The secret radical who dismantled the historical Jesus from his quiet Hamburg study

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Hermann Samuel Reimarus lived a quiet life as a professor, but he harbored a explosive secret. He authored a scathing critique of Christianity that he dared not publish while alive. After his death, his work sparked a firestorm, forever changing how scholars analyze the life and motives of Jesus.

Born in Hamburg in 1694, Reimarus was a man of the Enlightenment who balanced a conventional academic career with radical private thoughts. While he held a steady position as a professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages, his true intellectual obsession was the nature of religion. He championed Deism, the belief that human reason, rather than divine revelation, should guide our understanding of God and ethics.

His most significant work, a defense of rational worship, remained unpublished during his lifetime to avoid persecution. It was only after his death in 1768 that his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing released portions of the manuscript. These excerpts, known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, ignited the Fragmentenstreit, a fierce intellectual conflict that marked the birth of modern critical research into the historical Jesus.

Reimarus argued that Jesus was a mortal Jewish prophet who preached an imminent, worldly kingdom. He contended that the apostles, driven by selfish ambition, fabricated Christianity as a separate religion after Jesus' death. By dismissing miracles as impossible and characterizing the Bible as a collection of errors and deceit, Reimarus challenged the foundations of revealed religion. Though critics like Otto Pfleiderer later noted his lack of modern literary criticism, Albert Schweitzer famously praised his work as a masterpiece of literature and a pivotal event in historical research.

Ultimately, Reimarus viewed natural religion as the only path to a universal faith, rejecting the idea that God would favor some through exclusive revelations. His work remains a landmark in the history of skepticism, representing a bold attempt to reconcile the study of nature with a rational, non-supernatural worldview.

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