In 1774 the librarian of the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel began to print pieces of a manuscript that attacked revealed religion. In his preface he wrote that he had no idea how or when it had come into the library. That was a cover. The author was Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a Hamburg professor of oriental languages who had died in 1768 after showing his long hunt for contradictions in the Bible only to close friends; the pretence protected his family. Over the next four years the librarian, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, printed seven of these fragments.
Lessing knew the theology he was disturbing from the inside. His father was a Lutheran archdeacon in Kamenz, in Saxony, and wanted him to study theology; at Leipzig Lessing soon turned to poetry and the theatre instead. He spent the next two decades as a journalist, playwright and critic. In the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69) he argued that the French dramatists who claimed to obey Aristotle's rules had misunderstood them. The method was already his: take an authority, read it closely, and show that it does not say what its defenders claim.
The fragments brought defenders of scripture into print, and against one of them, Johann Daniel Schumann, a school director in Hannover, Lessing wrote the open letter "Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft" (1777). Origen, the early church father, had been able to point to miracles still happening in his own day. Lessing had only reports that other people once saw them. Accidental truths of history, he concluded, can never prove necessary truths of reason, and between the two lies an ugly broad ditch that he had tried many times to jump and could not. In ordinary words: even a reliable report that something happened in the first century cannot oblige anyone, centuries later, to believe a doctrine about God. If Christianity is true, it must be true on its own inner evidence.
He did not take Reimarus's side either. In A Rejoinder, written that winter against a Wolfenbüttel theologian who had defended the Gospel accounts of the resurrection against one of the fragments, he granted that the accounts contradict each other and denied that this disproved the resurrection itself. The same pamphlet, which appeared in January 1778, holds his best-known paragraph: offered all truth in God's right hand and in the left only the restless drive toward it, he would humbly choose the left.
Johann Melchior Goeze, the chief pastor of Hamburg, called the publication blasphemy, and between April and July Lessing answered him in eleven open letters, the Anti-Goeze. A true Lutheran, he wrote, wants the protection of Luther's spirit, not of Luther's writings, and pastors who could tell their flock where inquiry must stop would have become popes. In July 1778 Duke Karl of Brunswick, his employer, withdrew his exemption from censorship. Lessing told Elise Reimarus, the dead author's daughter, that he would see whether he could still preach from his old pulpit, the theatre.
Nathan the Wise came out in 1779. Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, it gives its title role to a Jewish merchant modelled on Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher. At its centre stands a parable taken from Boccaccio: a father with one precious ring and three sons he loves equally has two perfect copies made, and since no one can tell which ring is genuine, each son must prove his by how he lives. The Education of the Human Race followed in 1780, arguing that revelation teaches humanity as a teacher teaches a child, and that the New Testament too will one day be outgrown. Lessing died in Braunschweig on 15 February 1781.
In 1785 the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi made public his report that Lessing had privately called himself a follower of Spinoza, which contemporaries heard as a charge of atheism; the quarrel that followed, with Mendelssohn defending his dead friend, became known as the pantheism controversy. Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, took up the ugly broad ditch in two of his books. The Nazis banned Nathan, and on 7 September 1945 the Deutsches Theater in Berlin reopened with it.