. A. Fabricius, whose son-in-law he subsequently became. He attended school at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums. He studied theology, ancient languages, and philosophy at the university of Jena, became Privatdozent at the University of Wittenberg in 1716, and in 1720-21 visited the Netherlands and England. In 1723 he became rector of the high school at Wismar, and in 1727 professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at his native city's high school. Although he was offered more lucrative positions by other schools, he held this post until his death.

His duties were light; and he employed his leisure in the study of philology, mathematics, philosophy, history, political economy, science and natural history, for which he made large collections. His house was the center of the highest culture of Hamburg; and a monument of his influence in that city still remains in the Haus der patriotischen Gesellschaft, where the learned and artistic societies partly founded by him still meet. He had seven children, only three of whom survived him - the distinguished physician Johann Albrecht Heinrich Reimarus, and two daughters, one of them being Elise Reimarus, Lessing's friend and correspondent. Reimarus died on 1 March 1768.

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