David Friedrich Strauss' Bad News, 1835

"Until the appearance of Strauss's Leben Jesu, it was widely assumed that the Gospel traditions were historical sources for the life of Jesus in the very same sense that Roman histories of Livy could be used as sources for the life of emperors; also, that the historical Jesus could easily be distinguished from the sources themselves, as the kernel can be extracted from its husk; even more, that Jesus as an historical personality, including his development and his self-consciousness, were accessible to historical research."

-- Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 2nd ed., 1997, James Livingston, p. 219.