The world is now free, and ripe for a higher religion in which the ego will overcome nature, not by self-alienation, but by penetrating it and ennobling it. To the theologian we may fling as a gift the shreds of his former science, when we have torn it to pieces; that will be something to occupy himself with, that time may not hang heavy upon his hands in the new world whose advent is steadily drawing nearer.
Thus the task which Bauer had set himself at the beginning of his criticism of the Gospel history, turned, before he had finished, into something different. When he began, he thought to save the honour of Jesus and to restore His Person from the state of inanition to which the apologists had reduced it, and hoped by furnishing a proof that the historical Jesus could not have been the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, to bring Him into a living relation with history. This task, however, was given up in favour of the larger one of freeing the world from the domination of the Judaeo-Roman idol, Jesus the Messiah, and in carrying out this endeavour the thesis that Jesus Christ is a product of the imagination of the early Church is formulated in such a way that the existence of a historic Jesus becomes problematical, or, at any rate, quite indifferent.
At the end of his study of the Gospels, Bauer is inclined to make the decision of the question whether there ever was a historic Jesus depend on the result of a further investigation which he proposed to make into the Pauline Epistles. It was not until ten years later (1850�1851) that he accomplished this task, [1] and applied the result in his new edition of the "Criticism of the Gospel History." [2] The result is negative: there never was any historical Jesus. While criticising the four great Pauline Epistles, which the Tubingen school fondly imagined to be beyond the reach of criticism, Bauer shows, however, his inability to lay a positive historic foundation for his view of the origin of Christianity. The transference of the Epistles to the second century is effected in so arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself. However, this work professes to be only a preliminary study for a larger one in which the new theory was to be fully worked out. This did not appear until 1877; it was entitled "Christ and the Caesars; How Christianity originated from Graeco-Roman Civilisation." [3] The historical basis for his theory, which he here offers, is even more unsatisfactory than that suggested in the preliminary work on the Pauline Epistles. There is no longer any pretence of following
- ↑ Kritik der Paidinischen Briefe. (Criticism of the Pauline Epistles.) Berlin, 1850-1852.
- ↑ Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs. (Criticism of the Gospels and History of their Origin.) 2 vols., Berlin, 1850-1851.
- ↑ Christus und die Casaren. Der Ursprung des Christentums aus dem romischen Griecherttam. Berlin, 1877.
