 The work of David Strauss, Ferdinand Baur, and others, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marked a turn in the scholarly approach to religion and scripture, towards what is now called ‘the scientific study of religion’. Religious experience, sacred texts, and religious practice were now to be seen as phenomena open to critical investigation and which could—and should—be examined independently of one’s religious commitment, and according to the principles of literary and historical analysis. Strauss and his followers challenged the tendency to equate religious dogmas and creeds with original religious experience, and they were particularly doubtful whether one could recover much knowledge of such experience from ‘events’ recorded in scripture.