elements. He thought that understanding the secondary causes behind the purported miracles would serve to explain what “really” happened.9 David Strauss’ Life of Jesus, published just a few years later in 1835, presented a serious and influential challenge to Paulus’ classic approach. Strauss supplanted the rationalistic replacement method with a mythical strategy that questioned many reports about the historical Jesus. He held that the Gospels were chiefly mythological documents that utilized normal description