Weisse was born in
Leipzig, and studied at the
university there, at first adhering to the
Hegelian school of philosophy. In the course of time, his ideas changed, and became close to those of
Schelling in his later years. He developed (along with
I. H. Fichte with whom he regularly corresponded after 1829) a new speculative
theism, and became an opponent of Hegel's
idealism. In his addresses on the future of the Protestant Church (
Reden über die Zukunft der evangelischen Kirche, 1849), he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus' conceptions of the heavenly Father, the Son of Man and the kingdom of Heaven. In his work on philosophical
dogmatics (
Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christentums, 3 vols., 1855–1862) he seeks, by idealizing all the Christian dogmas, to reduce them to natural postulates of reason or conscience. Weisse was the first theologian to propose the
two-source hypothesis (1838), which is still held by a majority of biblical scholars today. In the two-source hypothesis, the
Gospel of Mark was the first gospel to be written and was one of two sources to the
Gospel of Matthew and the
Gospel of Luke, the other source being the
Q document, a lost collection of Jesus's sayings. Weisse was a contributor to I. H. Fichte's
academic journal Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie. He died in his native city of Leipzig, aged 65. ==Works==