Baur, FERDINAND CHRISTIAN, was one of the most eminent and influential of modern German theologians. It has not unjustly been said of him that he was for the criticism of the New Testament what Wolf and Niebuhr were for classical literature and history. Baur was born at Schmiden, near Stuttgart, on the 21st June 1792, became professor in the theological seminary at Blanbeuren in 1817, and was called to the university of Tübingen as professor of Theology in 1826. In his work here he spent a most laborious life, being known as the founder of the 'Tübingen School,' and at Tübingen he died 2d December 1860.
His first publication, Symbolik und Mythologie (1825), expounded the nature-religion of antiquity; but the main work of his life lay in the fields of church history, the history of Christian dogma, and biblical criticism. Originally a disciple of Schleiermacher, he early attached himself to the school of Hegel, and the Hegelian conception of history he in the main continued to hold from the time he published his books on Manichæism (1831) and Gnosticism (1835) till the end of his life. Of much greater importance than these were his elaborate works on The Christian Doctrine of the Atonement (1838) and the Trinity and Incarnation (1843). The Handbook of the History of Christian Dogma was followed by three volumes of Lectures on the same subject. His famous Contrast between Catholicism and Protestantism (1836) was written in reply to the Symbolik of the Catholic theologian, Möhler.
Baur's article on the 'Christ-party in the Corinthian Church,' contributed to the Tübinger Zeitschrift for 1831, may be said to have first indicated that conception of the early Christian Church with which his name is identified, and which in a long series of works he has compelled all subsequent writers on this period either to accept in whole or in part, or explicitly to refute. The current view of the early church was that in it peace, concord, and unity prevailed. But from a careful study of the New Testament and patristic literature, Baur came to a different conclusion. The most ancient Christianity, it seemed to him, stood very near to Judaism, the Christianity of the congregation in Jerusalem and the apostles there. Paul was the first to free the new faith from this narrowness, but the majority of the Jewish Christians and the apostles were unable to adopt Paul's wider view of the scope and mission of Christianity, and opposed it at times with passionate hostility. The Judaistic or Ebionite party long maintained the supremacy in the church, their creed differing from Judaism mainly in the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, and it was not till long after Paul's death, and mainly during the Gnostic controversies about or after the middle of the 2d century, that the contending parties were welded together into the Catholic Church, by help of the dogmatic system of the fourth gospel, and the episcopal constitution of the church. The various stages of the process of fusion are, in Baur's belief, marked by extant documents, both amongst the books of the New Testament and in extra-canonical literature. Most of the New Testament books Baur held to have been written in the 2d century. Of Paul's epistles he accepted as genuine only those to the Romans, Corinthians (I. and II.), and Galatians; and only these genuine epistles of Paul, and the Apocalypse representing the opposite or Judaistic extreme, seemed to Baur to have been written before the year 70 A.D. The Acts of the Apostles minimised the hostilities that rent the early church, and the highest outcome of the conciliating tendency was the Gospel of John, which was of course not by the apostle, but by a writer of the 2d century. These views are developed with vast learning, ingenuity, and brilliancy of criticism in Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ (2d ed. 1867; Eng. trans. 1873-75); Critical Investigations on the Canonical Gospels; the Gospel of Mark; and Christianity and the Christian Church of the first Three Centuries (3d ed. 1863; Eng. trans. 1879). The later periods of church history Baur treated in four separate works—on the church from the 4th to the end of the 6th century; the church of the middle ages; the church of modern times; and the church of the 19th century. The most distinguished of those who adopted Baur's view of the early church of the leaders of the Tübingen School were Zeller, Schwegler, Köstlin, and Hilgenfeld, their principal organ being the Theologische Jahrbücher (published from 1842 to 1857). But Baur's disciples were very numerous, and his influence was marked on many who could not be said to belong to the school. Many of the contentions of Baur and his earlier followers have been modified by the later representatives of Baur's view; but of the school as a whole, it may be said that its leaders were the first to bring to bear on the doctrine, constitution, and literature of the early church the strict scientific methods adopted by dispassionate workers in other departments of historical research. It should be noted that Baur's main position was to some extent anticipated by Semler, and also by the English deists, Thomas Morgan and John Toland. On the school, see Baur's own work, Die Tübinger Schule (1859); and R. Mackay's Tübingen School (1863). On Baur himself, see Zeller's Vorträge und Abhandlungen (2d ed. 1875).