The fact that the writings of Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) are only now being translated into English is cause for celebration and so I highly recommend this publication. Bruno Bauer is one of the great unsung intellectuals of history. He was imitated by many famous minds of his time, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. This book, CHRIST AND THE CAESARS (1877) was the last of his dozen great tomes on Christianity.

What is most remarkable about this book is that Bruno Bauer goes down to text-by-text comparisons of the New Testament and the Epistles of the great Stoic writer, Lucius Seneca (tutor to Nero Caesar), in order to research keywords and key phrases common to both.

Actually, this had been done many centuries ago to some degree, but with a different twist. The Early Fathers of the Christian Church had presumed that Seneca's writings resembled New Testament writings so much because Seneca 'must have been' a secret Christian. There is even an ancient forgery that claims to be a cordial, personal correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul.

However, Bruno Bauer cited the latest 19th century scholarship to show that if there were identical words and phrases between the writings of Seneca and the writings of the New Testament, the copying was all on the New Testament side, because Seneca wrote his Epistles a full generation before St. Paul wrote his.

That only gets us to chapter two.

Another remarkable fact about this book (a fact that I recently brought to the attention of Elaine Pagels) is that Bruno Bauer demonstrates that St. Paul's texts were clearly Gnostic in many essentials. Now, Elaine Pagels says she did not read Bruno Bauer, and I believe her, but every single citation made by Bauer about St. Paul's alleged Gnosticism is included in Ms. Pagels work on St. Paul (although Ms. Pagels goes on to give three times more examples than Bruno Bauer did in 1877). To me, this says a great deal about Bauer's insight so long ago.

This writing by Bruno Bauer has a key theme - that the writers of the New Testament were influenced to a significant degree by the existing Roman philosophers of the day, including Seneca, Philo, Josephus and others. Bauer does not just state this or give a few examples, but he provides a rigorous textual analysis and a penetrating historical analysis to make his points.

This book, like most books by Bruno Bauer, was not translated into English until a century after his death. This was unfair because he was so influential in his own day, but it is understandable when we recognize that Bauer was attacked by both the left wing as well as the right wing. Bauer's anti-communist stance earned him the total rejection of Marx and the Marxists, while Bauer's demand that we take a scientific approach to the Bible earned him the total rejection of fundamentalists and the right-wing regime of Prussia in 1841.

Although this translation has many typographical errors and the wit, wisdom and genius of Bauer's prose does not shine through this translation, the fact is that this is the first edition of the first time that CHRIST AND THE CAESARS has been translated into English, and if a second edition will ever come, this first edition must be successful. That is why I give it the highest rating. I believe in Bauer, and I want him to have more attention.

The day this book was published in Germany it was banned and the publisher was imprisoned. Bruno Bauer, the author, soon lost his position as a University lecturer, but he continued to write about history, theology and politics according to his conscience and his commitment to the freedom of thought.

Because Karl Lowith suggested that CHRISTIANITY EXPOSED (1843) might have been a model for Nietzsche's THE ANTICHRIST (1893), we may understand why there has been considerable hesitation to translate this book into English. I had to see this with my own eyes, and when I did, I realized that people greatly exaggerated the alleged radical nature of Bauer's writings.

This book is far milder than THE ANTICHRIST. In fact, Bruno Bauer here mainly reviews some writings from a theologian who lived in the 1700's, namely, Johann Edelmann. By modern standards this book should never have been banned, and there should have been no hestitation to translate it into English. It is well-written, thoughtful and scholarly.

The translators have done a fine job with this edition. It is easy to read, presented in contemporary English.

This is an academic book, hardcover, mainly for University libraries and scholars, yet it has inter-disciplinary interest, I think. Historians, philosophers, theologians, theorists and political scientists will all find something of interest in this, the first English edition of one of the most feared books of 1843.

Despite the fact that Bruno Bauer, the famous Young Hegelian, wrote dozens of books, this is only the third book of Bauer's translated into English. Thanks to this translating team, the English reader has a chance to see what all the fuss was about.

Best regards,
--Paul Trejo

This was the first full length book by Bruno Bauer translated into English. Dr. Stepelevich deserves credit for this fact alone. His translation is superb and invokes the feel of Bauer's troubled mind at the time of this writing. It is rarely recognized that young Bruno Bauer was one of Hegel's favorite pupils. Bauer was grooming himself to be the next great German philosopher after Hegel, and except for a twist of fate, he would have accomplished his goal because he was arguably the most intelligent man of his time. He was imitated by both Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche -- that should give the reader a hint of his intelligence.

The drama of Bruno Bauer began when David Strauss (a Schleiermachian) wrote the first de-mythologization of the Gospels in the mid-1830's and invoked Hegel's name. But the work was not a Hegelian work. More, David Strauss caused a scandal because his now-famous book took a non-fundamentalist attitude toward the Bible. The Government demanded that the official Hegel school respond to this scandal. Bruno Bauer was elected to provide the answer. It is true that Hegelians were not fundamentalists, either, but they had very spiritual ideas and their approach to the Bible was very, very different from that of David Strauss. Bauer's response, then, was honest and accurate, but it did not impress the new fundamentalist German regime. Most Hegelians lost their jobs, and Bruno Bauer was one of them.

This book was written in 1841 when Bauer had just been fired from his post for being a Hegelian. The irony is that Bauer remained a Hegelian but wrote this book against Hegelians as a mockery of the German Establishment. Bauer published this book under the pseudonym of a Lutheran Bishop. The book itself is an ironic comedy, a protest, and a howl of pain during the fall of this great intellect. Dr. Stepelevich's translation has opened the floodgates of new research into this gargantuan intellect. (Today, informal translations of Bauer's CHRIST AND THE CAESARS and CHRISTIANITY EXPOSED are being tossed off for the 'It Was Piso' conspiracy theorists.) When the new translations rise to the level of Lawrence Stepelevich, a whole new dimension of the past century of philosophy will be revealed.

This book doesn't mention any of the more recent philosophers that I would normally consider the best German thinkers, but it is excellent at setting Karl Marx in the context in which he went to Germany to study, dropped law for philosophy, found Hegel convincing, and attacked what he considered the "Ideology" of the Germany of that time. The distinction between philosophy and ideology is the mystery which makes this book interesting. "Ideology, Napolean asserted, was abstract speculation divorced from reality. With Napoleon the term *ideology* thus acquired a perjorative meaning that challenged philosophy's traditional sovereignty. To call philosophy `ideology' was now to say it was ineffective in the world. It operated in a dream world of abstraction." (p. 5).

The government of Germany, back in the early 1840s, was not based on elections depending on ideology to determine policies conforming to the will of those who were governed, and France, at the time of Napoleon, might be considered the greatest failure in Europe of the use of revolution to establish a government of the people. Translating anything that this book is about into practical politics is probably beyond the capacity of what Mark Crispin Miller called TV in THE BUSH DYSLEXICON (see "But there is now very little place for . . ." p. 64 of Miller). The thing I like about Harold Mah's book, THE END OF PHILOSOPHY, THE ORIGIN OF "IDEOLOGY"/KARL MARX AND THE CRISIS OF THE YOUNG HEGELIANS is that he gets the picture right from the religious perspective, which is a minor aspect of the book. The distinctions between followers of Hegel were religious as well as political:

If God as spirit developed by embodying itself in the mind of humanity and the institutions of the present, then this was entirely at odds with the Christian notion of a transcendent God who promised fulfillment in an afterlife. The debate over Hegel's supposed pantheism and whether or not his philosophy disallowed the possibility of immortality raged throughout the 1830s. In 1835, the publication of David Friedrich Strauss's LIFE OF JESUS radically transformed the controversy. Up to then, Hegelians had attempted to reconcile Christianity and philosophy, a transcendent God and immanent spirit. But Strauss asserted that reconciliation was no longer possible . . . (p. 37)

As Strauss himself later noted, the controversy over his book brought about yet another alignment in the Hegelian school. Orthodox or "right" Hegelians continued to cling to the conventional Hegelian view of the substantive compatibility of Christianity and philosophy. "Center" Hegelians tried to reach a compromise, asserting that some aspects of the two forms of consciousness could be reconciled. "Left" or Young Hegelians accepted Strauss's rejection of Christianity and his humanism. (p. 37).

That much of the book is really clear to me, and a good place to start a biography which ends with the thought:

The theory of ideology strives to remedy the intellectual's sense of being severed from the real world. Its formulation is his attempt to come to terms with a world that has forsaken him. (p. 229)

Then there are notes from page 231 to 279, citing a lot of original sources. By the time I got to the index, I was looking for things that weren't there. Fichte is only mentioned on one page, with a line of poetry that Karl Marx wrote:

Kant and Fichte soar to heavens blue . . . (p. 166).

Marx "read widely in different philosophies, including those of Kant and Fichte," but "Marx's intellectual clarification" was supposed to be "That which--in the street I find."