world-views of "Jesus"

"From the Deists and Reimarus to Strauss and Renan, the world view that was brought to the study of the Gospels was decisive in the interpretation of Jesus....The history of the study of Jesus in European thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is as much a history of changing philosophies, theologies, and world views, as it is of growing refinements in historical techniques."

-- from the "Postscript" in Jesus in European Protestant Thought, 1778-1860, Colin Brown, 1985, p. 275.