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Updated: May 20, 2025
Since all history, said Baur, before it reaches us must pass through the medium of a narrator, our first question as to the gospel history is not, what objective reality can be accorded to the narrative itself. There is a previous question. This concerns the relation of the narrative to the narrator.
I have never lent a shadow of foundation to the assumption that I am a follower of either Strauss, or Baur, or Reuss, or Volkmar, or Renan; my debt to these eminent men so far my superiors in theological knowledge is, indeed, great; yet it is not for their opinions, but for those I have been able to form for myself, by their help.
Those best acquainted with the results of modern criticism in Germany will perhaps be most surprised at finding such speculations in a book written many years before either Strauss or Baur were born. But such results, as might have been expected, did not satisfy the pastor Goetze or the public which sympathized with him.
Ritschl, and after him Baur and Schwegler, adopted more decidedly the view that the canonical Gospel was constructed out of Marcion's by interpolations directed against that heretic's teaching.
Their antagonism was so radical and far-reaching that at the end of the apostolic age the two parties had no dealings with each other. "Then," in the words of Professor Fisher, who is here summarizing the theory of Baur, "followed attempts to reconcile the difference, and to bridge the gulf that separated Gentile from Jewish, Pauline from Petrine Christianity.
Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His opinions are of no interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has busied scholars practically from Baur's day to our own.
The philosophy of Hegelconnected itself with a new form of rationalism, which found expression in the Life of Jesus, by Strauss, published in 1835, in which the Gospel miracles were treated as myths; and in the writings of Ferdinand Christian Baur, in connection with his followers of the "Tubingen School," who attempted to resolve primitive Christianity into a natural growth out of preexisting conditions, and held that the historical books of the New Testament were the product of different theological "tendencies" and parties in the apostolic and the subsequent age.
The studies of the last twenty years have more and more confirmed this view. We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as the ignorance of his time concerning the documents of the early Christian movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were directed toward overcoming this difficulty.
To the elaboration of the principles of this historical criticism Baur gave the labour of his life. His biblical work alone would have been epoch-making. Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in 1793 in Schmieden, near Stuttgart. He became a professor in Tübingen in 1826 and died there in 1860. He was an ardent disciple of Hegel. His greatest work was surely in the field of the history of dogma.
It is not easy to say to whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths. The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of institutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more than an inkling of the true state of things.
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