Arthur Drews

Arthur Drews (1865–1935) was a German philosopher and writer on religion, professor at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe from 1898. A follower of the pessimist metaphysician Eduard von Hartmann and an advocate of a monist religion of the spirit, he wrote on German speculative thought, on Kant and Nietzsche and on the philosophy of religion. Die Christusmythe (1909), which denied that Jesus had ever lived, provoked mass meetings and public debates in Berlin and other cities and was answered by theologians across Europe; he defended it in further books, including The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus and a history of the denial of Christ's existence.