Abgeschickt von Paul Trejo am 07 Juni, 2002 um 10:44:41
Antwort auf: Bruno Bauer von A. Klös am 05 Juni, 2002 um 23:09:59:
Dear Carotta Forum,
I am pleased that Andreas Klös shared some writings of Bruno Bauer with us. (I speak German poorly, so I will reply in English.) It is true that Bauer's writings have conclusions similar to the writings of Francesco Carotta, so they may be relevant to this forum. In that spirit, I reply to Andreas Klös as follows:
1. Bruno Bauer today is *not* a well-known name, largely because Karl Marx and Frederick Engels attacked Bauer's positive reputation among freethinkers in 1845. They were followers of Bruno Bauer before 1844, yet because Bauer refused to become a socialist they chose to attack him with a polemic that lowered his reputation among much of the left wing.
2. The right-wing Prussian government of 1843 banned Bruno Bauer from lecturing, and that was the end of Bauer as far as they were concerned. Bauer was the unfortunate victim of a rip-tide of both left-wing and right-wing hatred.
3. The eulogy by Frederick Engels was little help, since Engels was not an expert in Bauer's brilliant New Testament criticisms. Engels tended to patronize Bauer and used that opportunity to advance his own amateur criticism of the New Testament.
4. Today's English reader does not read Marx and Engels for a portrait of Bruno Bauer. Modern scholarship since 1990 depends more on translations of Bauer and the more objective writings of Albert Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 1902). Schweitzer rejected Bruno Bauer (as he praised Bauer's nemesis, David Strauss), yet he gives us no polemic but an honest opinion as objectively as possible. Bauer, admitted Schweitzer, was a great scholar who wrote the most comprehensive Gospel criticisms of the 19th century.
5. The quotations, provided by Andreas Klös, from Bauer himself, are relevant to the Carotta web site. Bruno Bauer read the ancient poet Horace and found young Roman readers infatuated with Jewish lore, walking to a synagogue on Saturday morning.
6. On the basis of GWF Hegel's analysis of the etiology of Christianity (as it grew out of the crisis of the Roman state and the richness of Roman Stoic philosophy), Bruno Bauer constructed his own study of the complex upsurge of Christianity from Roman civilization.
7. It was not a simple upsurge; it was not purely Roman. Bauer, like Hegel, showed that Christianity was a synthetic result of the union of the antithetic religions of Judaism and Roman religion.
8. Young Roman scholars were impressed by the historical perspective Hebrew Scriptures. It seemed to them richer and more substantial than the Greek and Roman Myths. They avoided circumcision, but they still demanded that Rome appropriate the Hebrew histories for the glory of Rome. The question was: how was this to be done?
9. Before the Roman-Judaean Wars (30-70 CE), a generation of Roman scholars had mastered the Greek (Septuagint) version of the Hebrew Scriptures. Some might cite scripture and verse from the Septuagint better than some Jewish scholars, according to Bauer.
10. So it was probably these young Roman scholars - experts in Roman Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, as well as in the Caesar cult (as Francesco Carotta properly emphasizes for a new generation), who were the scholastic force behind the original construction of the New Testament.
11. Clearly the Caesar cult provided the main doctrine of Christianity - the God-man doctrine. Carotta shows with impressive detail that the Passion narrative - long a puzzle to objective scholars - can be reconstructed from Caesar cult materials. However, for Bruno Bauer, it was the specific and careful synthesis of the Caesar cult with the Septuagint Hebrew Scriptures (and not, for example, errors by translators and copyists) that molded the original Gospel into the form we have today.
12. Bruno Bauer was among the first to show that we can find several sentences from Seneca the Younger within the New Testament. Also, the New Testament reveals debates between Old Law advocates and New Law advocates. For Bauer, the early Christian debate between the Old Law and the New Law was actually a metaphor for the debate within Rome between the pre-Republican Law and the post-Republican Law.
Thank you, Andreas Klös, for furthering this thread on the Carotta web site. I think this line of research still has vitality, after 150 years, and should be considered once more as we advance studies within the specifically Roman roots of the Christian historical movement.
Best regards,
--Paul Trejo, M.A.
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