Bruno Bauer

 

Bruno Bauer (September 6, 1809 – April 13, 1882), was a German theologian, philosopher and historian. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and controversially concluded that early Christianity owed more to pagan philosophy (Stoicism) than to Judaism.^{[citation needed]}

Biography

Bauer was the son of a painter in a porcelain factory at Eisenberg in Saxe-Altenburg. He studied directly under G.W.F. Hegel until Hegel died in 1831. Hegel once awarded the young Bauer an academic prize for a philosophical essay criticizing Immanuel Kant.

Bauer studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he attached himself to the so-called Right Hegelians under Philip Marheineke. In 1834 he began to teach in Berlin as a licentiate of theology, and in 1839 was transferred to the University of Bonn. In 1838 he published his Kritische Darstellung der Religion des Alten Testaments (2 vols.), which shows that at that date he was still faithful to the Hegelian Right. Soon afterwards his opinions underwent a change, and in three works, one on the Fourth Gospel, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (1840), and the other on the Synoptics, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (1841), as well as in his Herr Dr. Hengstenberg. Kritische Briefe über den Gegensatz des Gesetzes und des Evangeliums (1839), he announced his complete rejection of his earlier orthodoxy. Bauer became associated with the radical Young Hegelians or "Left Hegelians". In 1842 the government revoked his license and he retired for the rest of his life to Rixdorf, near Berlin.

From then on, he took a deep interest in modern history and politics, as well as in theology, and published Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des 18ten Jahrhunderts (4 vols. 1843-1845), Geschichte der französischen Revolution (3 vols. 1847), and Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks socialistischer Imperialismus (1882). Other critical works are: a criticism of the gospels and a history of their origin, Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs (1850-1852), and a criticism of the Pauline epistles, Kritik der paulinischen Briefe (1850-1852).

He died at Rixdorf in 1882.

Literary controversy

Bauer's criticism of the New Testament was highly deconstructive. David Strauss, in his Life of Jesus, had accounted for the Gospel narratives as half-conscious products of the mythic instinct in the early Christian communities. Bauer ridiculed Strauss's notion that a community could produce a connected narrative. His own contention, embodying a theory of Christian Gottlob Wilke (Der Urevangelist, 1838), was that the original narrative was the Gospel of Mark.

For Bruno Bauer, the Gospel of Mark was completed in the reign of Hadrian (where its prototype, the 'Ur-Marcus,' identifiable within the Gospel of Mark by a critical analysis, was begun around the time of Josephus and the Roman-Jewish Wars). Bauer, like other advocates of this 'Marcan Hypothesis', affirmed that all the other Gospel narratives used the Gospel of Mark as their model within their writing communities.

As one of Bruno Bauer’s reviewers Albert Schweitzer has said, he had "originally sought to defend the honour of Jesus by rescuing his reputation from the inane parody of a biography that the Christian apologists had forged." However, he eventually came to the conclusion that it was a complete fiction and "regarded the Gospel of Mark not only as the first narrator, but even as the creator of the gospel history, thus making the latter a fiction and Christianity the invention of a single original evangelist" (Otto Pfleiderer).

Although Bauer did investigate the 'Ur-Marcus,' it was his remarks on the current version of the Gospel of Mark that captured popular attention. In particular, some key themes in the Gospel of Mark appeared to be purely literary. The well-known, Messianic Secret theme, in which Jesus continually performed wonders and then continually told the viewers not to tell anybody that he did this, seemed to Bauer to be an example of fiction. If that is the case, Bauer wrote, then the redactor who added that theme was probably the final redactor of our current version of the Gospel of Mark. Nor was Bauer a lone theologian in that speculation.

For example, for some influential theologians in the Tubingen School, several Pauline epistles were regarded as forgeries of the 2nd century. Bauer agreed with some of their conclusions and added his own, penetrating theological analyses. For example, he suggested, the Pauline epistles were written in the West in antagonism to the Paul of The Acts. Bauer argued further for the preponderance of the Graeco-Roman element, over and above the Jewish element, in the Christian writings, and he added a wealth of historical background to support his theory; though modern scholars such as E. P. Sanders and John P. Meier have disputed this theory and attempted to demonstrate a mainly Jewish historical background.

According to Bruno Bauer, the writer of Mark's gospel was "an Italian, at home both in Rome and Alexandria"; that of Matthew's gospel "a Roman, nourished by the spirit of Seneca"; Christianity is essentially "Stoicism triumphant in a Jewish garb."

It is obvious that Mark is a Roman name, not a Jewish name. What Bruno Bauer added was a deep review of European literature in the first century. In his estimation, many key themes of the New Testament, especially those that are opposed to themes in the Old Testament, can be found with relative ease in Greco-Roman literature that flourished during the first century. (We should note here that such a position was also maintained by some Jewish scholars.)

Bauer's final book, Christ and the Caesars (1877) offers a penetrating analysis that shows common key-words in the words of first century writers like Seneca the Stoic and New Testament texts. While this had been perceived even in ancient times, the ancient explanation was that Seneca 'must have been' a secret Christian. Bruno Bauer was perhaps the first to attempt to carefully demonstrate that some New Testament writers freely borrowed from Seneca the Stoic. (One modern explanation drawn from socio-rhetorical criticism is that common cultures share common thought-forms and common patterns of speech; that similarities do not necessarily indicate borrowing. Nevertheless, the keywords Bauer cited are at the core of New Testament theology, and their similarities emphasize Greco-Roman sources in Stoic and Cynic writings, rather than in Jewish Scripture.)

In Christ and the Caesars, Bauer argued that Judaism entered Rome during the era of the Maccabees, and increased in population and influence in Rome since that time. He cited literature from the first century to strengthen his case that Jewish influence in Rome was far greater than historians had yet reported. The Imperial throne was influenced by the Jewish religious genius, he said, citing Herod's relation with the Caesar family, as well as the famous relationship between Josephus and the Flavians, Vespasian and Titus, and also one of the poems of Horace.

According to Bruno Bauer, Julius Caesar sought to interpret his own life as an Oriental miracle story, and Augustus Caesar completed that job by commissioning Virgil to write his Aeneid, making Caesar into the Son of Venus and a relative of the Trojans, thereby justifying the Roman conquest of Greece and insinuating Rome into a much older history.

By contrast, said Bauer, Vespasian was far more fortunate, since he had Josephus himself to link his reign with an Oriental miracle. Josephus had prophesied that Vespasian would become Emperor of Rome and thus ruler of the world. This actually happened, and in this way the Roman conquest of Judea was justified and insinuated Rome into an even older history.

According to Albert Schweitzer, who was a devout Christian^{[citation needed]}, Bruno Bauer's criticisms of the New Testament provided the most interesting questions about the historical Jesus that he had seen. Schweitzer's own theology was partly based on Bauer's writings.

This line of criticism has value in emphasizing the importance of studying the influence of environment in the formation of the Christian Scriptures. Bauer was a man of restless creativity, interdisciplinary activity and independent judgment. Many lesser-informed reviewers have charged that Bauer's judgment was ill-balanced, but history has barely begun to review his life. It is not surprising, given the institutional response to his ideas. Due to the controversial nature of his work as a social theorist, theologian and historian, Bauer was banned from public teaching by a Prussian monarch. After many years of similar censorship, Bauer came to resign himself to his place as a free-lance critic, rather than as an official teacher.

Douglas Moggach published The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer in 2003. This is the most comprehensive overview of Bauer's life and works, in English to date. Bauer's biography has obtained more kindly reviews these days, even by opponents. In his own day, his opponents often respected him, since he was not afraid of taking a line on principle. One point that is often raised in this regard is his line that was displeasing to his liberal friends on the Jewish question (Die Judenfrage, 1843).

In this controversial book about the question of Civil Rights for Jews, Bauer asked, how can Jews obtain Civil Rights until Germans themselves obtain Civil Rights?

The topic of atheism is a continuing debate in contemporary scholarship about Bruno Bauer. A number of 20th century references to Bauer presume that he was an atheist. One modern writer, Paul Trejo (2002), makes a case that Bauer remained a radical theologian who criticized specific types of Christianity, and that Bauer maintained a Hegelian interpretation of Christianity throughout his life. Bauer's infamous, banned book, Christianity Exposed (1843), was after all a mild affair, exposing only one sect of Christian against another.

In 1836, during his early days as a tutor, Bruno Bauer taught a teenage Karl Marx. Marx later was to turn against Bauer with criticisms in two books, The Holy Family, and, The German Ideology. Because Marx abandoned him, and because the Prussian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm IV banned him from holding a professorial post, Bruno Bauer's intellect was buried under the cross-currents of left-wing and right-wing battles at the turn of the 20th century.

This may explain why the great bulk of Bauer's writings have still not been translated into English. Only two books by Bauer have been formally translated; a comedic parody, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist (with Karl Marx, 1841, trans. Lawrence Stepelevich, 1989),^[1] and Christianity Exposed: A Recollection of the 18th Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the 19th (1843, ed. Paul Trejo, 2002).

The Trumpet, written by Bauer and Marx and published anonymously, was of inspiration to Gianfranco Sanguinetti, for his 1975 pamphlet Veritable Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy, a situationist prank which caused him to leave Italy under the force of political pressure.^[2]

Personality

Bauer's attitude towards the Jews is dealt with in the article in the Jewish Encyclopedia. See generally Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopedie; and cf. Otto Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 226; Karl Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie, pp. 142 if.; and F Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in the 19th Century (1889), pp. 374?378.

However, one may still consider the question open. For example, Bauer's attitude toward the Jewish writers of the first century, Philo and Josephus, was one of open admiration. In general terms Bauer's attitude toward Civil Rights for German Jews may be summarized in his question, 'how can Jews obtain Civil Rights until Germans themselves obtain Civil Rights?' That question should be answered in detail before judgment is passed on Bruno Bauer.

The first English-language rendering of Bruno Bauer's career was published in March, 2003 by Douglas Moggach, a professor at the University of Ottawa. His book is entitled, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. Professor Moggach develops a republican interpretation of Bruno Bauer, in which Bauer is portrayed as reaching atheist conclusions because of his political commitments to free self-consciousness and autonomy, and his criticisms of the Restoration union of church and state. Other scholars continue to dispute that portrait.

Bauer's personality was complex. During his career and even after he died he was difficult to classify. The left-wing tried to define him as one of their own. The right-wing tried to define him as one of their own. He was praised by the right-Hegelians, and he was praised by the left-Hegelians.

However, Bauer never considered himself as either left or right. He was a Young Hegelian.

Bauer had studied directly under the great innovator in philosophy, Hegel. Hegel had awarded an academic prize to Bauer when Bauer was about 20 years old. Hegel died when Bruno Bauer was 22 years old. Perhaps this affected Bauer's personality strongly; he may have seen himself as sitting very close to the highest academic post in Prussia and possibly he imagined that he would one day have that post.

When Hegel unexpectedly died of cholera Bruno Bauer's official connections were drastically reduced. Bauer had very few powerful friends during the academic fallout after Hegel's death.

In 1840 a chance came for Bauer to prove himself. The theologian, David Strauss, had made a scandal for the Fundamentalist Christian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, by publishing his book, The Life of Christ (1835). This famous book argued that much of Jesus' biography was legend, and that de-mythologization was the correct approach of Bible interpretation. In a surprise move, Strauss claimed that he obtained these ideas from the philosophy of Hegel. The monarch demanded that the Hegelians respond.

The Old Hegelians selected Bruno Bauer (now 26 years old) to respond. Bauer didn't care to defend Fundamentalism -- he took care to show that David Strauss used Hegel's name in vain. His ideas were not the same as Hegel's. Hegel died the year that Strauss entered Berlin University, so Strauss got his ideas from other sources.

In his book, In Defense of my LIFE OF JESUS Against the Hegelians (1838), David Strauss refused to debate with Bauer, insulted Bauer, and invented the rubric of left-right Hegelians to portray Bauer on the right-wing and himself on the left-wing. Strauss said Bauer's arguments were 'a foolish bit of pen-pushing' and did his best to portray Bauer as a right-wing radical.^{[citation needed]} Actually, Strauss had no effective arguments against Bauer. David Strauss never published another major book.

For a long time the title stuck; Bruno Bauer was called a right-Hegelian by many, but Bauer didn't accept it. When the monarch decided that the Hegelian response was not good enough, that is, it did not stop the soaring sales of Strauss' book, the monarch chose to ban almost all Hegelians from teaching. Bruno Bauer was among the first to go.

This also affected Bauer's personality.

Bauer went underground and began to write Hegelian newspapers here and there. In this journey he met some socialists, including Karl Marx, his former student, and Marx' new friends, Fredrick Engels and Arnold Ruge. They were all left-wing radicals. Bauer was not a left-wing radical, but he was happy to be their leader if it could lead them back to a Hegelian understanding of the dialectic. Another member of those Young Hegelians, Max Stirner, became Bauer's life long friend. Stirner was no socialist, on the contrary, he was a radical egoist. Although Bauer was not a radical egoist, he preferred the writings of Stirner to the writings of Marx, Engels and Ruge.

Shortly after, Marx and Engels broke sharply with Bruno Bauer and attacked him specifically in a critique of one of his works, "On the Jewish Question" and in other books that were critical of various Young Hegelians including Bauer, The Holy Family, and The Germany Ideology.

Bruno Bauer met with Marx again in London in the mid-1850's, while visiting his exiled brother Edgar there. According to Marx's correspondence with Engels, Bauer presented him with a copy of Hegel's Science of Logic. Marx referred to this volume while completing his drafts of 'Capital'.

Suppressed by the right-wing, and now suppressed by the left-wing, the influential Bruno Bauer settled into his family's tobacco shop to work, writing books at night. He never married, and he wrote books for the rest of his life.

Major works

• Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (1840)
• Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, 2 vols. (1841)
• Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen (1841)
• Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (1842)
• Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpunkte des Glaubens aus beurteilt (1842)
• Das Entdeckte Christentum (1843, banned and destroyed, into oblivion until 1927: ed. Barnikol)
• Die Judenfrage (1843)
• Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des 18. Jahrhunderts (1843-45)
• Geschichte Deutschlands und der französischen Revolution unter der Herrschaft Napoleons, 2 vols. (1846)
• Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs, 4 vols., 4 suppl. (1850-52)
• Russland und das Germanentum (1853)
• Philo, Renan und das Urchristentum (1864)
• Christus und die Cäsaren (1877)
• Zur Orientierung über die Bismarck'sche Ära (1880)
• Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks sozialistischer Imperialismus (1882)

Quotes

"We save the honor of Jesus when we restore His Person to life from the state of inanity to which the apologists have reduced it, and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly possessed." — Bruno Bauer, SYNOPTIKER, 1840

"Therefore, criticism has to direct itself against itself, and against the mysterious Substance in which it has up to now hid itself. In this way criticism must resolve things such that the development of this Substance drives itself forward to the Universality and Certainty of the Idea of its actual existence, the Eternal Self-consciousness." — Bruno Bauer, SYNOPTIKER, 1840

"The pure Christian State is a State in which theological law prevails. This law attains to real power or, to be more exact, absolute power, when through its results which are identical with those of opium, it puts all parts of humanity to sleep. If some occasionally awake they carry out crimes that horrify humanity which has not yet become Christian in the full sense of the word or has already abandoned the Christian framework." — Bruno Bauer, 1841, THE CHRISTIAN STATE AND OUR TIMES

"After fulfilling its destructive urge towards everything that is noble and good on earth, it [naive Religion] sketches, in its opium intoxication, a picture of the future situation, which differs drastically from the order of this world, since everything changes and is renewed." — Bruno Bauer, 1842, THE GOOD CAUSE OF FREEDOM AND MY OWN CASE

"Reason is the true creative power, for it produces itself as Infinite Self-consciousness, and its ongoing creation is...world history. As the only power that exists, Spirit can therefore be determined by nothing other than itself, that is, its essence is Freedom...Freedom is the infinite power of Spirit...Freedom, the only End of Spirit, is also the only End of History, and history is nothing other than Spirit's becoming *conscious* of its Freedom, or the becoming of Real, Free, Infinite Self-consciousness." — Bruno Bauer, 1842, HEGEL'S LEHRE VON DER RELIGION UND KUNST VON DEM STANDPUNKTE DES GLAUBENS AUS BEURTEILT, trans. Moggach, 2001

"It is not as uncommon ... [for some to] accept the reality of phenomena that are not yet understood, as it is very common for physicists to disbelieve the reality of phenomena that seem to contradict contemporary beliefs of physics" — Bruno Bauer

Notes

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Freedom from Religion Foundation entry
• The Quest of the Historical Jesus: Chapter 11 Bruno Bauer

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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