Leading proponent of radical literary criticism, whose masterful Messianic Secret in the Gospels revolutionized NT studies. A late bloomer, Wrede became professor of NT at Breslau, Germany in 1895 at age 36 & died just eleven years later. He produced two major books---one on the gospels (1901) the other on Paul (1904)--- both of which became classics, whose theses are referred to in all later texts on these topics.

In the Messianic Secret, Wrede sets out to investigate a double paradox in the synoptic gospels:

• The writers present Jesus as the Messiah; yet Jesus repeatedly tells people who recognize him as such to remain silent (until after his resurrection);
• Jesus' disciples recognize Jesus as Messiah (before his death); yet the writers repeatedly stress that these same disciples do not really understand Jesus (both before & after this recognition).

Wrede argued that the only way to account for these repeated motifs was to conclude that the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah belongs to the period after the resurrection. Thus, both Jesus' counsel of silence & the disciples' misunderstanding are literary fictions rather than historical fact:

...there can be no question at all of a historical motive; to put the matter positively, the idea of the messianic secret is a theological concept. [Messianic Secret, p. vi].

Wrede's comparison of synoptic passages further convinced him that the origin of the messianic secret was not Jesus, but Mark. Wrede did not hesitate to push these observations to a sensational but logical conclusion that identification of Jesus as messiah began only after Jesus' death:

If my deduction is correct, it is of importance for critical examination of the historical life of Jesus itself. If our view (of a messianic secret) could only arise at a time when nothing was known of a public messianic claim on Jesus' part, we seem to have it in a positive historical testimony that Jesus did not actually represent himself as the Messiah. [Messianic Secret, p. 229]

Wrede himself did not live to see his vindication by later gospel research. The year he died Albert Schweitzer issued a rebuttal to Wrede's radical criticism by claiming that the historical Jesus was himself motivated by a dogmatic idea of radical eschatology. But in the long run, most critical scholars have concluded that Wrede was essentially right.

The ultimate heir of Wrede's research was redaction criticism, which identifies the theological viewpoint of each gospel writer.

Other On-line resources:

• Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien - complete German text of Wrede's 1901 thesis on the Messianic Secret in Mark (Internet Archive).

• A Brief Summary of "The Messianic Secret" by William Wrede - Eric B. Dixon's blog gives a detailed introduction to Wrede's thesis (Practice in Questioning).