teaching in Universities, including Bruno Bauer. For the rest of his life, Bauer continued to be bitter towards Strauss, and the elderly Bruno Bauer encouraged a young Friedrich Nietzsche to write articles sharply critical of David Strauss. Nietzsche during this early period called Bruno Bauer, "[his] entire reading public!" Views on Christian Origins Bauer wrote a criticism of the New Testament. David Strauss, in his Life of Jesus, had accounted for the Gospel narratives as half-conscious products of the mythic instinct in the early Christian communities. Bauer ridiculed Strauss's notion that a community could produce a connected narrative. Rather, he believed only a single writer could be responsible for the first Gospel. His own contention, embodying a theory of Christian Gottlob Wilke (Der Urevangelist, 1838), was that the original narrative was the Gospel of Mark. For Bauer, the Gospel of Mark was completed in the reign of Hadrian (117–138 CE), although its prototype, the 'Ur-Marcus' (identifiable within the Gospel of Mark by critical analysis), was begun around the time of Josephus and the Roman–Jewish Wars (66-70 CE). Bauer, like other advocates of the 'Marcan Hypothesis', argued that all Synoptic Gospels had used the Gospel of Mark as their narrative model. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer wrote that Bauer "originally sought to defend the honor of Jesus by rescuing his reputation from the inane parody of a biography that the Christian apologists had forged." However, he eventually came to the belief that it was a complete fiction and "regarded the Gospel of Mark not only as the first narrator, but even as the creator of the gospel history, thus making the latter a fiction and Christianity the invention of a single original evangelist" (Otto Pfleiderer). Although Bauer investigated the 'Ur-Marcus', it was his remarks on the current version of the Gospel of Mark that captured popular attention. In particular, some key themes in the Gospel of Mark appeared to be literary. The Messianic Secret theme, in which Jesus continually performed wonders and then continually told the viewers not to tell anybody that he did this, seemed to Bauer to be an example of fiction. If the Messianic Secret is a fiction, Bauer wrote, the redactor who added that theme was probably the final redactor of our current version of the Gospel of Mark. In 1901, Wilhelm Wrede would make his lasting fame by repeating many of these ideas in his book, The