BUNSEN, CHRISTIAN KARL JOSIAS. - Lutheran diplomat and scholar, b. at Korbach in the principality of Waldeck on 25 Aug. 1791, d. at Bonn on 28 Nov. 1860. After theological, philosophical, philological and legal studies at Marburg, Göttingen and Berlin, he devoted himself to a diplomatic career: at Rome, first as secretary of legation, then as Niebuhr's successor at the embassy of the kings of Prussia to the Supreme Pontiff (1816-37), then at Bern (1839-41) and at 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 at Heidelberg and Bonn, devoting himself zealously to biblical scholarship.
In the politico-religious field, with regard to the thorny question of mixed marriages, he committed the grave error of stipulating with the archbishop of Cologne, Ferdinand August Spiegel, a secret convention that was supposed to paralyze, for Prussia, the brief of Pius VIII, which required guarantees for the Catholic education of the children (1834). He subsequently had to leave his post at Rome, and from then on his attitude toward the Catholic Church became increasingly hostile. To him is due the merit of the erection of an Anglo-Prussian Protestant diocese at Jerusalem (1841). Also known are his letters Die Zeichen der Zeit (1855) against the danger of the ecclesiastical "reaction" of the Protestants.
Among his productions of a rather philosophical and historical character are to 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.
Notable, especially during his Roman period, was his interest in Christian antiquity (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. And in the Index the English edition: Hippolytus and his age [London 1852] decr. 1853). Together with Niebuhr he founded the Prussian Archaeological Institute at Rome (1828), and created on the Capitoline Hill the Casa Tarpea for German artists and scholars (1835). For the communities of German Protestants at Rome and London he prepared a special liturgy and a book of religious hymns (1827). In vol. II of his Hippolytus, pp. 441-618, that is in the Religiae liturgicae, he would like 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 biblical matters his Vollständiges Bibelwerk für die Gemeinde is notable, comprising 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). With this he intended to revise Luther's Bible according to the original texts and, in opposition to the "orthodox" Protestants, to set forth its true historical sense.
Also interesting is B.'s epistolary correspondence with King Frederick William IV (ed. L. von Ranke, Leipzig 1873), with cardinals, bishops and other Catholic personages (ed. F. H. Reusch, Leipzig 1897).