The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present

Die Leugnung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (English: The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present) was a 1926 book in German by Arthur Drews on Christ myth theory.

The book is a historical review of some 35 major deniers of Jesus historicity (radicals, mythicists) covering the period 1780 – 1926, and was meant to be Drews’s response to Albert Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus of 1906. Drews’s book was in fact presented in the guise of "Quest of the non-Historicity of Jesus", with its own historical review of the key Jesus deniers.

Like Schweitzer, Drews, again, ignores the priority of Baron d'Holbach in publishing the first critical "Life of Jesus", with Ecce Homo! – The History of Jesus of Nazareth, Being a Rational Analysis of the Gospels, (1770).

As Schweitzer erected himself as the champion of "historicists", Drews stood up in opposition as the champion of "radicals" and "Jesus historicity deniers". They were later labeled "mythicists" by the media, a name never used by Drews, but popularized in the early 1940s by the British writers A.D. Howell Smith, in his book Jesus Not A Myth (1942) and Archibald Robertson in his book Jesus: Myth or History? (1946). This new label was convenient in opposing "mythicists" versus "historicists". But "mythicism" is an ambiguous and confusing word that does not convey Drews's precise meaning of "denial of historicity", the negative Hegelian "antithesis" which comes only after the primary positive "thesis", "advocacy of historicity". Other derived wordings have been non-historicists, ahistoricists, existence deniers, etc....

Although Drews was intellectually on the other side of the controversy over the historicity of Jesus from Albert Schweitzer, Hoffers notes that Drews "was temporarily a friend of Albert Schweitzer, the famous theologian and physician".

Drews gives the most prominent place to David Strauss, who reduced all the supernatural events of the New Testament stories to the role of myths; and to Bruno Bauer, the first professional scholar who denied the historicity of Jesus, argued the priority of Mark as inventor of the Gospel story and the fiction of Jesus's existence, rejected all of Paul's epistles as non genuine, and emphasized the input of Greco-Roman ideas (especially the Stoicism of Seneca) in the New Testament documents. Both Strauss and Bauer were forced to abandon University life at a young age.

...
Wikipedia