Georg Friedrich Eduard William Wrede (; 10 May 1859 – 23 November 1906) was a German Lutheran theologian.

Biography

Wrede was born at

Bücken Bücken is a municipality in the district of Nienburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany. Quarters * Altenbücken * Bücken * Calle * Dedendorf * Duddenhausen History An Abbey was established here in Bücken in the year 882 by Rimbert, Archbishop of B ...

in the

Kingdom of Hanover The Kingdom of Hanover (german: Königreich Hannover) was established in October 1814 by the Congress of Vienna, with the restoration of George III to his Hanoverian territories after the Napoleonic era. It succeeded the former Electorate of Han ...

. He became an associate professor at Breslau in 1893, and full professor in 1896. He died in office in 1906. He became famous for his investigation of the

Messianic Secret The Messianic Secret is a motif in the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus is portrayed as commanding his followers to maintain silence about his Messianic mission. Attention was first drawn to this motif in 1901 by William Wrede. Part of Wrede's theo ...

theme in the

Gospel of Mark The Gospel of Mark), or simply Mark (which is also its most common form of abbreviation). is the second of the four canonical gospels and of the three synoptic Gospels. It tells of the ministry of Jesus from his baptism by John the Baptist to h ...

. He suggested that this was a literary and apologetic device by which early Christians could explain away the absence of any clear claim to be the Messiah. According to Wrede, the solution devised by the author of the Mark Gospel was to imply that Jesus kept his messiahship secret to his inner group of supporters. He also wrote a crucial study of the

Second Epistle to the Thessalonians The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians is a book from the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It is traditionally attributed to Paul the Apostle, with Timothy as a co-author. Modern biblical scholarship is divided on whether the epistle was ...

, which argued for its inauthenticity. In his work on Paul, ''Paulus'', he argued that without Paul, Christianity would have basically become just another backwater Jewish sect that would have had little influence in later religious development. As a result, he concluded that Paul was "the second founder of Christianity."Wrede, ''Paul'' (trans. Edward Lummis; London: Philip Green, 1907), 179. He went so far as to separate Paul from his Jewish background, arguing that Paul was definitely influenced by certain Hellenistic concepts. As a result, his understanding of the flesh/spirit dualism within Paul parallels that of many others who understand flesh from a Hellenistic context where matter itself is inherently corrupted. His work and that of

Albert Schweitzer Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer (; 14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was an Alsatian-German/French polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schwei ...

mark the end of the ''First Quest'' or ''Old Quest'' into the historical Jesus. Schweitzer's 1906 book was called ''The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede''. (See the

Quest for the historical Jesus The quest for the historical Jesus consists of academic efforts to determine what words and actions, if any, may be attributed to Jesus, and to use the findings to provide portraits of the historical Jesus.. Since the 18th century, three scholarl ...

Works (selection)

* ''Ueber Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten Neutestamentlichen Theologie'', Göttingen 1897. (Published in English as "The Task and Methods of New Testament Theology", in ''Studies in Biblical Theology'', 1973.) * ''Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien'', Göttingen 1901. (Published in English as ''The Messianic Secret'', London 1971) * ''Paulus'', Halle 1904 / Tübingen 1907 (Published in English as ''Paul'', London 1907) * ''Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefes untersucht'' (The Authenticity of the Second Letter to the Thessalonians investigated), Leipzig 1903.

References

Sources

* Robert Morgan, ''The Nature of New Testament Theology: The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter'', Minneapolis: Wipf & Stock 2009.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wrede, William 1859 births 1906 deaths German biblical scholars German Lutheran theologians 19th-century German Protestant theologians 20th-century German Protestant theologians Writers from Hanover 19th-century German male writers German male non-fiction writers Lutheran biblical scholars 19th-century Lutherans