Bruno Bauer

In the 1850s Bauer became vocally anti-Semitic, describing an immutable racial divide between Jews and Christians. In the 1840s, however, he had advocated a comprehensive republicanism. In this theory, freedom and rationality are not simply natural properties distributed or shared among their bearers (as Bauer thought Strauss’s position…

…right and centre and from Bruno Bauer, a philosopher, historian, and biblical critic. From the anti-Hegelian side there was, above all, Die evangelische Geschichte (1838; “The History of the Gospels”), by Weisse, who, conceding to Strauss the necessity to rationalize the Gospel story, propounded a speculative interpretation of the Christ…

In 1841 Bruno Bauer, by then one of the recognized leaders of the Hegelian left, savagely parodied these criticisms in his anonymous and quickly banned work, Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen (1841; The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel, the Atheist…

Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea that the Christian Gospels were a record not of history but of human fantasies arising from emotional needs and that Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx enrolled in a course of…