Protestant theologian and political journalist, born in Eisenberg, EC Germany. He lectured on theology in Berlin (from 1834) and Bonn (from 1839). Beginning as an orthodox follower of Hegel, he shifted towards the Left. Stripped in 1842 of his permission to teach, as a result of his fierce criticism of the Bible and denial of the historical existence of Jesus, he later became a radical atheist. His work Christus und die Cäsaren (1877) proved, through Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, an inspiration for Marxist socialism - which he himself rejected - and Friedrich Nietzsche's religious criticism.
Biography
Bauer was the son of a painter in a porcelain factory at Eisenberg in Saxe-Altenburg. Hegel once awarded the young Bauer an academic prize for a philosophical essay criticizing Immanuel Kant.
Bauer studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he attached himself to the so-called Right Hegelians under Philip Marheineke. Bauer became associated with the radical Young Hegelians or "Left Hegelians".
Literary controversy
Bauer's criticism of the New Testament was highly deconstructive. Bauer ridiculed Strauss's notion that a community could produce a connected narrative.
For Bruno Bauer, the Gospel of Mark was completed in the reign 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.
As one of Bruno Bauer’s reviewers Albert Schweitzer has said, he had "originally sought to defend the honour of Jesus by rescuing his reputation from the inane parody of a biography that the Christian apologists had forged".
Although Bauer did investigate the 'Ur-Marcus,' it was his remarks on the current version of the Gospel of Mark that captured popular attention. The well-known, 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 that is the case, Bauer wrote, then the redactor who added that theme was probably the final redactor of our current version of the Gospel of Mark. Nor was Bauer a lone theologian in that speculation. Bauer agreed with some of their conclusions and added his own, penetrating theological analyses. Bauer argued further for the preponderance of the Graeco-Roman element, over and above the Jewish element, in the Christian writings, and he added a wealth of historical background to support his theory;
According to Bruno Bauer, the writer of Mark's gospel was "an Italian, at home both in Rome and Alexandria"; What Bruno Bauer added was a deep review of European literature in the first century. (We should note here that 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 first century writers like Seneca the Stoic and New Testament texts. Bruno Bauer was perhaps the first to attempt to carefully demonstrate that some New Testament writers freely borrowed from Seneca the Stoic. Nevertheless, the keywords Bauer cited are at the core of New Testament theology, and their similarities emphasize Greco-Roman sources in Stoic and Cynic writings, rather than in Jewish Scripture.)
In Christ and te Caesars, Bauer argued that Judaism entered Rome during the era of the Maccabees, and increased in population and influence in Rome since that time.
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.
According to Albert Schweitzer, who was a devout Christian, Bruno Bauer's criticisms of the New Testament provided the most interesting questions about the historical Jesus that he had seen. Schweitzer's own theology was partly based on Bauer's writings. Bauer was a man of restless creativity, interdisciplinary activity and independent judgment. Many lesser-informed reviewers have charged that Bauer's judgment was ill-balanced, but history has barely begun to review his life. 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.
David 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 this controversial book about the question of Civil Rights for Jews, Bauer asked, how can Jews obtain Civil Rights until Germans themselves obtain Civil Rights?
The topic of atheism is a continuing debate in contemporary scholarship about Bruno Bauer. A number 20th century references to Bauer presume that he was an atheist. However, in the 19th century, perhaps most academic books about theology make reference to Bruno Bauer. Bauer's philosophy was not less complicated and not less controversial than that of Hegel his teacher. One modern writer, Paul Trejo (2002), makes a 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. Bauer's infamous, banned book, Christianity Exposed (1843), was after all a mild affair, exposing only one sect of Christian against another.
In 1836, during his early days as a tutor, Bruno Bauer taught a teenage Karl Marx. Marx later was to turn against Bauer with criticisms in two books, The Holy Family, and, The German Ideology. Because Marx abandoned him, and because the Prussian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm IV banned him from holding a professorial post, Bruno Bauer's intellect was buried under the cross-currents of left-wing and right-wing battles at the turn of the 20th century.
This may explain why the great bulk of Bauer's writings have still not been translated into English. Only two books by Bauer have been formally translated;
Personality
Bauer's attitude towards the Jews is dealt with in the article in the Jewish Encyclopedia. For example, Bauer's attitude toward the Jewish writers of the first century, Philo and Josephus, was one of open admiration. In general terms Bauer's attitude toward Civil Rights for German Jews may be summarized in his question, 'how can Jews obtain Civil Rights until Germans themselves obtain Civil Rights?' That question should be answered in detail before judgment is passed on Bruno Bauer.
The first English-language rendering of Bruno Bauer's career was published in March, 2003 by Douglas Moggach, a professor at the University of Ottawa. Professor Moggach develops a republican interpretation of Bruno Bauer, in which Bauer is portrayed as reaching atheist conclusions because of his political commitments to free self-consciousness and autonomy, and his criticisms of the Restoration union of church and state.
Bauer's personality was complex.
However, Bauer never considered himself as either left or right.
Bauer had studied directly under the great innovator in philosophy, Hegel. Hegel had awarded an academic prize to Bauer when Bauer was about 20 years old. Hegel died when Bruno Bauer was 22 years old. Perhaps this affected Bauer's personality strongly;
When Hegel unexpectedly died of cholera Bruno Bauer's official connections were drastically reduced. Bauer had very few powerful friends during the academic fallout after Hegel's death.
In 1840 a chance came for Bauer to prove himself.
The Old Hegelians selected Bruno Bauer (now 26 years old) to respond. Bauer didn't care to defend Fundamentalism -- he took care to show that David Strauss used Hegel's name in vain.
In his book, In Defense of my LIFE OF JESUS Against the Hegelians (1838), David Strauss refused to debate with Bauer, insulted Bauer, and invented the rubric of left-right Hegelians to portray Bauer on the right-wing and himself on the left-wing. Strauss said Bauer's arguments were 'a foolish bit of pen-pushing' and did his best to portray Bauer as a right-wing radical. Actually, Strauss had no effective arguments against Bauer. Bruno Bauer was called a right-Hegelian by many, but Bauer didn't accept it. Bruno Bauer was among the first to go.
This also affected Bauer's personality.
Bauer went underground and began to write Hegelian newspapers here and there. Bauer was not a left-wing radical, but he was happy to be their leader if it could lead them back to a Hegelian understanding of the dialectic. Another member of those Young Hegelians, Max Stirner, became Bauer's life long friend. Although Bauer was not a radical egoist, he preferred the writings of Stirner to the writings of Marx, Engels and Ruge.
Shortly after, Marx and Engels broke sharply with Bruno Bauer and attacked him specifically in a critique of one of his works, "On the Jewish Question" and in other books that were critical of various Young Hegelians including Bauer, The Holy Family, and The Germany Ideology.
They never spoke to Bruno Bauer again.
Suppressed by the right-wing, and now suppressed by the left-wing, the influential Bruno Bauer settled into his family's tobacco shop to work, writing books at night.
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8 months ago
There are some factual errors in this entry. 1. The reference should be to Douglas Moggach, not David Moggach. 2. Bauer visited Marx in London in 1856, bringing him as a gift a copy of Hegel's Logic, that Marx may have referred to while writing Capital. It is incorrect to say that they never spoke again.