He taught that the accounts of the New Testament were to be regarded as fixed written versions of oral Gospel tradition.
[2] Using form criticism, Schmidt showed that an editor had assembled the narrative out of individual scenes that did not originally have a chronological order.
[3] This finding challenged historians' ability to discern a historical Jesus and helped bring about a decades-long collapse in interest in the topic.
He was dismissed from his position as a professor at Bonn in September 1933 by the Nazi regime due to his resistance to the Aryan paragraph.
[5] He wrote the article on the meaning of the Greek word ekklesia (church) for the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.