Views on Christian origins
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. Rather, only a single writer could be responsible for the first Gospel. 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 (117-138) 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.
In 1906 Albert Schweitzer wrote that Bauer "originally sought to defend the honor 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 belief 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 literary. The 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 the Messianic Secret is a fiction, Bauer wrote, then the redactor who added that theme was probably the final redactor of our current version of the Gospel of Mark. In 1901, Wilhelm Wrede would make his lasting fame by repeating many of Bauer's ideas in his book, The Messianic Secret.
Also, for some influential theologians in the Tübingen School, several Pauline epistles were regarded as forgeries of the 2nd century. Bauer radicalised that position by suggesting that all Pauline epistles were forgeries, written in the West in antagonism to the Paul of The Acts. Bauer observed a preponderance of the Greco-Roman element, over and above the Jewish element, in 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. Other authors, such as Rudolf Bultmann, tended to agree that a Greco-Roman element was dominant.
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."
What Bruno Bauer added was a deep review of European literature in the 1st 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 1st century. 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 1st-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 is that common cultures share common thought-forms and common patterns of speech; that similarities do not necessarily indicate borrowing.
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 1st 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, Bruno Bauer's criticisms of the New Testament provided the most interesting questions about the historical Jesus that he had seen.
Judging by the second-to-last chapter of his Quest, Schweitzer's own theology was partly based on Bauer's writings. The title of that chapter is Thoroughgoing Skepticism and Eschatology. In that chapter Schweitzer clashes head-on with Wilhelm Wrede, who had recently (in 1905) proposed the theory of a Messianic Secret. Wrede's theory claimed that Jesus' continual commands to his followers to "say nothing to anybody" after each miracle was performed could only be explained as a literary invention of this Gospel writer. (That is, Wrede was the thoroughgoing skeptic, and Schweitzer was the thoroughgoing eschatologist.) Schweitzer began by showing that Wrede had merely copied this idea from Bruno Bauer. Then Schweizter listed another forty brilliant criticisms from Bruno Bauer (pp. 334–335) some of which he disagreed with (such as the so-called Messianic Secret) and some of which he considered indispensable for any modern theology of the Gospel.
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 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). Bauers later article "Jews abroad" (Das Judentum in der Fremde) in "Staats- und Gesellschaftslexicon" was even more radical and extensive, mixing arguments of racism, religion and "voelkisch" ideology.
The topic of Bauer's personal religious views or lack thereof is a continuing debate in contemporary scholarship about Bruno Bauer. One modern writer, Paul Trejo (2002), has made the 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. According to Trejo, Bauer's book, Christianity Exposed (1843), was very mild, only setting one sect of Christian against another. Further, opined Trejo, Bauer's Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist was a comedy – actually a prank – in which Bauer pretended to be a right-wing cleric who was attacking Hegel. When many right-wing readers publicly praised the book, Bauer revealed himself as the actual author and had a good laugh.
The Trumpet, written by Bauer 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.
