Book Description

Nearly thirty years after Bruno Bauer published his 1877 book, Christus und die Caesaren...(Christ and the Caesars...), Albert Schweitzer left the Lutheran ministry in his native Alsace-Lorraine to study medicine in Paris (1905 at age 30). In 1911 he earned a Doctorate in Medicine and two years later (1913) he and his wife set off to establish a hospital in Lambarene, now Gabon, West Central Africa. He had given chapter eleven of his 1906 book (Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung; English: The Quest of the Historical Jesus) the title "Bruno Bauer." In that chapter, Dr. Schweitzer had concluded with this statement: ..".his [Bruno Bauer's] work...is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found...The shaft which he had driven into the mountain...laid bare once more the veins of ore which he had struck...for his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric...But his eccentricity concealed a penetrating insight. No one else had as yet grasped with the same completeness the idea that primitive Christianity and early Christianity were not merely the direct outcome of the preachings of Jesus, not merely a teaching put into practice, but more, much more, since to the experience of which Jesus was the subject there allied itself [with] the experience of the world-soul at a time when its body-humanity under the Roman Empire-lay in the throes of death...Bauer transferred it to the historical plane and found the 'body of Christ' in the Roman Empire," The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery, B.A., B.D. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911), second English edition, pp. 159-160, with a Preface by, F. C. Burkitt, M.A., D.D. What, according to Albert Schweitzer, were the ..".bare...veins of ore..." that Bruno Bauer had struck about Jesus' history (and the New Testament)? Chances are that it can be found in the last chapter (VIII) of Christ and the Caesars(Bloomington IN: Xlibris, 2015): Chapter VIII The Completion of New Testament Literature A Great History and a Late Work of Fiction "We have now seen unfold, in a series of images, the fate of imperial rule, nationalities and social classes during the first two centuries of our calendar. As diverse as the figures were who acted before our eyes, they were still just shells hiding one and the same fact. If on the one hand already at that time the friends of tradition saw the removal of the citizens from their political and national efforts only as a violent act of the new Lord of the world, so we also recognized on the other hand in imperial rule the consequence and image of an emancipation of minds from their limited daily tasks, and a political form that corresponded with the ideal of a world community during that time. Personal freedom within the newly opened world-wide coherence was the heartfelt wish of that discredited time, which, in the history books since the days of Tacitus, has been decried as decayed and lost. The immaterial goods which Greece had produced in a similar time of political decline filled the political void; in Rome and Alexandria they united around the center of the Jewish Law, and Seneca gave the new associations the leader in the image of the one who would perfect mankind and who was eventually able to join in battle with the powerful ruler in Rome," Christ and the Caesars, pp. 365-