In 1906 the theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, son of a Lutheran pastor in Alsace, wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which argued that this preoccupation of liberal scholarship was misguided. The historical Christ Schweitzer saw in the Gospels was a man who believed that the end of the world was coming immediately, and had gone on to offer up his life in Jerusalem, to hasten on the time of tribulation. His career had therefore been built round a mistake. If there was a historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels, he was a figure of failure and tragedy who could only
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