he left open the question of whether a historical Jesus existed at all until his 1851 work, Criticism of the Gospels and History of their Origin and then in 1879 proposed his theory for the true origin of Jesus in Christ and the Caesars, namely, that the Gospel writers freely used Greco-Roman classics in their mythical reconstructions of the life of the real man, Jesus of Galilee. We should note, however, that in this opinion, Bruno Bauer remained close to the dialectical theology of GWF Hegel. Hegel hailed from the Rationalist School of Biblical critique, starting with Johann Gottfried Herder and Heinrich Paulus (who had been Hegel's employer during his early days). There was in fact a large movement of Bible Rationalism in the early 1800's. Hegel and Bauer were both part of that movement. Hasty writers call that atheism. Actually, the literature of Hegel and Bauer affirm that Jesus was real -- but that typical theologians had interpreted Jesus all wrong. Bauer's 1842 work, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker und des Johannes (3 vol) debated whether the gospels were purely literary, with no historically authentic material. While not yet rejecting the historicity of Jesus, Bauer denied the historicity of a supernatural Christ (viz. Jesus—a natural human). Bauer wrote, "Everything that the historical Christ is, everything that is said of Him, everything that is known of Him, belongs to the world of imagination, that is, of the imagination of the Christian community, and therefore has nothing to do with any man who belongs to the real world." (see David Strauss (1808–1874) who pioneered the search for the "Historical Jesus" by also rejecting the supernatural events of "The Christ", in his 1835 work, Life of Jesus). In his Criticism of the Pauline Epistles (1850–1852) and in A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin (1850–1851), Bauer argued that Jesus had not existed. Schweitzer notes, "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, (. (Criticism of the Pauline Epistles.) Berlin, 1850–1852.) and applied the result in his new edition of the "Criticism of the Gospel History." ( (Criticism of the