What is the relevance or actuality, as the French like to say, of David Strauss and Bruno Bauer (and for that matter, Ludwig Feuerbach) today? In their own time they caused outrage, were sacked from university posts and denied positions. Outside Germany (Prussia) they were known as part of the corroding ‘German Pestilence’ that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible. No less a thinker than Nietzsche made a shipwreck of his faith after reading Strauss. In our own time, especially with the so-called minimalist position in biblical studies, we find a return to many of their concerns. It is as though the implications of the radical work of these nineteenth-century scholars have yet to be realized.

This essay concerns itself with three topics. First, it considers the reasons for the theological turn of German philosophy in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Why did all of the major debates concerning reason, republicanism, democracy, the nature of the state, freedom of speech and of the press, the relations of church and state and even economics take place on the territory of the Bible, especially the New Testament Gospels? An exploration of the context in relation to other European centres draws out the reasons for this distinct German turn to theology. I also argue that this was the situation which launched a century-long global domination of biblical criticism by German biblical scholarship.