Starting in 1840, he began a series of works arguing that Jesus of Nazareth was a 2nd-century fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology.

From 1828 to 1834 Bauer studied at the University of Berlin under Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, and Phillip Marheineke.

While at the university, Bauer's 1829 essay on Immanuel Kant's aesthetics won the Prussian royal prize in philosophy on Hegel's recommendation.

[3] Consistent with his Hegelian Rationalism, Bauer continued in 1840 with, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (Critique of the Evangelical History of John).

Further, several scholars (e.g., Dr. Lawrence Stepelevich) still maintain that Bauer's book, Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist (1841), was a genuinely right-wing production.

Bauer, however, created many enemies at pietist-dominated Bonn University, where he openly taught Rationalism in his new position as professor of theology.

Bauer attested in letters during this time that he tried to provoke a scandal, to force the government either to give complete freedom of research and teaching to its university professors or to openly express its anti-enlightenment position by removing him from his post.

[citation needed] Between 1843 and 1845, Bauer published Geschichte der Politik, Kultur und Aufklärung des 18ten Jahrhunderts (History of Politics, Culture and Enlightenment in the 18th Century, in 4 volumes).

David Strauss, in his Life of Jesus, had accounted for the Gospel narratives as half-conscious products of the mythic instinct in the early Christian communities.

Bauer promoted the other two major architects of this theory, namely, Christian Hermann Weisse Die evangelische Geschichte, kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet (The Gospel History, Critically and Philosophically Reviewed, 1838) and Christian Gottlob Wilke (Der Urevangelist oder exegetisch kritische Untersuchung über das Verwandtschaftsverhältniß der drei ersten Evangelien (The First Evangelist, Exegetical Critical Study on the Relationship of the First Three Gospels, 1838).

In 1906 Albert Schweitzer wrote that Bauer originally sought "to save the honor of Jesus and to restore His Person from the state of inanity to which the apologists had reduced it...to bring Him into a living relation with history."

Bauer radicalized that position by suggesting that all Pauline epistles were forgeries written in the West in antagonism to the Paul of The Acts.

However, modern scholars such as E. P. Sanders and John P. Meier have disputed the theory and attempted to demonstrate a mainly Jewish historical background.

[citation needed] Bauer's final book, Christ and the Caesars (1879) offers an analysis that shows common keywords in the texts of 1st-century writers like Seneca the Stoic and The New Testament.

The imperial throne was influenced by the Jewish religious genius, he said, citing Herod's relation with the Caesar family, as well as the famous relationship between Josephus and the Flavians, Vespasian and Titus.

The title of that chapter is "Thoroughgoing Skepticism and Eschatology" in which Schweitzer clashes head-on with Wilhelm Wrede, who had recently (in 1905) proposed the theory of a Messianic Secret.

Wrede's theory claimed that Jesus's continual commands to his followers to "say nothing to anybody" after each miracle was performed could be explained only as a literary invention of this Gospel writer.

[citation needed] That line of criticism has value in emphasizing the importance of studying the influence of the environment in the formation of the Christian Scriptures.

Because of the controversial nature of his work as a social theorist, theologian and historian, Bauer was banned from public teaching by a Prussian monarch.

[citation needed] When Hegel unexpectedly died in 1831, possibly of cholera, Bauer's official connections were drastically reduced.

[citation needed] The two new works by Marx and Engels that were critical of several Young Hegelians, including Bauer, were The Holy Family, and The German Ideology.

Condemned by both the right-wing and the left-wing, Bauer settled into his family's tobacco shop to earn his living, though he continued to write.

Beginning in 1841, in his Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptics, Bauer argued that the Biblical Jesus was primarily a literary figure.

[citation needed] In his Criticism of the Pauline Epistles (1850-1852) and in A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin (1850-1851), Bauer argued that Jesus had not existed.

"[24] In Christ and the Caesars (1879) he suggested that Christianity was a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the Younger and of the Jewish theology of Philo as developed by pro-Roman Jews such as Josephus.

Like GWF Hegel and the Rationalist School, Bauer would focus on the historical environment and the teachings of Jesus, rather than engage in sophomoric debates about the reality of Nature miracles.

Bauer's scholarship was buried by German academia, and he remained a pariah, until Albert Kalthoff rescued his works from neglect and obscurity.

Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie (The Problem of Christ: Principles of a Social Theology, 1902) and Die Entstehung des Christentums, Neue Beiträge zum Christusproblem (The Rise of Christianity, 1904).

Already in 1906, Albert Schweitzer, while appreciating Bauer's earlier work, was sharply critical towards his later support for the Christ myth theory, writing in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus that Bauer "originally sought to defend the honor of Jesus by rescuing his reputation from the inane parody of a biography that the Christian apologists had forged."

[31] Common criticisms against the Christ myth theory include: general lack of expertise or relationship to academic institutions and current scholarship; reliance on arguments from silence, dismissal of what sources actually state, and superficial comparisons with mythologies.