Bruno Bauer

Background

Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) is the fountainhead of academic Jesus mythicism. Born at Eisenberg, he began on the Hegelian right — reviewing David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus critically in 1835 — became Privatdozent at Berlin in 1834 and moved to Bonn in 1839; in March 1842, after the Prussian faculties were canvassed on his fitness to teach, "Bauer was obliged to cease lecturing" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI). His radicalism was initially literary, not mythicist: replacing Strauss's communal myth with "reflection," he argued the Gospel history is "real 'experience,' only not the experience of Jesus, but of the Church" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI).

The decisive step came with his study of the Pauline epistles (1850–1851): "The result is negative: there never was any historical Jesus" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI, p.157). His final theory, Christus und die Cäsaren (1877), derived Christianity from the Graeco-Roman religious ferment of the early Empire, with Stoicism and Roman Judaism as its matrix (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI, p.158).

Positions held in this wiki

• Jesus Mythicism Assessed — the founding statement of the thesis, presented at full strength and assessed fringe: Bauer's redating of the Pauline corpus to the second century "is effected in so arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI, p.157).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus status: Bauer's own books are not ingested; he is in corpus via Schweitzer's chapter XI (Schweitzer 1906), which both surveys and answers him — and, notably, honors him: his critical work is "worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus," being "the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI, p.159-160). This is a steelman-relevant gap: the mythicist founder is cited only through his rebutter.

Principal critics

• Albert Schweitzer — the definitive assessment: Bauer "had become blind to history by examining it too microscopically" (Schweitzer 1906, ch. XI, p.160).
• David Friedrich Strauss — the position Bauer radicalized and abandoned; Strauss's mythical-interpretation-without-mythicism stands as the standing internal critique that myth formation presupposes a historical recipient (Strauss 1835, §15).
• Flavius Josephus — the documentary obstacle: the James passage (Josephus, Ant. XX.9.1) and Gal 1:19 (bib) jointly attest a brother of Jesus known to Paul.

See also

• Arthur Drews — the twentieth-century popularizer of the thesis Bauer founded (now in corpus directly).
• Richard Carrier — the contemporary Bayesian restatement; not in corpus.
• David Friedrich Strauss — the near-neighbor position mythicism is persistently confused with.