Thanks for this.flowers_grow wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 10:02 am Bruno Bauer is so interesting, as you hear so much of him by reputation but he's so inaccessible if you don't read German. The Gothic script in one of his works I found really put me off too.
Usually Bauer is quickly dismissed, but some like Schweitzer treat him with more respect. Another such person was A.D. Loman, a Dutch scholar from the late 19th century. Here's what A.D. Loman wrote about him in Theologisch Tijdschrift 16, in 1882, in his first "Quaestiones Paulinae", which helped kick off the Dutch radical movement (my translation from the Dutch):
...
The only thing I know about the Dutch critics is through Hermann Detering's book The Fabricated Paul. It is interesting to read this excerpt from Loman.
The reverse side of Schweitzer's observation about Bauer having distinguished himself by finding the most problems in the NT, and the deepest problems, is that it is very hard to resolve those problems into positive explanations. In life and in academia as well, people don't want to hear about unsolved and unsolvable problems. Many prefer an absurd story to a pile of unanswerable questions. "Savage wilds under an open sky" about sums it up.