Hegel shocked Germany with the contention that the gospels were not historical documents at all but only myths, that, though they could be traced back to an authentic germ of fact, they had largely been created unconsciously by a communal imagination which had flowed through the minds of the early christians. Bruno Bauer, in criticisms of the gospels published in 1840 and 1841, tried to clear away this mythopoeic possession, itself something in the nature of a myth, by examining the New Testament documents as the products of specific human hands and concluding that the whole thing was a forgery, known and intended as a fraud by its first perpetrator: Jesus had never existed.
Edmund Wilson
1895 - 1972
