It is not always remembered that the important and influential work of Albert Schweitzer on the historical Jesus – both as historian of ‘the quest’ and as proponent of an apocalyptic Jesus who was messiah yet who proved amenable to Schweitzer's own emphasis on ethics – rests within the matrix of another, perhaps even broader topic, that of the origin and development of the Lord's Supper. For Schweitzer's first published work in biblical studies, his dissertation for the licentiate in theology degree in 1900, was a ‘Critical Presentation of Various Recent Historical Concepts of the Lord's Supper’, and his initial ‘Sketch of the Life of Jesus’, published 1901 and destined to be reiterated and expanded in his books on Jesus of 1906 and 1913, was Part II of a wider study on ‘The Lord's Supper in connection with the Life of Jesus and the History of Primitive Christianity’.