BUNSEN, CHRISTIAN KARL JOSIAS. – Lutheran diplomat and scholar, born at Korbach in the principality of Waldeck on 25 August 1791, died at Bonn on 28 November 1860. After theological, philosophical, philological, and legal studies at Marburg, Göttingen, and Berlin, he devoted himself to a diplomatic career: in Rome, first as legation secretary, then as Niebuhr’s successor at the embassy of the kings of Prussia to the Supreme Pontiff (1816–37), thereafter in Bern (1839–41) and in London (1841–54). He always cultivated his studies and wrote many works of a political, historical, philosophical, religious, and liturgical character. In 1854 he retired to private life in Heidelberg and Bonn, devoting himself zealously to biblical scholarship.
In the political-religious sphere, with regard to the thorny question of mixed marriages, he committed the grave error of concluding with the archbishop of Cologne, Ferdinando Augusto Spiegel, a secret agreement that was intended, for Prussia, to thwart the brief of Pius VIII, which required guarantees for the Catholic education of the children (1834). He subsequently had to leave his post in Rome, and from that time his attitude toward the Catholic Church became increasingly hostile. He deserves credit for the establishment of an Anglo-Prussian Protestant diocese in Jerusalem (1841). His letters Die Zeichen der Zeit (1855), against the danger of the ecclesiastical “reaction” of the Protestants, are also well known.
Among his works of a predominantly philosophical and historical character, the following should be mentioned: Aegyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, 5 vols., Gotha 1845–57; Gott in der Geschichte oder der Fortschritt des Glaubens an eine sittliche Weltordnung, 3 vols., Leipzig 1857 ff.; Aphorismen aus der Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit und der Religionsgeschichte insbesondere, in vol. I of his Hippolytus.
His interest in Christian antiquity was notable, especially during the Roman period (e.g. Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, 3 vols., Stuttgart 1830–43; Die Basiliken des christlichen Roms, Munich 1843; Ignatius und seine Zeit, Hamburg 1847; Hippolytus und seine Zeit (2 vols., Leipzig 1852 ff.; in the Index, the English edition: Hippolytus and his age [London 1852], condemned in 1853). Together with Niebuhr he founded the Prussian Archaeological Institute in Rome (1828), and on the Capitoline Hill he established the Tarpeian House for German artists and scholars (1835). For the communities of German Protestants in Rome and London he prepared a special liturgy and a hymnal (1827). In vol. II of his Hippolytus, pp. 441–618, that is, in the Religiae liturgicae, he sought to reconstruct the liturgies of the ancient Church, eliminating “ecclesiastical falsifications and insertions.” In 1841 he published Die hl. Leidensgeschichte und die stille Woche and in 1855 Analecta Ante-Nicaena.
In the biblical field, his Vollständiges Bibelwerk für die Gemeinde is noteworthy; it comprises a version, commentary, criticism, history, etc., of the sacred books, a work revised and completed by A. Kamphausen and H. J. Holtzmann (9 vols., Leipzig 1858–70). In this work he intended to revise Luther’s Bible according to the original texts and, in opposition to the “orthodox” Protestants, to expound the true historical meaning.
Also interesting is B.’s epistolary correspondence with King Frederick William IV (ed. L. von Ranke, Leipzig 1873), and with cardinals, bishops, and other Catholic figures (ed. F. H. Reusch, Leipzig 1897).