He had a number of followers, who in many cases modified his positions, and the groundwork laid by Baur continues to be built upon in the twenty-first century.

[4] When, a few years after his appointment at Blaubeuren, he published his first important work, Symbolik und Mythologie oder die Naturreligion des Altertums ("Symbol and mythology: the natural religion of Antiquity", 1824–1825), it became evident that he had made a deeper study of philosophy, and had come under the influence of Schelling and more particularly of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Das manichäische Religionssystem ("The Manichaean religious system") appeared in 1831, Apollonius von Tyana in 1832, Die christliche Gnosis ("Christian Gnosis") in 1835, and Über das Christliche im Platonismus oder Socrates und Christus ("On Christianity in Platonism: Socrates and Christ") in 1837.

As Otto Pfleiderer (Pflederer 1890 p. 285) observes, "the choice not less than the treatment of these subjects is indicative of the large breadth of view and the insight of the historian into the comparative history of religion.

The demonstration, mainly by English scholars, of the impossibility of the late dates ascribed to the New Testament documents (four Epistles of St. Paul and the Apocalypse were the only documents generally admitted as being of early date), and the proofs of the authenticity of the Apostolic Fathers and of the use of St. John's Gospel by Justin, Papias, and Ignatius, gradually brought Baur's theories into discredit.

In 1847 Hilgenfeld dated the original nucleus of the Clementine literature (Kerygmata Petrou) soon after the Jewish war of 70; successive revisions of it were anti-Basilidian, anti-Valentinian, and anti-Marcionite respectively.

[4] He found traces of a keen conflict of parties in the post-apostolic age, which have passed into the mainstream of Early Christian historiography.

The theory is further developed in a later work (1835, the year in which David Strauss' Leben Jesu was published), Über die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe.

F. C. Baur, the father of the Tubingen School, who cannot be accused of being a friend of traditional orthodoxy, was correct in his statement that Christianity would have lost its character as the universal religion of mankind if Arianism had been triumphant at Nicea.Baur was prepared to apply his theory to the whole of the New Testament; in the words of H. S. Nash, "he carried a sweeping hypothesis into the examination of the New Testament."

In his Kritische Untersuchungen über die kanonischen Evangelien, ihr Verhältniss zu einander, ihren Charakter und Ursprung (1847) he turns his attention to the Gospels, and here again finds that the authors were conscious of the conflict of parties; the Gospels reveal a mediating or conciliatory tendency (Tendenz) on the part of the writers or redactors.

The Petrine Matthew bears the closest relationship to this original Gospel (Urevangelium); the Pauline Luke is later and arose independently; Mark represents a still later development according to Baur; the account in John is idealistic: it "does not possess historical truth, and cannot and does not really lay claim to it.

The change is noticeable in his Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschreibung (1852), Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte (1853), and Die christliche Kirche von Anfang des vierten bis zum Ende das sechsten Jahrhunderts (1859), works preparatory to his Kirchengeschichte, in which the change of view is specially pronounced.

Baur's lectures on the history of dogma, Ausführlichere Vorlesungen uber die christliche Dogmengeschichte, were published later by his son (1865–1868).

[3] Since Adolf von Harnack proposed very early dates for the synoptics and Acts (c. 1910), the Tübingen School has been generally abandoned.