David Friedrich Strauss

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) was a German theologian and writer. Born at Ludwigsburg and trained at Tübingen under Hegelian influence, he published at twenty-seven The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), which treated the Gospel narratives as myth and provoked such outrage that he was dismissed from his teaching post and in 1839 prevented from taking a chair at Zurich. He turned to literature and biography, sat briefly in the Württemberg assembly, and in The Old Faith and the New (1872) abandoned Christianity for a scientific humanism that Nietzsche attacked. George Eliot translated his Life of Jesus into English in 1846.