Trevor wrote:Too bad it is out of print and I can't find a used copy. The reviewer talks about Paul and Seneca. I believe that Abraham Malherbe became the leading authority on Stoicism and Paul. I enjoyed his commentary on the epistles to the Thessalonians. The basic idea that Christianity is very much a religion of the Roman Empire seems indisputable to me. As more work continues to be done in this vein, the picture will come into clearer focus.
Albert Schweitzer dedicates a chapter to Bruno Bauer in his classic study,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer thought Bauer's earlier work on the Gospel of John (1840) and the Synoptics (1850-52) was brilliant in many respects, but he also clearly conveys its polemical nature:
"In the end Bauer's only feeling towards the theologians was one of contempt. 'The expression of contempt,' he declares, 'is the last weapon which the critic, after refuting the arguments of the theologians, has at his disposal for their discomfiture'. . . . These outbreaks of hatred are to be explained by the feeling of repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in every genuinely honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it adopted in opposing Strauss. Hence the fiendish joy with which Bauer snatches away the crutches of this pseudo-science, hurls them to a distance, and makes merry over its helplessness. A furious hatred, a fierce desire to strip the theologians absolutely bare, carried him much farther than his critical acumen would have led him in cold blood" (Albert Schweitzer,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery, J.R. Coates, Susan Cupitt and John Bowden [Minneaopolis: Fortress Press, 2001], 136).
Schweitzer was critical of Bauer's final work,
Christ and the Caesars (1877): "The historical basis for the theory which he offers here is even more unsatisfactory than that suggested in the preliminary work on the letters of Paul. There is no longer any pretence of following a historical method; the whole thing turns into an imaginary picture of the life of Seneca" (140).
Describing the book's reception, Schweitzer writes: "When this latest work of Bauer's appeared he had long been regarded by theologians as an extinct force, indeed he had been forgotten. And he had not even kept his promise. He had not succeeded in showing what that higher form of victory over the world was which he declared superior to Christianity; and in place of the personality of Jesus he had finally set up a hybrid thing, laboriously compounded out of two personalities of so little substance as those of Seneca and Josephus. That was the end of his great undertaking" (141). Schweitzer charges him with having become "blind to history by examining it too microscopically" (142).
"But," he goes on to say, "it was a mistake to bury, along with the Bauer of the second period, also the Bauer of the first period . . . The only critic with whom Bauer can be compared is Reimarus. Each exercised a terrifying and disabling influence upon his time. No one had been so keenly conscious as they of the extreme complexity of the problem offered by the life of Jesus. In the view of this complexity they found themselves compelled to seek a solution outside the confines of verifiable history: Reimarus, by finding the basis of the story of Jesus in a deliberate imposture on the part of the disciples; Bauer, by postulating an original evangelist who invented the history. On this ground it was just that they should lose their case. But in dismissing the solutions which they offered, their contemporaries also dismissed the problems which had necessitated such solutions. . . . However, the time is past for pronouncing judgment upon Lives of Jesus on the ground of the solutions which they offer. For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those who discovered them. 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 to be found anywhere" (141-42).
Of course, Schweitzer wrote this in 1906. I daresay Bauer's work on Christian origins is more or less irrelevant now. Historical-critical scholarship on the Gospels has grown exponentially since the turn of the 20th century and theology has taken a back seat. That said, I do think it's too bad that Bauer's writings are not more widely available in English.