These theoretic considerations regarding the basis of the views of Baur and his successors are so obvious that they were bound to come up sooner or later. The fact was that in one particular point the Tübingen master had held back from unprejudiced criticism and had foisted upon critical science the traditional belief. In doing so he had obeyed an instinct of caution. Those who proceeded further along the path of questioning and investigation arrived, some with satisfaction and some with dismay, at the result of declaring all the epistles to be spurious. It was Bruno Bauer who about the middle of the nineteenth century opened the ball with his criticism of the Pauline letters._(_87_)_ [pg 121] This work is not on the same level as his criticism of the Gospels._(_88_)_ The objections which have to be brought against F. C. Baur’s views are not clearly developed nor completely stated. In what sense Paulinism is to be considered the work of a school with Greek sympathies within Christianity is not explained. In addition to this, Bruno Bauer complicates his task by regarding not merely the doctrine of the Apostle of the Gentiles, but Christianity in general, as a creation of the Greek mind. It was not, however, until twenty-five years after the appearance of his criticism of the Pauline letters that he attempted to prove this in the confused work on “Christ and the Caesars.”_(_89_)_ It was not Palestine, according to his thesis, but Rome and Alexandria which cradled Christianity. Palestine merely supplied the background for the picture which the first Evangelist undertook to create of the beginnings of a movement which really originated with Seneca and [pg 122] his adherents. Whether there ever was a Jesus or a Paul may be left an open question. It is in any case certain that the one did not utter the sayings which the Gospels put into his mouth, and that the other is not to be regarded as the author of the letters. The Christian “community” arose among the oppressed, the slaves and Jews, of the great city. They formed associations and fostered in one another a yearning for the End of the Age, developed the Platonico-Stoic thoughts of Seneca into the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount, and invented for themselves their hero, Christ. The spirit of the new creation came from the West; its framework was furnished by Judaism. Judaism brought with it a tendency towards legalism. In the Flavian period the Greek ethical philosophy struck up an alliance with the law. This movement was opposed by the freedom-loving Gnosis. In the last years of Hadrian and the first half of the reign of Marcus Aurelius matters came to an issue. So far as the struggle took a literary form we have the evidences of it in the Pauline letters and the Acts of the Apostles. Galatians is the last of the letters, issued at the crisis of the struggle, and was directed against Acts, which appeared at the same time.