Page - 8 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

German theological scholarship and its achievements in the field of biblical ex- egesis, which were also influential in other European countries. Indeed, in the 19th century some historical biographies of Jesus had achieved great success. In 1835, the liberal theologian David Strauss (1808–1874) published his Das Le- ben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined). This pioneer- ing study, a historical investigation of the life story of Jesus, was as controver- sial as it was influential. A few decades later, Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus) by the French Orientalist Ernest Renan became a bestseller in France and was soon translated into other European languages.4 These historical depictions of the life of Jesus attracted fame and criticism, glory and infamy, but they resonated with the burgeoning culture of an educated middle class and the rise of mass culture. A more humane Jesus was appropriated by a secularizing culture in its attempt to engage critically and counter traditional Christian theologies. Recent historiography has challenged Schweitzer’s genealogy along at least two lines. The first looks at historical representations of the life of Jesus be- fore Reimarus, whereas the second aims to be more inclusive, paying attention to different confessional and national contexts in which these representations were produced. Indeed, the last decades have witnessed a wealth of academic research, characterized by new approaches to the historical Jesus “before Rei- marus”,5 influenced by a novel interest in theories and notions of religion in the early modern period and its representations of early Christianity. The Protestant Reformation, geographical exploration and missionary policies all contributed to the deepening of religious strife. Interest in religion grew. Committed phi- lologists and brilliant apologists from different religious communities engaged in defining the notion of Christianity and establishing the biography of Jesus. New iconographies of the Nazarene circulated on title pages and as book illus- trations, albeit often in a clandestine context, pictorially marking a shift from representation of the divine to representation of the human nature of Jesus. From the second half of the 17th century and in the first decades of the 18th century an enormous amount of literature about Jesus and Christianity circulat- ed both officially and clandestinely. As we seek to recover the Jewish context of Jesus as imagined by scholars and theologians of the early modern period, we can usefully combine different media, from texts to images, to detect various sensibilities concerning Jesus as a Jew and therefore as a man. If we are to fully appreciate the richness of early modern scholarship on these topics, a more inclusive approach will surely be required, one capable of grasp- 4 A number of recent studies have drawn attending to this text; see Richard 2015; Priest 2015. For a more general account for the 19th century see Moxnes 2012. 5 For example, the Annual Meeting on Christian Origins held in Bertinoro, Italy, cf. https://cissr.net; and the Journal of the Historical Jesus, published by Brill. For similar approaches critical of Schweitzer’s account, see Salvatorelli 1929; and before, Labanca 1900. 8 | Cristiana Facchini and Paola von Wyss-Giacosa www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1, 7–21