William Wrede

Life

William Wrede was born in 1859 in the Hanover region of northern Germany. He studied theology at Leipzig and Göttingen. After gaining experience in pastoral ministry and teaching, he became professor of New Testament at the University of Breslau in the 1890s. He was closely associated with the so-called History of Religions School, a group of scholars who studied the Bible and early Christianity historically within the religious and cultural environment of their time. He died in 1906, in his forties.

Work and Contributions

Wrede's best-known work is The Messianic Secret in the Gospels, published in 1901. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus repeatedly commands that his identity as the Messiah not be disclosed. Examples include scenes in which he forbids demons to speak (Mark 1:34) and enjoins silence on those he has healed and on his disciples (Mark 1:44; 8:30). Wrede did not regard these scenes as historical records of the life of Jesus. He argued instead that they were a theological construction of the early church. After the Resurrection, the church confessed Jesus as the Messiah, yet the life of Jesus as preserved in tradition did not clearly contain such a confession. According to Wrede, Mark bridged this gap with the framework that Jesus' messiahship "was a secret until the Resurrection" (cf. Mark 9:9). This argument led readers to approach Mark not as a simple historical record but as a work expressing its author's theology. It is regarded as having had a major influence on later research into the editorial intentions of the Gospel writers.

In Paul (1904), Wrede contended that Paul had substantially reinterpreted the teaching of Jesus, and he therefore called Paul the "second founder" of Christianity. He also wrote a study questioning the Pauline authorship of 2 Thessalonians, as well as a methodological essay arguing that New Testament theology should be written not as a system of doctrine but as a history of early Christian religion.

Influence on the Korean Church

Wrede's work reached Korea less through the life of local churches than through New Testament instruction in theological seminaries. The "Messianic secret" is a standard topic in discussions of the Synoptic Problem and of Markan studies. Its reception, however, varies with theological orientation. Those who broadly accept historical criticism treat Wrede as one of the starting points of modern Gospel research. Conservative Presbyterian and Baptist circles that emphasize biblical inerrancy present his conclusions as views to be critically examined.

Assessment

In From Reimarus to Wrede (1906), Albert Schweitzer characterized Wrede's position as thoroughgoing historical skepticism, contrasting it with his own eschatological understanding of Jesus. Many later scholars accepted that the Messianic secret is an important theme in Mark, but they did not agree with the conclusion that it was entirely a creation of the church. Some scholars proposed that Jesus may actually have commanded silence in order to avoid political misunderstanding. Conservative theologians have criticized Wrede's work for unduly discounting the historical reliability of the Gospels.