Karl Ludwig Schmidt

Karl Ludwig Schmidt was a German Protestant theologian and professor of New Testament studies at the University of Basel. He taught that the accounts of the New Testament were to be regarded as fixed written versions of oral Gospel tradition. In 1919, his book Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu showed that Mark's chronology is the invention of the evangelist. Using form criticism, Schmidt showed that an editor had assembled the narrative out of individual scenes that did not originally have a chronological order. This finding challenged historians' ability to discern a historical Jesus and helped bring about a decades-long collapse in interest in the topic.