"Few authors in modern times can be said to have redirected the course of an entire field of study. In 1906, Albert Schweitzer did, with his brilliant monograph, The Quest of the Historical Jesus... Schweitzer was convinced that Jesus was an apocalypticist. Schweitzer is best known, of course, for his humanitarian endeavors. After giving up an extraordinarily promising academic career as a philosopher-theologian in Strasbourg to establish a medical mission in French Equatorial Africa, he spent his life curing the sick in his jungle clinic, far removed from the ivy towers of the European intellectual scene. ... The bulk of his book recounts the attempts since the Enlightenment to produce a life of Jesus. With scathing wit, penetrating analysis, and inimitable turns of phrase, Schweitzer shows that every generation of scholars that attempted to write a life of Jesus in fact portrayed Jesus in its own image. ... Schweitzer demonstrates this thesis through an exhaustive analysis of the entire history of scholarship on Jesus—from its beginnings in 1776 with a posthumously published account of a German scholar named H. Reimarus, who argued that Jesus was a political revolutionary whose violent activities were covered up by the Gospel writers, to the rationalist views of Heinrich Paulus and the myth-oriented response of D. F. Strauss... on down to his own day. ... he scorns every attempt to make Jesus into a modern man, who promoted, in substance, the religious, political, cultural, or social agenda of modern European intellectuals. For Schweitzer, Jesus was a man of the past. To understand what he was really like, we must situate him in his own context, not pretend that he fits perfectly well into our own. ... Schweitzer did not think that the historical Jesus shared the problems or perspectives of the twentieth century. Instead, Jesus was a first-century apocalypticist, who never expected that there would be a twentieth century. He thought that the end of the world was coming within his own lifetime. In fact, he expected it to come before the year was out. When it didn't come, Schweitzer argued, Jesus decided that he himself needed to suffer in order for God to bring the heavenly Kingdom here to earth. And so he went to his cross fully expecting God to intervene in history in a climactic act of judgment. When at his last meal he told his disciples that he would not drink wine again until he drank it anew with them in the Kingdom, he was not thinking that this would be two thousand years hence, but in the next day or two. It turns out that Jesus was wrong. He died on the cross mistaken about his own identity and the plan of God."