The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus is a landmark work of theological historiography, not a biography of Jesus itself but a critical survey of the nineteenth century scholarly attempts to write one, and its lasting influence comes from Schweitzer's own argument that those liberal-era biographers had largely projected their own values onto Jesus rather than recovering the historical figure. As a book about the history of a scholarly method, it is authoritative on how that quest was conducted and where Schweitzer judged it to fail. It is also over a century old, and the historical Jesus scholarship it reviews and critiques has moved through several further waves, the second and third quests, since Schweitzer wrote, so it should be read as the classic opening critique of a still-ongoing scholarly conversation rather than its final word.