Saturday, August 21, 2010

Higher Critical Review Robert M. Price Deconstructing Jesus.


Higher Critical Review
Robert M. Price
Deconstructing Jesus.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000. 284 pp. $31.95. ISBN 1-57392-758-9.

Reviewed by Earl Doherty. Institute for Higher Critical Studies
JHC 7/1 (Spring 2000), 126-140.
Until recently, one of the mainstays of liberal New Testament scholarship was the concept that Jesus, during the course of his career or immediately following his death, gave rise to a wide variety of responses, each of which became embodied in a particular circle of followers who went off in their own more or less individual directions: a kind of break-up of Jesus into his component parts. Only later, went the theory, did those splintered pieces come back together, as reflected in the work of the evangelists. Such theories were an attempt to take into account all the different elements to be found in the Gospels and in the early Christian movement generally, elements which seemed to possess their own independent character and which often could not be found in close association with each other in stages prior to the Gospels.
This created the picture of a multi-faceted figure whose teachings had so impressed one group of people that they recorded his sayings and nothing else, whose wonder-working exploits were seized on by another group who put together collections of miracles attributed to him, whose conflicts with the religious establishment were remembered by still others who preserved the traditions embodied in the controversy or pronouncement stories of the Gospels. Set against all these groups who responded to facets of Jesus' ministry was yet another tradition, as represented by the epistles. This was a reaction to his death in Jerusalem, one that created out of the human man a cosmic pre-existent divinity, a redeeming Son of God who had suffered, been crucified and rose from his tomb. Miscellaneous groups like the relatives of Jesus and the Jerusalem Pillars, together with various Jewish-Christian sects which later claimed to trace their ancestry back to a primitive community around Jesus in Jerusalem, were fitted into the mosaic in various, sometimes overlapping ways.
But is this one Jesus, or many? Were all these constituent parts linked in any meaningful fashion before they came together in the Gospels? Do any of the components go back to a single figure who can be given the appellation "the historical Jesus"?
These are the kinds of questions which Deconstructing Jesus addresses. Robert Price's new book is an invigorating romp, a no-holds-barred excursion across the landscape of first century Palestine and beyond. Its diverse scenes include all the going movements of the day that reveal their presence in the early Christian record; it opens doors onto the mythological and ritual underpinnings of the Christian story and faith. Itinerant philosophers, social and religious reform agitators, romance novelists, personal saviors and popular icons, are only some of those (along with modern scholars -- some of the 'critical' variety -- who wander the same landscape still wearing Gospel-tinted glasses of varying hues) that are subjected to Price's keen eye, discerning insight and engaging wit. His knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his ability to dissect and rearrange the pieces of a multi-faceted ancient world is fascinating.
Because the passing vista is so multifarious, it would have been fatal for him to set down a conclusion at the outset and interpret everything in accord with it. He gives us no opening statement that his deconstruction of the Christian founder will have to lead to rejecting any existence at all for such a figure. That will remain to be seen. Some of his scenarios must place a representative Jesus on the stage, at least while the action is unfolding. Once the scene has passed by, we can question whether the central character in it was indeed there in actuality, or whether his presence was a later construction to give body to those traditions and memories. But that many different representative "Jesuses" must be taken into account is undeniable, and by the end of this book it must be admitted that not even the greatest apologetic wizard could fit them all into a harmonious and historical whole.
Jesus Movements and Christ Cults
One of those modern wizard-scholars is the very radical and very secular Burton L. Mack, who nevertheless - at last word - still adheres to the idea that a single historical man had an input (if not exclusively) into all the major facets that make up the later Gospel-embodied Christianity. (He has, however, abandoned the Big Bang model that all of Christianity proceeded from the perceived resurrection of Jesus, advocating instead the existence of many Jesus movements and responses of which only one involved the idea of resurrection.) Price first examines the main features of the early Christian landscape through the prism of Mack's breakdown, enlarging on it and pointing out its weaknesses.
The Galilean Q scene of itinerant apostles and homeless radicals comes alive in Price's hands. He calls our attention to the 'freeloading' dimension to the wandering prophets whom the Didache, for one, must caution the settled community against (chapter 11). Somewhat in the nature of modern televangelists, the meaning behind certain formerly pristine sentiments about charity is revealed as subtly self-serving -- Price calls it "fund-raising theology" [p. 50] -- when such prophets exhorted their hearers to cash in their worldly possessions and give to the poor. The saying in Mark 14:7 may reveal just which "poor" these prophets had in mind. Certain elements in the early Gospels are shown to be coping with the decline of the whole itinerant preacher movement. Such insights are brought home even more effectively through Price's humor and unpretentious approach.
If resurrection is to be seen as the product of only one faction of early Christianity [p. 56], the question is raised as to whether even the death of Jesus was a known fact, or taken for granted in all the reactions to him. Might the early Christians have believed that Jesus had escaped dying at his execution? Like the Moslems, some may have believed that Jesus had been supernaturally taken up by God, or hidden away. Perhaps he was simply rescued from a grueling but not fatal crucifixion. This becomes a not-so-crazy idea when we are taken through telltale elements of Mark's Gospel which seem to be pointing to that very plot development, perhaps reflecting some earlier version or predecessor. We'll take a look at those 'romance novel' elements later.
Price asks if Jesus was only one of many on the scene whom various groups venerated, as such figures jockeyed for prominence of place in the minds of competing adherents. Was resurrection adopted as a selling point by one of these factions within "a creatively inchoate, unstable and diverse early Christianity"? Perhaps it was the product of a rivalry between John the Baptist and Jesus followings. Looking at Mack's miracle-preserving groups, did these have a political agenda to turn Jesus into a new Moses, as opposed to a new David? The Gospel miracles, after all, are emulations of the former, while David as a role model is conspicuously absent. Perhaps such elements in the Gospels are reflective of northern, non-Judaean interests, with Jesus as their non-Davidic symbolic spokesperson.
These and a host of carefully investigated and entertaining questions can always be seen to be supported by some facet of the evidence, and one feels that Price has tossed them onto the table, not only as an indicator of his fundamental object -- to show how many and varied are the components that can be uncovered beneath the composite Jesus picture -- but also to get the reader salivating in perverse fascination and not a little unnerved. Even for the poor mythicist, the picture becomes bewildering: how to fit all these elements into a coherent picture of the non-existence of an historical Jesus?
Q and Cynic Travelers
But let me not get too far off the road of the journey being undertaken. I've alluded to the Q scene, and here Price fleshes out our understanding of the nature and background of the Kingdom of God movement centered in Galilee. Mack, Crossan and others have revealed a Galilee that is only marginally Jewish, one heavily hellenized. Several Cynic wandering philosophers/apostles can be located here in the BCE period. Q's parallels (those layers of teaching attributed by modern critical scholars to the historical Jesus) with Cynic lifestyle and outlook on the world are striking. The Cynics, too, preached a kingdom of God/Zeus, they aimed cynical barbs at established social convention, they used chreia forms to get across the essence of their teachings. Were the Q preachers imitating such a Jesus, who himself owed his inspiration to the Cynic movement? Or did they simply reimagine a past Jesus in a newer Cynic image? Or, one could add, did they invent a Jesus to give themselves a more acceptable and identifiable founder and precursor?
Price gives us ten pages [151-160] of parallels between the sayings of Q1 (the apparent bedrock layer of the Q document) and Cynic-style pronouncements of famous sages like Epictetus, Seneca, or of those reporting on Cynic philosophers, such as Diogenes Laertius. There seems little doubt of the ultimate provenance of the core teachings of the Gospel Jesus -- and it isn't a Jewish one. This makes exceedingly ironic the modern appeal on the part of religious conservatives to a Christianity that preserves a so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition: something which in actuality constitutes an ethic that is Greek and a philosophy and ritual of salvation derived from the thoroughly Hellenistic ethos of the mystery cults.
Price suggests that Q1, "far from allowing us access for the first time to the historical Jesus, is instead inconsistent with an historical Jesus" [p.150]. While people like Burton Mack detect (quite rightly) a pronounced character to the Q1 sayings, one of sly humor and wise common sense, supposedly implying a definite personality, the same features can equally be found in the body of Cynic sayings to which they have been compared, sayings which identifiably "stem from many different Cynic philosophers over several centuries." If the latter sayings do not need to have come from a single person, Price reasons, neither do those attributed to Jesus.
He further observes that with virtually all other sayings collections of the ancient world attributed to a prominent figure (such as the many to Solomon or the collections of psalms ascribed to David), such attribution is fictive, the figure himself legendary. Price notes that attributing anonymous or traditional sayings to an authority figure is a fundamental shift on the part of a "canonical mindset." Rather than let the inherent wisdom of such sayings stand on their own, self-evident and proverbially established from experience, their legitimacy becomes grounded in the fact that they were spoken by some respected or glorified figure, whose pipeline to a higher divinity is emphasized. By imposing theology, the sayings shift to the realm of revelation and prophecy. As "proverbs (that) enshrine wisdom, not revelation," the attribution of Q1 to a Jesus is uncharacteristic of the proverb genre and suggests a later development.
Price postulates that this Q Cynic root entered the Jewish Kingdom movement by way of the Godfearers, those gentiles attached to Judaism. He agrees (with myself) that the Q base of sayings had no narrative settings, no controversy stories. In the Gospels, the apparent point of a saying itself often makes a less-than-perfect fit with the set-up situation the evangelists provide for it, as though the exact significance of the original saying was lost or confused when adapted to its new milieu. The controversy stories, with Jesus as the star character, are consequently later additions, offering a singular, heroic originator who is simply an ideal figure.
The Roots of an Elevation
In examining Mack's category of the Christ cult, Jesus as savior god-man from heaven, Price uncovers a variety of roots. Here, in some cases, I would add my own element and make a distinction between the later interpretation of an imposed historical Jesus on roots that may have lacked him, and the separate question of how such an interpretation could initially have been made of an actual historical man. Price points to the idea of a "Jesus Martyr cult," which people like Mack and Sam Williams have fashioned along the lines of the martyr/atonement deaths in 2 and 4 Maccabees. This category, say Mack and Williams, comprised Jesus people who, aware of the fact of Jesus' death, saw it as one which God might be willing to accept as expiation for certain sins, namely those of the pagans who filled the ranks of such believers. Thus Jesus and his death were the means by which God opened the door to the gentiles and allowed them into the Jewish house.
I have no doubt that once an invented Jesus was on the table, gentile groups could well have imposed such an interpretation on him, suggestions of which appear in the Gospels. But I wonder at how such a reading of an actual human man would have arisen in the first place and on what foundation it was built. It hardly started cold, the very first evaluation by a new group about an otherwise unknown, recently executed rabbi. It had to be an overlay on an earlier Jesus movement -- and this is the way Burton Mack fashions it. Yet the picture of the universal separateness of the cultic tradition from the teaching tradition, with never the twain meeting, makes such a leap very doubtful. The epistles, on the whole an earlier record than the Gospels, give no sign that a martyr Jesus phase preceded the full-blown cosmic Christ dimension which saturates the Pauline corpus and Hebrews, and certainly not that it all grew out of an initial movement which viewed Jesus as simply a teaching sage.
That first extant expression in the epistles goes far beyond any Maccabean understanding. Jesus is a divinity descended from heaven, and in the hymn in Philippians 2:6-11 (possibly one of the earliest expressions of Christian faith surviving) there is no atonement doctrine at all. The consequence of death is exaltation, and the point may be that, through paradigmatic relationships between divinity and devotee, a similar guarantee (of exaltation) is made for the latter. Revelation has much the same soteriology. Paul, it is true, offers the 'dying for sin' doctrine as part of his basic gospel, but he too puts forward a paradigm guarantee in regard to the resurrection, as expressed in Romans 6:5. On the whole, the Sam Williams type of concept is difficult to support in any depth within the earliest record.
Be that as it may, there is probably no question that the atonement doctrine which has one expression in Jewish tradition within 2 and 4 Maccabees has fed into the composite Jesus picture (though it is certainly, as Price points out, understated in the Gospels). Then there's the Christ/anthropos ("Man") of gnostic-style myth, the descending Redeemer idea which is very pronounced in the Gospel of John and is ultimately a product of pagan philosophy. Without identifying Paul as 'gnostic,' Price sees the Pauline Christ in this same category and points out that the Jesus of Paul really has nothing to do with, and no characteristics of, the Jewish Messiah or Jewish messianism. Inherent in such a (proto-) gnostic type of outlook is the idea that Christ inhabits the believer, and the apostle who preaches him possesses a highly developed sense of the Christ/Redeemer within himself. Paul, with his "Christ in you" and "all are members of the body of Christ," falls into that line of thinking.
An idea first brought home to me in an earlier essay by Price fits in here: a telling observation about that hymn in Philippians. At his post-death exaltation to heaven, Paul's Christ has been given the "name above every name," at which every knee would bow and every tongue confess, in heaven and on earth. Verse 10, together with the sense of the passage, affirms that this name is "Jesus." Verse 11 has traditionally provided a possible 'out,' in that confessing that "Jesus Christ is Lord" might imply that the name conferred is "Lord." But Price points out the obvious fact that "Lord" is not a name, it is a title. "Lord," moreover, has already been taken, being a title of God himself. It's a tantalizing deduction, putting 'proof' almost within one's grasp, that if the sacrificed and exalted Christ received the name Jesus (Savior or Yahweh Saves) only when he returned to heaven, he could not have been envisioned as based on a man of that name who had previously lived on earth.
As a dying and resurrected deity, Jesus falls into that prominent category of savior gods worshiped in a host of pagan mystery cults. Price recounts several myths and formulae of the mysteries that bear uncanny resemblance to the way the early Christians presented their Christ. He also provides a good grounding in the underlying meanings and sources of such cultic beliefs. And in the most effective and satisfying piece of counter-debunking I've yet seen on this subject, he thoroughly discredits that 20th century trend of scholarly apologetics which has sought to dissociate the Christian savior Jesus from the similar expression of the mysteries. Jonathan Z. Smith ("Dying and Rising Gods" in Encyclopedia of Religion) and Gunter Wagner (Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries) are only two of many offenders who have naively or arrogantly twisted, misread and misrepresented the Greek mysteries and Pauline Christianity in order to divorce Jesus from his fellow cultic saviors: Dionysos, Attis, Osiris & Co. No one can read these pages [88-91] and ever again allow such special pleading tactics any credence.
Only one original feature was introduced by Christians like Paul for their savior deity. Whereas the Hellenistic tradition of liberality and inclusiveness allowed for the side-by-side existence of many cult deities within the pantheon of saviors -- and many a pagan devotee hedged his or her bets by subscribing to the cults of several savior gods -- only Christianity claimed exclusivity for its version of the old tune, and regarded Jesus Christ as the sole existing source of salvation. Once political power was obtained, of course, that claim of exclusivity was ruthlessly enforced.
Pharisees and Scapegoats
Leaving Mack's Jesus categories and the pagan mysteries behind, Price switches roads and leads us down yet more fascinating byways. He sets the early Christian record against the development of Judaism in the first century and presents a clear picture of disparity and anachronism which the Gospels create. He shows how unlikely it is that Pharisaic Judaism would have been present in Galilee to any degree prior to the Jewish War, making Jesus' disputatious struggle with the religious establishment, which Mark's Gospel presents, an obvious anchronism. Such a situation would have arisen only in the War's aftermath, when the destruction of Jerusalem resulted in the dispersal of the Pharisees to the north, where they attempted to set up their own 'normative' Judaism in their new habitats.
Price also contrasts the rabbinic attitude toward collective, communal authority with the Christian emphasis on Jesus' uniqueness. This is yet another indication of the trend reflected in Mark and the Christianity of the late first century, to subsume all beliefs and practices under one authoritative charismatic figure. Such a tendency caters to a universal sectarian need to present a strong face against hostile forces and prevent internal weakening of the faith, a need which often leads to the invention and glorification of founder figures. Indeed, the controversy stories teem with anachronisms, says Price, and indicate that the earlier strata relate not to an individual founder but to the movement itself and its many members. Some indicators point to earlier intra-Christian debates rather than conflict with outsiders. Price also looks at the 'flight to Pella' tradition and sees it as a legitimizing legend for later groups. Present needs and circumstances have a way of being read back into the past.
In some ways, the chapter on deconstructing the passion element of the Jesus story according to the "Sacred Scapegoat" theories of Rene Girard is the high point of the book. Girard, writing and developing his concepts over a few decades, has set up yet another dimension by which the deconstructed Jesus may be measured. This particular dimension permeates one of humanity's deepest unconscious tendencies, one extending back into irrecoverable prehistory and forward into the unconscious workings of societal impulses even today. This is not a subject I can do justice to in this book review, partly because it is not an area I am fully at home in. But Girard has clearly opened the door into a deep and disturbing understanding of the human psyche, even if he could not, as a Christian believer himself (as Price points out), draw the full implications for the Gospels themselves. Suffice to say, at times of societal pressure and crisis, the need for a scapegoat becomes paramount, and the nature and fate of this scapegoat follows intricate and (once uncovered) predictable rules. The scapegoat must be the society's "double," representative enough to serve as a symbol of the society itself, but still be enough of a 'fringe' character that any repercussions on society in response to his murder will be avoided. In the process, the scapegoat may become 'sacred' and his sacrifice redeems (defuses the crisis). A host of other features are also operative. The Gospel story, on so many levels, can be seen to fill these symbolic and subconscious needs, rendering any question of it simply being an account of an historical event highly dubious. This chapter of the book is a tour de force in itself and merits the closest examination by the reader.
Biographies and Romances
Early in the book [pp. 35-42], Price offers a series of excerpts from the aretalogy stories of the ancient world. An aretalogy is "a wonder-laden religious hero biography or saint's life," written about men such as Moses, Alexander the Great, Pythogoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and many others. "Like Jesus," says Price, "many of them were believed to be the Son of God, miraculously conceived, their births announced by gods or angels." He gives examples from the lives of Pythagoras by Iamblichus, Alexander by Plutarch, Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, and others, analyzing the close parallels these bear to elements of the Jesus story: such things as heavenly conceptions on a human woman, the astonishment created by the adolescent hero among his elders for his learning and piety, a career of miracles and exorcisms. It is clear that the Jesus story in regard to these elements is cut from exactly the same cloth, casting the greatest doubt on the veracity of such Gospel ingredients.
Later in the book, Price moves to the other end of Jesus' life and compares the Passion story to the ubiquitous romance novels of the ancient world. Their stock plot devices involve an entanglement for the hero which brings him near death, often near crucifixion and even entombment, but with a rescue or revival from a coma in the nick of time. Elements such as mourners coming to a tomb after three days, stones moved from a tomb entrance, amazed followers or bystanders observing an empty tomb, someone soliciting of a mourner why he or she weeps, the hero meeting friends and family after such a revival or escape, all abound in such novels.
The close similarity of the Passion and resurrection story to this genre leads Price to wonder if a version of the tale earlier than Mark could have adhered even more closely to the stereotype. Was it in fact the tale of a wise man (the Q charismatic sage) who was falsely condemned and narrowly escaped death? Mark, for theological reasons, would have turned it into the actual dying and rising of a deified figure. But it would seem that he left in a lot of features which point only to a near death and a rescue in the nick of time -- one that "had Jesus survive crucifixion, appearing still alive, not alive again"-- features such as Jesus' prayer for deliverance in Gethsemane, or Pilate expressing surprise that Jesus was dead after only six hours on the cross, or having a rich man (Joseph of Arimathea) place the body in his own tomb. The romance novel often used the latter as an opportunity to have grave robbers break into the tomb to steal its wealth, only to discover that the corpse still lived. However one decides to interpret it, the parallels are astonishing and fascinating.
Was There an Historical Jesus?
In the final chapter, Price gets to the nub of the matter and addresses the central question. Is it possible to judge whether an historical man lies beneath all this deconstruction? In order to do so, one must first answer the related question of whether an historical Jesus lies behind the epistles. In other words, could there have been an historical man who was rapidly glorified? To answer this, Price examines the recent and ongoing case of the 'deification' of the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson of the Lubavitcher movement in Hasidic Judaism.
Shortly after his death, some of Schneerson's followers, on account of his holiness and legal wisdom, were led to identify him with the coming Messiah. Soon they were even regarding him as "the Essence and Being of God enclothed in a body." Price draws parallels between this process and a reading of the Gospel of John as it reveals a similar elevation of Jesus to the status of Messiah and Godhead, and the community's resulting separation from the synagogue.
Price's analysis of the Johannine Gospel is perceptive, especially in regard to its possible docetic element (which goes against the grain of the usual view of John as having anti-docetic intentions, at least in its final version.) I do question, however, whether it is without problems to see John as dealing with the historical elevation of a recent man. If John is late enough after the Synoptics to reflect a now-established belief in an historical Jesus which the originally allegorical Mark had created, the scenario might work. But the fundamental difference between Jesus and Rabbi Schneerson is that no one ever lost sight of the latter's human origins and character; he has not (so far) been presented in entirely heavenly terms with no reference to a life on earth. Nor, I think, has Schneerson yet been elevated to the status of pre-existent creator and sustainer of the universe.
The epistle 1 John, which I (and a few others) maintain must be dated prior to the Gospel, does not show a more primitive stage of the Gospel's attitude toward Jesus. Rather, it barely reflects a human Jesus at all - if at all. A dispute in chapter 4 seems to reflect a debate on whether Jesus Christ had in fact come to earth. (By the way, Price offers a very intriguing interpretation of the 'layering' feature evident in the first epistle of John. Rather than a single letter reworked with new insertions over time, each reflecting a further stage of evolving thought, he suggests that there may have been multiple copies of the letter in different communities, each of which evolved along somewhat different theological lines and ended up containing different material. Later, two or more such versions were simply integrated into a new copy, creating a clash between some verses and others.)
Price goes on to offer another comparison, this one with the Islamic figure of Ali, cousin and adopted son of Muhammad, who gave rise to the breakaway Shi'ite sect. Ali underwent a dramatic mythological elevation even before his death, which involved seeing him as the incarnation of Allah on earth. Some sects eventually mythologized him in extravagant ways. I'm unsure that the latter degree of elevation happened so soon as in the supposed elevation of Jesus of Nazareth (as in the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11), and such an elevation of Ali was from the beginning motivated by political circumstances and rivalry, no parallel for which exists in the case of Christianity for the pre-Pauline period of Jesus' 'elevation.' But the similarity is certainly there, to show once more what factors-cultural and historical ones - can be said to lie behind the creation of the Gospel Jesus and his features.
Finally, Price asks if we can be certain even of the fundamental fact that Jesus was linked with first century Palestine and specifically with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. He thinks that this is "more apparent than real" [p. 241]. The atmosphere surrounding Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, the details of his arrest and execution, are suspiciously similar to events of the later Jewish War and the fall of Jerusalem in 70. Josephus records the woes pronounced on the city by Jesus ben-Ananias leading up to that war, and the 'cleansing of the Temple' by the revolutionary Simon ben-Giora who expelled the brigand Zealots from the holy place just before the fall of the city. Pilate's uncharacteristic behavior at the trial of Jesus also sounds like a garbled reworking of an episode involving Pilate in Samaria, as recounted by Josephus, with all the elements reshuffled to create the trial scene in the Gospels.
Other Josephan episodes concerning revolutionary Messiahs ("Joshua Messiahs," i.e., figures with characteristics of the biblical Joshua) in the course of the troubled first century bear striking resemblances to the messianic Jesus of the Gospels. Josephus' accounts of men like Theudas and the unnamed Egyptian establish the current concept of a Joshua Messiah -which is, directly translated, "Jesus Christ." Is the Gospel figure of that name, asks Price, a fictional rendering of such an "available" anticipated figure? Is Jesus' caution against false messiahs in Mark 13 a reflection of the proliferation of such a concept/expectation? How will the people know when the real one comes along? (How will we know to extract a real Jesus Christ from all this myth and expectation?)
Did Jesus live in a distant, obscure past?
Price looks at G. A. Wells' concept that Jesus was a legendary hero of a more distant or obscure past. If an historical Jesus cannot be linked securely with Pilate, are the Gospels arbitrarily moving such a Wellsian Jesus up to Pilate's time, in an inviting remake of Christian origins? The suggestion is also made that 1 Cor 2:8, Col 2:15 and other passages which seem to portray Jesus' death at the hands of the demon spirits of the heavens are offered by early writers as an alternative to locating that death at an unknown historical time. But here I would suggest that legendary figures usually develop legends on earth, and I could expand on that to counter the Wellsian idea by pointing out that the epistles reflect no earthly setting for Jesus, legendary, obscure, or otherwise -- which I regard as a significant silence. (Even Hercules, a hero who can't be located in a specific historical time by his legends, still had those legends placed on earth.) The Talmudic placement of Jesus in a more distant, obscure past -- around 100 BCE -- is only one of several later Jewish traditions about when Jesus lived.
When we look at the contrast between gnostic and orthodox treatments of Jesus, we find among the gnostics an emphasis on a docetic Christ and an ongoing claim to 'revelation' teachings by Jesus. These are found in a series of dialogue Gospels in the second century, to which the orthodox church countered by emphasizing the historical boundaries of Christ's life and thus a fixed limitation on the 'genuine' acceptable teachings. But this suggests that the gnostic Christ was earlier a spiritual revealer figure, not a legendary earthly one. Price points out that when the gnostics eventually "assimilated the basic Markan story-plot" (as in those dialogue Gospels of a post-resurrection teaching Jesus) they tended to retain a docetic nature for him.
Creating a Protagonist
Dissecting the Gospels themselves, Price first calls attention [p. 251] to the basic tenet of form criticism, that the Gospel ministry does not reflect an actual sequence of events, but is a case of the evangelist linking separate 'pearls on a string,' with the plot line and setting a literary creation. But has Mark gone beyond the creation of a "schematic framework" for independent stories that were genuinely linked with Jesus? Price quotes the Russian literary critic, Boris Tomashevsky: "The protagonist . . . is the result of the formation of the story material into a plot. On the one hand, he is a means of stringing motifs together; and on the other, he embodies the motivation that connects the motifs." Price goes on:
Tomashevsky might almost have had Mark himself in mind! Was Jesus an itinerant? There is no reason to think so. It is the impression created by the choice of placing anecdotes side by side in narrative form. Bruno Bauer once argued that Mark had himself created the Jesus character out of whole cloth. I am saying that it may well be that Mark took preexisting traditions of miracles and wise sayings, some or all of them already attributed to the Christian savior, Jesus, and from them created the idea of a "historical Jesus."
To this I would add the qualification that the "Christian savior," within the very earliest epistolary record, had no miracle or sayings traditions attached to him, but seems to have acted entirely in heaven. And as if to support the idea of total creation of an historical Jesus, Price proceeds to parallel a comprehensive set of pre-Markan sayings material found in the Gospels with "Truths and Truisms" of the day as found in the rabbinic writings, and deeds material with the hero stories of figures from the Old Testament and related Indo-European and Semitic legends.
Post-Deconstruction
Price offers a splendid summing up of what this vast deconstruction of the Christian Jesus has led to, and I'll quote the final two paragraphs of his last chapter, The Historicized Jesus? [p. 260-61]:
Traditionally, Christ-Myth theorists have argued that one finds a purely mythic conception of Jesus in the epistles and that the life of Jesus the historical teacher and healer as we read it in the gospels is a later historicization. This may indeed be so, but it is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last. In the gospels the degree of historicization is actually quite minimal, mainly consisting of the addition of the layer derived from contemporary messiahs and prophets, as outlined above. One does not need to repair to the epistles to find a mythic Jesus. The gospel story itself is already pure legend. What can we say of a supposed historical figure whose life story conforms virtually in every detail to the Mythic Hero Archetype, with nothing, no "secular" or mundane information, left over? As Dundes is careful to point out, it doesn't prove there was no historical Jesus, for it is not implausible that a genuine, historical individual might become so lionized, even so deified, that his life and career would be completely assimilated to the Mythic Hero Archetype. But if that happened, we could no longer be sure there had ever been a real person at the root of the whole thing. The stained glass would have become just too thick to peer through. Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, King Arthur, and others have nearly suffered this fate. What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan, is that there is some residue. We know at least a bit of mundane information about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend cycle. Or they are so intricately woven into the history of the time that it is impossible to make sense of that history without them. But is this the case with Jesus? I fear it is not. The apparent links with Roman and Herodian figures is too loose, too doubtful for reasons I have already tried to explain. Thus it seems to me that Jesus must be categorized with other legendary founder figures including the Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-tzu. There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure."
My own observation on the deconstruction process -- revealed not only by Robert Price in Deconstructing Jesus, but by other books in the field, including my own The Jesus Puzzle, The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S, Alvar Ellegard's Jesus - One Hundred Years Before Christ, and The Jesus Mysteries by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy -- relates to the amazing plurality of parallels to Jesus in ancient world mythology and the primitive unconscious, astrological speculation, ethical and reform innovations of the time, Jewish scriptural precedent, pagan salvation cults, legendary hero-worship, popular philosophy and literature, all of it feeding into the constructed founder of Christianity. This Jesus was a bloated sponge that seems to have sucked in every mythical precedent, every contemporary expression and underlying instinct to be found on the landscape of pre-Christian western culture.
Without becoming mystical about it, something fundamental must have been going on here, in this monumental historic piece of intensely focused syncretism. There are so many pieces to the Deconstructed Jesus that not only is it patently impossible to find or choose a way to put some of them back together and arrive at a likely or even possible historical man lying in the background, it almost feels as though it would go against common sense -- perhaps even be blasphemous! -- to do so. It seems insulting to the Deity of Evolution, shall we say, who inexplicably set up this great process of ancient world amalgamation.
And yet, as in the case of any other Deity's work -- to our misfortune -- the end result has been less than ideal. That great syncretistic synthesis, the creation of a new religion around Jesus which seems to embody all the ancient world's prior manifestations, has not given us a product which subsequent history can be entirely proud of: philosophically open, politically tolerant, scientifically innovative, or socially enlightened. Indeed, because the syncretism was so intense, so narrowed onto one movement of faith and institution, onto one exclusive hero and savior figure, the drawbacks and abuses proceeding from such power and exclusivity were virtually inevitable.
But then, that's the nature of the god of natural processes. It doesn't make judgments, or dispense advice. There is no instruction manual. The switch gets thrown and we're left to our own devices. The Christian Jesus has been our creation, regularly reworked, over two millennia. Now the machine, rebuilt too many times for too long a journey, is breaking down and can no longer serve the needs of the traveler whose own personal development has outstripped that of his vehicle. We are 21st century riders in a first century buggy, and while we've periodically outfitted the driver with new clothes, the old technology is still in evidence and is no longer up to the trip.
As for a real human man who might lie buried at the root of it all, or even a part of it, he too, like the Deity who found him so useful, might well be insulted if he were dragged into the picture. He would surely and rightly be unwilling to bear that degree of responsibility - or indignity. If he did exist, it's quite possible he would even avoid rolling over in his grave, the better to minimize the chance of calling attention to himself.
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Darrell J. Doughty
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Bruno Bauer-from Wikipedia

Bruno Bauer

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Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer (September 6, 1809 – April 13, 1882) was a German theologian, philosopher and historian. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and concluded that early Christianity owed more to ancient Greek philosophy (Stoicism) than to Judaism.[1] Starting in 1840, he began a series of works arguing that Jesus was a myth, a second-century fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology.[2]

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[edit] Biography

Bauer was the son of a painter in a porcelain factory and his wife at Eisenberg in Saxe-Altenburg.
Bauer studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin from Spring 1828 to Spring 1832. He became associated with the so-called Right Hegelians under Philip Marheineke, for whom he was allowed to edit the second edition of Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of religion. In 1834 he began to teach in Berlin as a licentiate of theology, and in 1839 was transferred to the University of Bonn.
In 1838 he published his Kritische Darstellung der Religion des Alten Testaments (2 vols.), a work that shows he was still faithful to the Hegelian Right. Soon afterward his opinions underwent a change to the Hegelian left. In three works, one on the Fourth Gospel, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (1840), and the other on the Synoptics, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (1841), as well as in his Herr Dr. Hengstenberg. Kritische Briefe über den Gegensatz des Gesetzes und des Evangeliums (1839), he declared rejection of his earlier orthodoxy.
That explains why Bauer was first called a "Right Hegelian" (cf. David Strauss, In Defense of My 'Life of Jesus' Against the Hegelians, 1838) but later is associated with the radical Young Hegelians or "Left Hegelians". From 1839-1841, Bauer was a teacher, mentor and close friend of Karl Marx, but in 1841 they came to a break. Marx began to reject Bauer from a position even more leftist, as expressed in two books he wrote along with Friedrich Engels in the 1840s: German Ideology and Holy Family.
The Prussian Minister of Education, Altenstein, sent Bauer to the university of Bonn, to protect his leftism from the critique of the Berlin orthodox, as well as to win over the Bonn University to Hegelianism. But, Bauer instead created many enemies in the pietist-dominated Bonn university. He openly taught atheism in his new position as professor of theology. Bauer attested in letters during this time that he tried to provoke a scandal, to force the government either to give complete freedom of science and teaching to its university professors, or to openly express its anti-enlightenment position by removing him from his post. The pro-Hegelian minister Altenstein had died and been replaced by the anti-Hegelian Eichhorn. The government officials asked for advice from the theology departments of its universities. Except for the Hegelian Marheineke, most said that a professor of Protestant theology should not be allowed to teach atheism to his priest students. As Bauer was unwilling to compromise, the Prussian government in 1842 revoked his teaching license. After the setbacks of the revolutions of 1848, Bauer left the city. He lived an ascetic and stoic life in the countryside of Rixdorf near Berlin, where he lived in a small cell-like stall. He became known as the "hermit of Rixdorf."
Bauer continued to write, including more than nine theological tomes, in twelve lengthy volumes. In addition he wrote books on modern history and politics. He published them at his own expense while working at his family's tobacco shop. Bauer published Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des 18ten Jahrhunderts (4 vols. 1843-1845), Geschichte der französischen Revolution (3 vols. 1847), and Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks socialistischer Imperialismus (1882).
Bauer's books on Biblical criticism, especially the historical and literary criticism of the New Testament, include: A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin, (Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs) (1850–1852), and, 'A Critique of the Pauline Epistles,' Kritik der paulinischen Briefe (1850–1852). His final book, Christ and the Caesars (Christus und die Caesaren) (1877) was Bauer's final effort to justify Hegel's position that Christian theology owed at least as much to Greco-Roman classical philosophy as it owed to Judaism.
Bruno Bauer died at Rixdorf in 1882. His younger brother, Edgar, was a German left-wing journalist who had supported his brother's fights and was sent to prison for his political positions. He later became a police spy in London for the Danish government, reporting about Karl Marx, among others.

[edit] Conflict with David Strauss

Shortly after the death of Hegel, another writer, David Strauss, who had been a student of Hegelianism in Berlin and the first one to teach students Hegel's philosophy in Tuebingen, wrote a controversial book which is now famous, entitled, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, usually referred to as The Life of Jesus (1835).
In the year of its publication, Strauss' book raised a storm of controversy. In that year, also, the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, maintained a tighter control of the Prussian University system, and he personally favored an ultra-conservative approach to the Bible. So, he objected to David Strauss, and he also decided that the Hegel school must consist of trouble-makers.
Bruno Bauer, despite his youth, was chosen by the Hegelians to refute David Strauss in the Hegelian "Journal für wissenschaftliche Kritik". Bauer ably showed that Strauss misrepresented Hegel, and that Strauss' position differed from Hegel's. Bauer demonstrated that David Strauss' so-called dialectic was taken from Schleiermacher (who had been antagonistic toward Hegel).
Although Strauss' book had become a best-seller, widely sold throughout Europe, in 1838 Strauss published a rebuttal to Bruno Bauer in a booklet entitled, In Defense of my Life of Jesus against the Hegelians. In that book Strauss admitted that his position was not inspired by Hegel's lectures, nor by Hegel's theological position (which was radically Trinitarian). Strauss divorced himself from the Hegelians with this booklet, and never joined their ranks again. Yet in his final words with the Hegelians, he did his best to scramble their work, accusing them all of confusion and disagreement.
His final attack was famously successful. In that booklet David Strauss invented terms still in use today: a Right Hegelian would defend all positions of orthodox Christian theology, he said, claiming that it could be in perfect harmony with philosophy. A Left Hegelian would place science and philosophy above theology, taking that side when in doubt, he said. A Centrist Hegelian would try to honor both: whatever was rational in theological thinking as well as free scientific thought.
In that booklet Strauss claimed that Bruno Bauer was a Right Hegelian, not because Bauer had attacked him from that position, but because Strauss wished to deftly evade the able criticisms of Bruno Bauer. Strauss claimed to be a Left Hegelian, and ended his book with an insult of Bruno Bauer's work, calling it a "foolish bit of pen-pushing."
The Prussian monarch was unimpressed with any of this, and quickly banned many Hegelians from teaching in Universities. For the rest of his life, Bauer continued to be bitter towards David Strauss.
For example, when Bauer was middle-aged, a youthful Friedrich Nietzsche came to visit him, seeking advice from a well-known author (because Bruno Bauer did remain well-read during his lifetime). Bauer encouraged Nietzsche to criticize David Strauss, and in that early period, that is exactly what young Nietzsche did. Nietzsche in turn mentions even later Bruno Bauer to be one of his few readers.[3]

[edit] Translations

The great bulk of Bauer's writings have still not been translated into English. Only two books by Bauer have been formally translated; a comedic parody, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist (1841, trans. Lawrence Stepelevich, 1989),[4] and Christianity Exposed: A Recollection of the 18th Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the 19th (1843, ed. Paul Trejo, 2002).

[edit] Views on Christian origins

Bauer's criticism of the New Testament was highly deconstructive. David Strauss, in his Life of Jesus, had accounted for the Gospel narratives as half-conscious products of the mythic instinct in the early Christian communities. Bauer ridiculed Strauss's notion that a community could produce a connected narrative. His own contention, embodying a theory of Christian Gottlob Wilke (Der Urevangelist, 1838), was that the original narrative was the Gospel of Mark.
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.
In 1906 Albert Schweitzer wrote that Bauer "originally sought to defend the honor of Jesus by rescuing his reputation from the inane parody of a biography that the Christian apologists had forged." However, he eventually came to the conclusion that it was a complete fiction and "regarded the Gospel of Mark not only as the first narrator, but even as the creator of the gospel history, thus making the latter a fiction and Christianity the invention of a single original evangelist" (Otto Pfleiderer).
Although Bauer did investigate the 'Ur-Marcus,' it was his remarks on the current version of the Gospel of Mark that captured popular attention. In particular, some key themes in the Gospel of Mark appeared to be literary. The 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 the Messianic Secret is a fiction, Bauer wrote, then the redactor who added that theme was probably the final redactor of our current version of the Gospel of Mark. In 1901, Wilhelm Wrede would make his lasting fame by repeating many of Bauer's ideas in his book, The Messianic Secret.
Also, for some influential theologians in the Tubingen School, several Pauline epistles were regarded as forgeries of the 2nd century. Bauer radicalised that position by suggesting that all Pauline epistles were forgeries, written in the West in antagonism to the Paul of The Acts. Bauer observed a preponderance of the Greco-Roman element, over and above the Jewish element, in Christian writings, and he added a wealth of historical background to support his theory; though modern scholars such as E. P. Sanders and John P. Meier have disputed this theory and attempted to demonstrate a mainly Jewish historical background. Other authors, such as Rudolf Bultmann, tended to agree that a Greco-Roman element was dominant.
According to Bruno Bauer, the writer of Mark's gospel was "an Italian, at home both in Rome and Alexandria"; that of Matthew's gospel "a Roman, nourished by the spirit of Seneca"; Christianity is essentially "Stoicism triumphant in a Jewish garb."
What Bruno Bauer added was a deep review of European literature in the first century. In his estimation, many key themes of the New Testament, especially those that are opposed to themes in the Old Testament, can be found with relative ease in Greco-Roman literature that flourished during the first century. 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. While this had been perceived even in ancient times, the ancient explanation was that Seneca 'must have been' a secret Christian. Bruno Bauer was perhaps the first to attempt to carefully demonstrate that some New Testament writers freely borrowed from Seneca the Stoic. One modern explanation is that common cultures share common thought-forms and common patterns of speech; that similarities do not necessarily indicate borrowing.
In Christ and the Caesars, Bauer argued that Judaism entered Rome during the era of the Maccabees, and increased in population and influence in Rome since that time. He cited literature from the first century to strengthen his case that Jewish influence in Rome was far greater than historians had yet reported. The Imperial throne was influenced by the Jewish religious genius, he said, citing Herod's relation with the Caesar family, as well as the famous relationship between Josephus and the Flavians, Vespasian and Titus, and also one of the poems of Horace.
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. Josephus had prophesied that Vespasian would become Emperor of Rome and thus ruler of the world. This actually happened, and in this way the Roman conquest of Judea was justified and insinuated Rome into an even older history.
According to Albert Schweitzer, Bruno Bauer's criticisms of the New Testament provided the most interesting questions about the historical Jesus that he had seen [5]. Schweitzer's own theology was partly based on Bauer's writings[citation needed].
This line of criticism has value in emphasizing the importance of studying the influence of environment in the formation of the Christian Scriptures. Bauer was a man of restless creativity, interdisciplinary activity and independent judgment. Many reviewers have charged that Bauer's judgment was ill-balanced, but history has barely begun to review his life. It is not surprising, given the institutional response to his ideas. 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.
Douglas 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 his own day, his opponents often respected him, since he was not afraid of taking a line on principle.
One point that is often raised in this regard is his line that was displeasing to his liberal friends on the Jewish question (Die Judenfrage, 1843). Bauers later article "Jewism abroud" (Das Judentum in der Fremde) in "Staats- und Gesellschaftslexicon" was even more radical and extensive, mixing arguments of racism, religion and "voelkisch" ideology.
The topic of atheism is a continuing debate in contemporary scholarship about Bruno Bauer. Scientific 20th-century common sense is that Bauer was an atheist. One modern writer, Paul Trejo (2002), is the exception form that rule, making 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. According to him, Bauer's book, Christianity Exposed (1843), was a mild affair, exposing only one sect of Christian against another.
The Trumpet, written by Bauer and published anonymously, was of inspiration to Gianfranco Sanguinetti, for his 1975 pamphlet Veritable Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy, a situationist prank which caused him to leave Italy under the force of political pressure.[6]

[edit] Anti-Semitism

Beginning in 1848, Bauer promoted a virulent anti-Semitism in print within reactionary circles.[7] Bauer's view of Jews and Judaism was absolutely negative, both when considering the past and when contemplating the present.[8] He argued that the Jews were responsible for their own misfortunes in European society since they had "made their nest in the pores and interstices of bourgeois society".[9]

[edit] Political ideology

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. His book is entitled, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer. 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. Other scholars continue to dispute that portrait.
Bauer's personality was complex. During his career and even after he died he was difficult to classify. The left-wing tried to define him as one of their own. The right-wing tried to define him as one of their own. He was praised by the right-Hegelians, and he was praised by the left-Hegelians.
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; he may have seen himself as sitting very close to the highest academic post in Prussia and possibly he imagined that he would one day have that post.
When Hegel unexpectedly died in 1831, possibly of cholera, Bruno Bauer's official connections were drastically reduced. Bauer had very few powerful friends during the academic fallout after Hegel's death.
After the publication of his 'The Trumpet' (1841) he was considered as an important representative of the radicals.
The struggle with David Strauss and especially with the Prussian monarchy had set Bruno Bauer back quite a bit. This also affected Bauer's personality.
Bauer went underground and began to write Hegelian newspapers here and there. In this journey he met some socialists, including Karl Marx, his former student, and Marx' new friends, Friedrich Engels and Arnold Ruge. They were all left-wing radicals. 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 lifelong friend. Stirner was no socialist, on the contrary, he was a radical egoist. 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 German Ideology.
Bruno Bauer met with Marx again in London in the mid-1850s, while visiting his exiled brother Edgar there. According to Marx's correspondence with Engels, Bauer presented him with a copy of Hegel's Science of Logic. Marx referred to this volume while completing his drafts of 'Capital'.
Bauer was devastated though by the piercing argument piece The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company by his former comrades, Marx and Engels. He descended into deep depression, and contemplated suicide.[10][not in citation given]
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. He never married, and he wrote books for the rest of his life.

[edit] Major works

  • Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (1840)
  • Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, 2 vols. (1841)
  • Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen (1841)
  • Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (1842)
  • Hegels Lehre von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpunkte des Glaubens aus beurteilt (1842)
  • Das Entdeckte Christentum (1843, banned and destroyed, into oblivion until 1927: ed. Barnikol)
  • Die Judenfrage (1843) ("The Jewish Question")
  • Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des 18. Jahrhunderts (1843–45)
  • Geschichte Deutschlands und der französischen Revolution unter der Herrschaft Napoleons, 2 vols. (1846)
  • Kritik der Evangelien und Geschichte ihres Ursprungs, 4 vols., 4 suppl. (1850–52)
  • Russland und das Germanentum (1853)
  • Philo, Renan und das Urchristentum (1864)
  • Christus und die Cäsaren (1877)
  • Zur Orientierung über die Bismarck'sche Ära (1880)
  • Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks sozialistischer Imperialismus (1882)

[edit] Quotes

"We save the honor of Jesus when we restore His Person to life from the state of inanity to which the apologists have reduced it, and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly possessed." — Bruno Bauer, SYNOPTIKER, 1840
"Therefore, criticism has to direct itself against itself, and against the mysterious Substance in which it has up to now hid itself. In this way criticism must resolve things such that the development of this Substance drives itself forward to the Universality and Certainty of the Idea of its actual existence, the Eternal Self-consciousness." — Bruno Bauer, SYNOPTIKER, 1840
"The pure Christian State is a State in which theological law prevails. This law attains to real power or, to be more exact, absolute power, when through its results which are identical with those of opium, it puts all parts of humanity to sleep. If some occasionally awake they carry out crimes that horrify humanity which has not yet become Christian in the full sense of the word or has already abandoned the Christian framework." — Bruno Bauer, 1841, THE CHRISTIAN STATE AND OUR TIMES
"After fulfilling its destructive urge towards everything that is noble and good on earth, it [naive Religion] sketches, in its opium intoxication, a picture of the future situation, which differs drastically from the order of this world, since everything changes and is renewed." — Bruno Bauer, 1842, THE GOOD CAUSE OF FREEDOM AND MY OWN CASE
"Reason is the true creative power, for it produces itself as Infinite Self-consciousness, and its ongoing creation is...world history. As the only power that exists, Spirit can therefore be determined by nothing other than itself, that is, its essence is Freedom...Freedom is the infinite power of Spirit...Freedom, the only End of Spirit, is also the only End of History, and history is nothing other than Spirit's becoming *conscious* of its Freedom, or the becoming of Real, Free, Infinite Self-consciousness." — Bruno Bauer, 1842, HEGEL'S LEHRE VON DER RELIGION UND KUNST VON DEM STANDPUNKTE DES GLAUBENS AUS BEURTEILT, trans. Moggach, 2001

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ see Bauer's work "Christus und die Caesaren"
  2. ^ Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1972
  3. ^ Nietzsche, Friedrich, Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Ecce Homo, page 278 (Random House: Vintage Books Edition, 1989, Walter Kaufmann, ed.)
  4. ^ quote from Sanguinetti '75: In 1841, under the pretext of denouncing Hegel for his atheism, Marx and Bauer wrote and published an anonymous pamphlet [The Trumpet..] in fact directed against the right-wing Hegelians, but which, in its style and tone, seemed to have been written by a right-wing metaphysician. This pamphlet in reality showed all of the menacing revolutionary traits that the Hegelian dialectic had in that epoch, and was thus the first document to establish the death of metaphysics and, consequently, the "destruction of all of the laws of the State."
  5. ^ Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus - 1910 - Adam and Charles Black, on p.159, Schweitzer explicitly states, "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 recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found."
  6. ^ Bauer citation, report of scandal.
  7. ^ Moggach, Douglas, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 17
  8. ^ Katz, Jacob, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) p. 214
  9. ^ Poliakov, Leon, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume III: From Voltaire to Wagner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) p. 420
  10. ^ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/index.htm

[edit] External links

[edit] See also


This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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