A first quest for the historical Jesus took place in the 19th century, when hundreds of "Lives of Jesus" were being written. David Strauss (1808–1874) pioneered the search for the "Historical Jesus" by rejecting all supernatural events as mythical elaborations. His 1835 work, "Life of Jesus", was one of the first and most influential systematic analyses of the life story of Jesus, aiming to base it on unbiased historical research. The "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule", starting in the 1890s, used the methodologies of higher criticism, a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text". It compared Christianity to other religions, regarding it as one religion among others and rejecting its claims to absolute truth, and demonstrating that it shares characteristics with other religions. It argued that Christianity was not simply the continuation of the Old Testament, but syncretistic, and was rooted in and influenced by Hellenistic Judaism (Philo) and Hellenistic religions like the mystery cults and Gnosticism. Martin Kähler questioned the usefulness of the search for the historical Jesus, making the famous distinction between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith", arguing that faith is more important than exact historical knowledge. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), who was related to the "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule", emphasized theology, and in 1926 had argued that historical Jesus research was both futile and unnecessary; although Bultmann slightly modified that position in a later book.