Bauer, BRUNO

Bauer, BRUNO, one of the most audacious of recent biblical critics, was born at Eisenberg, in the duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, 9th September 1809. After his studies at Berlin, he became a privat-docent in the university there, and in 1839 at Bonn; but three years later he was forbidden to deliver any more theological lectures. He then removed to Berlin, and busied himself there with incessant writing of a more or less violent and polemical description on theological and political subjects, until his death at Rixdorf, near Berlin, 13th April 1882. At first an adherent of the young Hegelian school, Bauer in his earlier works explained the Christian religion as substantial truth obscured by the accretions of a confused and erroneous system of interpretation. In his books on John and the Synoptic Gospels, published in 1840-42, he maintained that the gospels were in no sense historical, but merely artistic products of the human self-consciousness. These books brought him into embittered controversies, which impelled him to retorts that were often both violent and vulgar. His pamphlet against the emancipation of the Jews, in 1843, marked the beginning of a reaction against liberalism, and from this time he abandoned theology for some years, and employed himself as a publicist and littérateur. He wrote numerous historical works on the 18th century, in which he tries to show that the failure of the popular and national struggles in the 19th century was a result of the essential weakness of the 'enlightenment' of the 18th. Later he returned to his earlier studies, and alternated books of destructive criticism on the gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline epistles, with defences of Prussian conservatism. His latest work, published in the year of his death, was Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks sozialistischer Imperialismus.