Some great books have the capacity to focus on the questions of the day so that everyone must deal with them; others rise to greatness only when they are discovered years later. Strauss's The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History may belong to both groups. When it was first published, it articulated sharply the crucial issues in the then current theological debate. Theologians today are discovering, not least of all from this century-old "book review" here translated for the first time, that they are not yet finished with David Friedrich Strauss. The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History brings to a head issues which had dominated Strauss's theological work. When read in the light of the author's career, amply surveyed in the Editor's Introduction, it also illumines major issues of modern Christian theology: the character of the Gospels, the historical accuracy of what they report, the possibility of getting at "Jesus as he really was," and the relevance of such a Jesus for modern man. -Publisher