BAUR, FERDINAND CHRISTIAN. - Protestant theologian, b. at Schmieden on 22 June 1792, d. at Tübingen on 2 Dec. 1860. He studied at the University of Tübingen, in order to follow the career of his father, a Lutheran pastor. But after a few months he abandoned the life of ministry, to devote himself to teaching and above all to the study of the origins of Christianity. In 1826, at the age of 32, he obtained the chair of Church History and Dogma at the aforementioned University and held it until his death.
His principal works: Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe (Tübingen 1835); Paulus der Apostel Jesu Christi (Stuttgart 1845, 2nd ed. Leipzig 1867); Kritische Untersuchungen über die canonischen Evangelien (Tübingen 1847); Das Markuservangelium nach seinem Ursprung und Character (ibid. 1851); Das Christentum und die christliche Kirche in den drei ersten Jahrhunderten (vol. I of his Kirchengeschichte, ibid. 1853, 2nd ed., ibid. 1860); Vorlesungen über die neutestamentl. Theologie (ibid. 1867, posthumous), and a great number of dissertations published in three theological collections.
As a fervent follower of Hegelian philosophy, B. applied to the New Testament the theory of the continuous becoming and evolving of the universal Idea through the indefinite series of theses and antitheses flowing into the synthesis or fusion. Christianity, consequently, represents a transitory phase of the religious becoming of humanity. Christ inaugurated this phase by grasping the religious idea elaborated in the preceding centuries and making it capable of conquering the world, by casting it into the mold of Jewish messianism. The further effort made by the religious idea to free itself from the special form impressed upon it by the founder, sums up the whole history of the Christian religion.
That effort corresponds to a continuous struggle between the universalistic element and the particularistic or Jewish one; the first is represented by Paul (Paulinism) and the second by Peter (Petrinism). The struggle had its epilogue, that is, its synthesis, only toward the middle of the 2nd century, by means of reiterated and gradual attempts at accommodation which were to lead to the constitution of the (Jewish element) Catholic (Pauline element) Church. In the end it was Paulinism that prevailed.
The reconciliation would have been facilitated by the growing necessity of all uniting in the face of the irruption of Gnostic heresy and the unleashing of the Roman persecutions, and it was promoted by writings in which both parties sought to bury the past, to attenuate the divergences and to invite each other to reciprocal concessions. B. therefore distinguishes three groups of writings: those of the Jewish faction (thesis), those of the Pauline faction formed by the Gentile Christians (antithesis) and those of the conciliatory tendency (synthesis).
On the basis of this criterion, B. claims to explain the formation of the canon of the New Testament books: a) in the 1st century he places the four great Epistles: to the Romans, I and II to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, recognized as Pauline and considered as anti-Petrine circulars; he attributes instead the Apocalypse to the opposite tendency and places alongside it certain contemporary apocryphal writings (Gospel of the Hebrews, of the Ebionites, of Peter, etc.); b) of uncertain date he considers the Epistles to the Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians: in them the anti-Petrine tendency now shows itself too attenuated for them to be safely ascribed to St. Paul; thus the Epistles of Peter and James are held to be too little anti-Pauline to attribute to one of the Twelve; c) B. places in the 2nd century the Pastoral letters, written to combat the heretic Marcion (and his followers), in which the Pauline teaching appears faded; and the Acts of the Apostles, which would be the principal work of the conciliatory tendency, since by sayings and deeds (misrepresented or invented) it aims to present Peter in a framework that is also universalistic, and Paul in a framework that is also Jewish; d) the Gospels, at least in their present form, would also be of the 2nd century. That of Matthew, of a pacifying tendency, would have arisen from a reworking of the apocryphal "of the Hebrews"; that of Luke would be the Pauline Gospel of Marcion, modified, according to the same tendency; Mark is neutral and without value from the historical point of view; John presupposes the reconciliation as having been in effect for some time.
This criticism, called "tendency" criticism, placed B. at the head of German New Testament scholarship and made him the head of the well-known "new Tübingen school" ("new" to distinguish it from the orthodox apologetic one of the 18th century), whose compactness lasted a short time, because its best disciples (such as E. Zeller, A. Schwegler, A. Hingelfeld, K. Holsten, K. Holl; etc.), soon came into conflict among themselves.
Following a criterion less subjective than the master's, some of these contested B.'s conclusions, indeed calling into question his very fundamental a priori schema; while Catholics battered the system by relying, among other things, on the same letter to the Galatians, which served B. to document the existence of a sectarian dualism within primitive Christianity. When he died, his school could be said to be in decline; although its animating spirit persists, indeed is becoming more accentuated, and the thesis of "tendencies" always has many followers among the "critics" of the New Testament. A. Loisy and M. Goguel, for example, have made use of the Baurian ecclesiological conception.
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