Note 127 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

To this a certain contribution was made by Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), who, after setting out as an orthodox Hegelian, outwent Strauss in the opposite direction. In 1838, as a licentiate at Bonn, he produced two volumes on The Religion of the Old Testament, in which the only critical element is the notion of a “historical evolution of revelation.” Soon he had got beyond belief in revelation. In 1840 appeared his Critique of the Gospel History of John, and in 1841 his much more disturbing Critique of the Gospel History of the Synoptics, wherein there is substituted for Strauss’s formula of the “community-mind” working on tradition, that of individual literary construction. Weisse and Wilcke had convinced him that Mark was the first gospel, and Wilcke in particular that it was no mere copy of an oral tradition but an artistic construction. As he claimed, this was a much more “positive” conception than Strauss’s, which was fundamentally “mysterious.”127 Unfortunately, though he saw that the new position involved the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus, he left his own historic conception “mysterious,” giving no reason why the “Urevangelist” framed his romance. Bauer was non-anthropological, and left his theory as it began, one of an arbitrary construction by gospel-makers. Immediately after his book appeared that of Ghillany on Human Sacrifice among the ancient Hebrews (1842), which might have given him clues; but they seem to have had for him no significance.