Thus the task which Bauer had set himself at the beginning of his criticism of the Gospel history, turned, before he had finished, into something different. When he began, he thought to save the honour of Jesus and to restore His Person from the state of inanition to which the apologists had reduced it, and hoped by furnishing a proof that the historical Jesus could not have been the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, to bring Him into a living relation with history. This task, however, was given up in favour of the larger one of freeing the world from the domination of the Judaeo‐Roman idol, Jesus the Messiah, and in carrying out this endeavour the thesis that Jesus Christ is a product of the imagination of the early Church is formulated in such a way that the existence of a historic Jesus becomes problematical, or, at any rate, quite indifferent. At the end of his study of the Gospels, Bauer is inclined to make the decision of the question whether there ever was a historic Jesus depend on the result of a further investigation which he proposed to make into the Pauline Epistles. It was not until ten years later (1850‐1851) that he accomplished this task,(94) and applied the result in his new edition of the “Criticism of the Gospel History.”(95) The result is negative: there never was any historical Jesus. While criticising the four great Pauline Epistles, which the Tübingen school fondly imagined to be beyond the reach of criticism, Bauer shows, however, his inability to lay a positive historic foundation for his view of the origin of Christianity. The transference of the Epistles to the second century is effected in so arbitrary a fashion that it refutes itself. However, this work professes to be only a preliminary study for a larger one in which the new theory was to be fully worked out. This did not appear until 1877; it was entitled “Christ and the Caesars; How Christianity originated from Graeco‐ Roman Civilisation.”(96) The historical basis for his theory, which he here offers, is even more unsatisfactory than that suggested in the preliminary work on the Pauline Epistles. There is no longer any pretence of following an historical method, the whole thing works out into an imaginary picture of the life of Seneca. Nero’s tutor had, Bauer thinks, already in his inmost consciousness fully attained to inner opposition to the world. There are expressions in his works which, in their mystical emancipation from the world, prelude the utterances of Paul. The same thoughts, since they belong not to Seneca only, but to his time, are found also in the works of the three poets of the Neronian period, Persius, Lucan, and Petronius. Though they had but a feeble breath of the divine afflatus, they are interesting witnesses to the spiritual condition of the time. They, too, contributed to the making of Christianity.