Bruno Bauer: The First Skeptical Life of Jesus
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:30 pm
The full text of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (1st ed., tr. Montgomery, 1910) is available here on Early Christian Writings.
Links to earlier posts on:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapters 4 & 5
Chapter 6
Chapters 7 & 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Albert Schweitzer on Bruno Bauer:
“Bauer's ‘Criticism of the Gospel History’ is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.”
“The question which has so much exercised the minds of men—whether Jesus was the historic Christ ( = Messiah)—is answered in the sense that everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him, everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world.”
Bruno Bauer: Resources in English
[Very few of Bauer's texts, and none of his volumes of New Testament criticism, have been translated from German to English.]
Entry on Bauer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (by Douglas Moggach)
Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, 2003).
Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (tr. David Green, 1941/1967), pp. 103-108, 339-346.
Roland Boer, “The German Pestilence: Re-Assessing Feuerbach, Strauss, and Bauer,” in ‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus (eds. Thompson & Verenna, 2012), pp. 47-53
Synopsis of Chapter 11
1. Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), philosopher, historian, and theologian, was a prominent disciple of Hegel, a leader of the “young Hegelians,” and a major influence on Karl Marx. He lectured on the Old and New Testaments at several universities in the 1830s before his professorship was terminated in 1842, at the behest of the king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
2. In approaching the Gospel history, Bauer chose the literary rather than the historical method. His thought begins from the end, from the finished literary product, instead of from the beginning of the Gospel history. It was his life task to follow out, to its ultimate consequences, the literary solution of the problem of the life of Jesus.
3. The first Gospel on which Bauer published a study was that of John, in 1840. He found it to be a work of art, far from perfect aesthetically, and inspired by the speculation of Philo of Alexandria. “The parable of the Good Shepherd,” says Bauer, “is neither simple, nor natural, nor a true parable, but a metaphor, which is, nevertheless, much too elaborate for a metaphor, is not clearly conceived, and finally, in places shows much too clearly the skeleton of reflection over which it is stretched.”
4. It appears that Bauer had intended to treat the Synoptics as the solid historical foundation on which the fantastic structure of the 4th Gospel had been built. But the rock of the Synoptics crumbled under his pick. There was not, it turned out, a difference of kind, but merely of degree, between the Synoptics and John.
5. Bauer takes Wilke and Weisse to have proven with scientific certainty the priority of Mark’s Gospel.
6. “If it be once admitted that the whole Gospel tradition, so far as concerns its plan, goes back to a single writer, who has created the connection between the different events…does not the possibility naturally suggest itself that the narrative of the events themselves, not merely the connection in which they appear in Mark, is to be set down to the account of the author of the Gospel?” A great danger had arisen, says Schweitzer, when Weisse and Wilke reduced the triple embankment of the 3 Synoptic Gospels to Mark’s Gospel alone, which might not hold against a flood of skepticism.
7. The 4th Gospel is proof that a Gospel could have a purely literary origin. It is possible, and might be proved from the literary data, that Papias’ statement about the “Logia” [sayings] is worthless, and that Matthew and Luke are nothing but literary expansions of Mark. After all, the birth stories of Matthew and Luke would not be as different as they are if they issued from a common “tradition.” Our knowledge of the Gospel history does not rest on any basis of tradition, but upon three literary works, two of which depend on the third as their source. (But the sayings material in Matthew appears to Bauer to be a development of suggestions in Luke.)
8. Who can assure us that the Gospel history, and its assertion of the messiahship of Jesus, did not first become known in a literary form? And that one man did not create, out of general ideas, the historical tradition in which these ideas are embodied?
9. There is no documentary evidence of any Messianic expectation among the Jews at any time connected to the period when the Gospel history is supposed to have taken place. Daniel was the last of the prophets. Philo knows nothing of a Messiah, nor do the Wisdom writings. The Messiah is scarcely mentioned in “the Apocalypses” [question: what inter-testamental, apocryphal, apocalyptic Jewish texts were known in Europe in the 1840s?].
10. The theme of secrecy about Jesus’ messiahship in Mark, and the form of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8), compel one to ask why Mark’s identification of Jesus as messiah is made so inconsistently and surreptitiously? Because the writer well knew “that no one had ever come forward publicly on Palestinian soil to claim the Messiahship, or had been recognized by the people as Messiah.”
11. In the early phase of his investigation, Bauer assumed that there had been some historical Jesus, who had been “a great, a unique Personality, who so impressed men by His character that it lived on among them in an ideal form, and had awakened into life the Messianic idea.” In time, however, Bauer’s writing becomes “ill-tempered, biting, injurious, hateful, pathological, obsessive, contemptuous, mocking.” His hatred is of the theologians, and his obsession is with the idea that the only historical reality from first to last might have been a late literary embodiment of a set of exalted ideas.
12. The Gospel history is religious art, arising from the experience of a community, and at the same time from the ideas of a single author.
13. The center of everything in the Gospels, and the point of departure, is belief in the sacrificial death and the resurrection of Jesus.
14. Concerning John the Baptist, Matthew and Luke add to Mark’s basic story of Jesus’ miraculous baptism an episode in which JB poses a skeptical question about Jesus’ messiahship. The two stories are not consistent.
15. It is only when one reads the words of Jesus, e.g. “let the dead bury their dead,” as embodying experiences of the early church, that their meaning becomes intelligible. Had they been uttered by a real man in history, they would have been absurd. The parables, said by Jesus to be intended to keep the people in darkness and ignorance, although the disciples themselves can understand nothing about them, are particularly incoherent as accounts of the teaching of a historical Jesus, or even on merely aesthetic grounds.
16. Bauer’s thesis that Mark is an artistic unity, and thus the product of a single mind, runs into difficulties with such imperfections of the text as the dual telling of the feeding of the multitude. Eventually, he resorted to a distinction between canonical Mark and an “Ur-Markus.” But this hardly explains the difficulty.
17. The early Church held inconsistent views about Jesus’ miracles: (a) he must have performed them, but (b) spiritual meanings and understandings were felt to be of superior merit to the “Jewish” demand for signs. The first evangelist handled this inconsistency by having Jesus forbid the persons he healed from spreading the news abroad. The other evangelists failed to grasp this purpose, and found only absurd occasions to repeat the motif of Jesus’ secrecy about his miracles.
18. Mark’s Jesus performs miracles, but does not thereby reveal himself to be the Messiah. Except for Peter’s strange confession at Caesarea Phillipi, there was no genuine recognition of the earthly Jesus by the people or by his disciples, such as arose in the era of Christian belief, when the Gospels were written. Jesus, as Messiah, must perform miracles; but they fail in their purpose of making him known to be the Messiah. “Mark is influenced by an artistic instinct which leads him to develop the main interest, the origin of the faith, gradually.” But the sudden recognition of Jesus as Messiah by the multitude in Jerusalem, after a single miracle which they had not even witnessed, seems to fall from heaven.
19. The incident at Caesarea Phillipi is the central fact of the Gospel History. But it implies that, previously, Jesus had never been recognized as the Messiah. It also necessitates a demonstration of how Peter, and later the Jerusalem multitude, came to believe it. These are insuperable problems. “It is impossible to explain how anyone could come to reject the simple and natural idea that Jesus claimed from the first to be the Messiah, if that had been the fact, and accept this complicated representation [sc. Mark’s] in its place. The latter, therefore, must be the original version. In pointing this out, Bauer gave for the first time the real proof, from internal evidence, of the priority of Mark.”
20. Nothing in Jewish writings supports the notion that the Messiah would appear as a wonder-worker. The connection between miracles and messiahship could only have been established long after Jesus’ death, in the ideas of the early Church. Similarly, Jesus was not in fact hailed as Messiah on entering Jerusalem. The controversy around him in Jerusalem did not turn on this question, nor did the Sanhedrin think of setting up witnesses to Jesus’ supposed claim to be the Messiah.
21. The 3-fold predictions of his passion, the transfiguration, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, the Johannine story of the raising of Lazarus (not related by the Synoptics), the treachery of Judas—all these parts of the Gospel history are inexplicable and inconceivable as historical events. Likewise, the Last Supper, considered as a historical scene. A man, present in person, could not have entertained the idea of offering his own flesh to his friends to eat.
[22. The last 7 pages of Schweitzer’s chapter depart from the study of the Gospels, and treat of Bauer’s philosophical critique of Christianity. Over several decades, Bauer developed a novel and "eccentric" account of Christianity's historical origins in Roman Stoicism, and more generally in the conditions of the Roman Empire.]
Links to earlier posts on:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapters 4 & 5
Chapter 6
Chapters 7 & 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Albert Schweitzer on Bruno Bauer:
“Bauer's ‘Criticism of the Gospel History’ is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.”
“The question which has so much exercised the minds of men—whether Jesus was the historic Christ ( = Messiah)—is answered in the sense that everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him, everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world.”
Bruno Bauer: Resources in English
[Very few of Bauer's texts, and none of his volumes of New Testament criticism, have been translated from German to English.]
Entry on Bauer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (by Douglas Moggach)
Douglas Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge, 2003).
Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (tr. David Green, 1941/1967), pp. 103-108, 339-346.
Roland Boer, “The German Pestilence: Re-Assessing Feuerbach, Strauss, and Bauer,” in ‘Is This Not the Carpenter?’: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus (eds. Thompson & Verenna, 2012), pp. 47-53
Synopsis of Chapter 11
1. Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), philosopher, historian, and theologian, was a prominent disciple of Hegel, a leader of the “young Hegelians,” and a major influence on Karl Marx. He lectured on the Old and New Testaments at several universities in the 1830s before his professorship was terminated in 1842, at the behest of the king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
2. In approaching the Gospel history, Bauer chose the literary rather than the historical method. His thought begins from the end, from the finished literary product, instead of from the beginning of the Gospel history. It was his life task to follow out, to its ultimate consequences, the literary solution of the problem of the life of Jesus.
3. The first Gospel on which Bauer published a study was that of John, in 1840. He found it to be a work of art, far from perfect aesthetically, and inspired by the speculation of Philo of Alexandria. “The parable of the Good Shepherd,” says Bauer, “is neither simple, nor natural, nor a true parable, but a metaphor, which is, nevertheless, much too elaborate for a metaphor, is not clearly conceived, and finally, in places shows much too clearly the skeleton of reflection over which it is stretched.”
4. It appears that Bauer had intended to treat the Synoptics as the solid historical foundation on which the fantastic structure of the 4th Gospel had been built. But the rock of the Synoptics crumbled under his pick. There was not, it turned out, a difference of kind, but merely of degree, between the Synoptics and John.
5. Bauer takes Wilke and Weisse to have proven with scientific certainty the priority of Mark’s Gospel.
6. “If it be once admitted that the whole Gospel tradition, so far as concerns its plan, goes back to a single writer, who has created the connection between the different events…does not the possibility naturally suggest itself that the narrative of the events themselves, not merely the connection in which they appear in Mark, is to be set down to the account of the author of the Gospel?” A great danger had arisen, says Schweitzer, when Weisse and Wilke reduced the triple embankment of the 3 Synoptic Gospels to Mark’s Gospel alone, which might not hold against a flood of skepticism.
7. The 4th Gospel is proof that a Gospel could have a purely literary origin. It is possible, and might be proved from the literary data, that Papias’ statement about the “Logia” [sayings] is worthless, and that Matthew and Luke are nothing but literary expansions of Mark. After all, the birth stories of Matthew and Luke would not be as different as they are if they issued from a common “tradition.” Our knowledge of the Gospel history does not rest on any basis of tradition, but upon three literary works, two of which depend on the third as their source. (But the sayings material in Matthew appears to Bauer to be a development of suggestions in Luke.)
8. Who can assure us that the Gospel history, and its assertion of the messiahship of Jesus, did not first become known in a literary form? And that one man did not create, out of general ideas, the historical tradition in which these ideas are embodied?
9. There is no documentary evidence of any Messianic expectation among the Jews at any time connected to the period when the Gospel history is supposed to have taken place. Daniel was the last of the prophets. Philo knows nothing of a Messiah, nor do the Wisdom writings. The Messiah is scarcely mentioned in “the Apocalypses” [question: what inter-testamental, apocryphal, apocalyptic Jewish texts were known in Europe in the 1840s?].
10. The theme of secrecy about Jesus’ messiahship in Mark, and the form of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8), compel one to ask why Mark’s identification of Jesus as messiah is made so inconsistently and surreptitiously? Because the writer well knew “that no one had ever come forward publicly on Palestinian soil to claim the Messiahship, or had been recognized by the people as Messiah.”
11. In the early phase of his investigation, Bauer assumed that there had been some historical Jesus, who had been “a great, a unique Personality, who so impressed men by His character that it lived on among them in an ideal form, and had awakened into life the Messianic idea.” In time, however, Bauer’s writing becomes “ill-tempered, biting, injurious, hateful, pathological, obsessive, contemptuous, mocking.” His hatred is of the theologians, and his obsession is with the idea that the only historical reality from first to last might have been a late literary embodiment of a set of exalted ideas.
12. The Gospel history is religious art, arising from the experience of a community, and at the same time from the ideas of a single author.
13. The center of everything in the Gospels, and the point of departure, is belief in the sacrificial death and the resurrection of Jesus.
14. Concerning John the Baptist, Matthew and Luke add to Mark’s basic story of Jesus’ miraculous baptism an episode in which JB poses a skeptical question about Jesus’ messiahship. The two stories are not consistent.
15. It is only when one reads the words of Jesus, e.g. “let the dead bury their dead,” as embodying experiences of the early church, that their meaning becomes intelligible. Had they been uttered by a real man in history, they would have been absurd. The parables, said by Jesus to be intended to keep the people in darkness and ignorance, although the disciples themselves can understand nothing about them, are particularly incoherent as accounts of the teaching of a historical Jesus, or even on merely aesthetic grounds.
16. Bauer’s thesis that Mark is an artistic unity, and thus the product of a single mind, runs into difficulties with such imperfections of the text as the dual telling of the feeding of the multitude. Eventually, he resorted to a distinction between canonical Mark and an “Ur-Markus.” But this hardly explains the difficulty.
17. The early Church held inconsistent views about Jesus’ miracles: (a) he must have performed them, but (b) spiritual meanings and understandings were felt to be of superior merit to the “Jewish” demand for signs. The first evangelist handled this inconsistency by having Jesus forbid the persons he healed from spreading the news abroad. The other evangelists failed to grasp this purpose, and found only absurd occasions to repeat the motif of Jesus’ secrecy about his miracles.
18. Mark’s Jesus performs miracles, but does not thereby reveal himself to be the Messiah. Except for Peter’s strange confession at Caesarea Phillipi, there was no genuine recognition of the earthly Jesus by the people or by his disciples, such as arose in the era of Christian belief, when the Gospels were written. Jesus, as Messiah, must perform miracles; but they fail in their purpose of making him known to be the Messiah. “Mark is influenced by an artistic instinct which leads him to develop the main interest, the origin of the faith, gradually.” But the sudden recognition of Jesus as Messiah by the multitude in Jerusalem, after a single miracle which they had not even witnessed, seems to fall from heaven.
19. The incident at Caesarea Phillipi is the central fact of the Gospel History. But it implies that, previously, Jesus had never been recognized as the Messiah. It also necessitates a demonstration of how Peter, and later the Jerusalem multitude, came to believe it. These are insuperable problems. “It is impossible to explain how anyone could come to reject the simple and natural idea that Jesus claimed from the first to be the Messiah, if that had been the fact, and accept this complicated representation [sc. Mark’s] in its place. The latter, therefore, must be the original version. In pointing this out, Bauer gave for the first time the real proof, from internal evidence, of the priority of Mark.”
20. Nothing in Jewish writings supports the notion that the Messiah would appear as a wonder-worker. The connection between miracles and messiahship could only have been established long after Jesus’ death, in the ideas of the early Church. Similarly, Jesus was not in fact hailed as Messiah on entering Jerusalem. The controversy around him in Jerusalem did not turn on this question, nor did the Sanhedrin think of setting up witnesses to Jesus’ supposed claim to be the Messiah.
21. The 3-fold predictions of his passion, the transfiguration, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, the Johannine story of the raising of Lazarus (not related by the Synoptics), the treachery of Judas—all these parts of the Gospel history are inexplicable and inconceivable as historical events. Likewise, the Last Supper, considered as a historical scene. A man, present in person, could not have entertained the idea of offering his own flesh to his friends to eat.
[22. The last 7 pages of Schweitzer’s chapter depart from the study of the Gospels, and treat of Bauer’s philosophical critique of Christianity. Over several decades, Bauer developed a novel and "eccentric" account of Christianity's historical origins in Roman Stoicism, and more generally in the conditions of the Roman Empire.]