Purity

Lundin sees a link between (some) Protestant hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, and the quest of the historical Jesus. The common factor is a search for a pure origin:

“In the nineteenth century the quest for scriptural purity and origins assumed a number of guises. In some quarters, it became the drive to recover the exact mental state of the author (Schleiermacher), while in other instances, it involved the search for the unadulterated person of the historical Jesus (Strauss, Renan, and others). Here again, what the liberal Protestant temperament sought was a means of separating wheat from the chaff, the essence from the excess. Though they often different dramatically on what they took the essence to be, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics shared the conviction that it could be found, whether through a discipline of painstaking historical reconstruction or an art of imaginative empathy.”