Strauss in England

In his book Contested Christianity (Baylor, 2004), Wheaton historian Timothy Larsen examines the reception of DF Strauss’s Life of Jesus in England. He suggests that only Darwin’s Origin of Species rivals Strauss’s book as a challenge to orthodoxy in Victorian England. Yet, the book’s impact had less to do with its radicalism than its piety. Charles Hennell, friend to Strauss’s English translator George Eliot and author of his own non-miraculous account of Christianity, suggested that Strauss’s abandonment of miracles was not “equivalent to an entire renunciation of the Christian religion.” Strauss on the contrary want his book “employed in the real service of Christianity, rather than as an attack upon it.” Thomas Cooper, a shoemaker and radical political leader who lectured on Strauss, drew similar conclusions: “I seek to multiply, not to lessen, the number of [Jesus’] true disciples . . . his religion no longer commends itself to me by mysterious or miraculous sanctions. I hold it to be the most perfect version of the Religion of Humanity; and for that reason, desire to see it divested of all legendary incrustations that may prevent its reception with sincere and earnest thinkers. The great work of Strauss assisted me in coming to a clear and determined conclusion respecting the source of the corruptions in the real history of Christ.”