Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74). German Protestant theologian and biblical critic. In 1835 he produced Das Leben Jesu Kritisch Bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, tr. 1846). This, it has been said, produced both fame and ruin: its radical ideas prevented any future employment (he was appointed to a chair at Zurich but could not actually exercise the post). His Christliche Glaubenslehre (1840, Christian Faith) was a hostile account of the unfolding of Christian doctrine; and Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872, The Old Faith and the New) expressed more of his disillusion and unhappiness, rejecting, for example, any hope of immortality. When he died, he was buried according to the instructions of his will, without any religious ceremony. In his Life of Jesus, Strauss exploited Hegel's distinction between ‘idea’ and ‘fact’, with ‘idea’ being the significance which transcends mere occurrence. Religions are communities of ‘meaning-making’, or, to use Strauss' own term, of myth-making. Myth did not mean (as it has come to mean colloquially) something false, but rather a way in which significance and meaning can be shared. Whatever happened in the case of Jesus, incomparably more important than his biography is the way in which his followers used the mythological opportunities in the Bible to expound his significance. Thus he was not ‘explaining away’ the supernatural, as he is often accused of doing; he was trying to show how the life of Jesus is embedded in the mythological codes of the time as a language of explication.