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.

Biography

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. This had a deep impact as the beginning of critical research of the historical Jesus.

Reimarus pointed out the differences between what Jesus said and what the apostles said, identifying Jesus as a Jewish preacher. Jesus, according to this view, was an apocalyptic prophet preaching about a worldly kingdom soon to come. This view still has currency within modern scholarship. Reimarus also considered Christianity to be a fabrication.

Reimarus' philosophical position is essentially that of Christian Wolff, but he is best known for his Apologie as excerpted by Lessing in what became known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragmente. The original manuscript is in the Hamburg town library. A copy was made for the university library of Göttingen, 1814, and other copies are known to exist. In addition to the seven fragments published by Lessing, a second portion of the work was issued in 1787 by C. A. E. Schmidt (a pseudonym), under the title Übrige noch ungedruckte Werke des Wolfenbüttelschen Fragmentisten, and a further portion by D. W. Klose in Christian Wilhelm Niedner's Zeitschrift für historische Theologie, 1850-52. The complete work has been published as edited by Gerhard Alexander (2 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1972). D. F. Strauss has given an exhaustive analysis of the whole work in his book on Reimarus.

quote|"Natural religion suffices; a revelation is therefore superfluous. Moreover, such a thing is both physically and morally impossible. God cannot interrupt His own work by miracles; nor can He favour some men above others by revelations which are not granted to all, and with which it is not even possible for all to become acquainted. But of all doctrines that of eternal punishment is most contrary, Reimarus thinks, to true ideas of God; and it was this point which first caused him to stumble."

Richard N. Soulen points out that Reimarus "is treated as the initiator of ‘Lives of Jesus Research’ by Schweitzer and accorded special honour by him for recognising that Jesus' thought-world was essentially eschatological, a fact overlooked until the end of the 19th century."