 Finally, a more fruitful contribution of Schleiermacher’s to the study of Christianity was the series of lectures on the life of Jesus that—under the influence of two late works of Herder’s: On the Savior of Mankind according to our First Three Gospels (1796) and On God’s Son, the World’s Savior, according to John’s Gospel (1797)—he began to deliver in 1819 and which were published posthumously as The Life of Jesus. Schleiermacher tried in these lectures to combine an interpretation of Jesus as a mere human being with a claim that his extraordinary level of awareness of God nonetheless amounted to a sort of presence of God in him. This compromise was strained and implausible. But Schleiermacher’s project nonetheless constituted an important first step toward much more consistently naturalistic and plausible treatments of the life of Jesus by subsequent scholars, especially David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835–6).