the local Synagogue. According to Bauer, Julius Caesar sought to interpret his own life as an Oriental miracle story, and Augustus Caesar completed that job by commissioning Virgil to write his Aeneid, making Caesar into the Son of Venus and a relative of the Trojans, thereby justifying the Roman conquest of Greece and insinuating Rome into a much older history. By contrast, said Bauer, Vespasian was far more fortunate since he had Josephus himself to link his reign with an Oriental miracle. Josephus had prophesied that Vespasian would become Emperor of Rome and thus ruler of the world. Since that actually came true, it smoothly insinuated Rome into Jewish history. After this, the Roman conquest of Judea would take on new historical dimensions. According to Albert Schweitzer, Bauer's criticisms of the New Testament provided the most interesting questions about the historical Jesus that he had seen. The second-last chapter of his Quest suggests that Schweitzer's own theology was partly based on Bauer's writings. 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. (That is, Wrede was the thoroughgoing skeptic, and Schweitzer was the thoroughgoing eschatologist.) Schweitzer began by showing that Wrede had merely copied the idea from Bauer. Then, 40 listed another forty brilliant criticisms from Bauer (pp. 334–335) and disagreed with some of them (such as the so-called Messianic Secret) and considered others indispensable for any modern theology of the Gospel. That line of criticism has value in emphasizing the importance of studying the influence of environment in the formation of the Christian Scriptures. Bauer was a man of restless creativity, interdisciplinary activity and independent judgment. Many reviewers have charged that Bauer's judgment was ill-balanced. 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. After many years of similar censorship, Bauer came to resign himself to his place as a freelance critic, rather than an official teacher. Douglas Moggach published The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer in 2003. It is the most comprehensive overview of Bauer's life and works