 Bauer’s political and theoretical radicalization is evidenced in his biblical studies. The series is comprised of Critique of the Gospel of John (1840), and the three-volume Critique of the Synoptic Gospels (1840– 42). Together with his 1838 study of the Old Testament, these volumes criticized the stages of revealed religion, and forms of self-alienated spirit in history. Bauer’s critique of John’s gospel demonstrated the opposition between the free self-consciousness and the religious spirit. His stated purpose was to restore the Christian principle to its source in creative self-consciousness; he did not yet openly oppose the principle itself, but sought to differentiate it, as a rational idea, from ecclesiastical dogmatism. The positivity of Christianity derived from the abstract understanding, rather than from speculative reason, which led religious experience back to its subjective roots. The rational core of Christianity was the identity of God and man, but theology had built an untenable doctrinal system on this foundation. Speculation now undermined dogma; it was not confirmed by it, as Bauer’s mid-1830s articles had maintained. In his correspondence, though not in this text itself, Bauer indicated that this restoration of the Christian principle was also its overthrow, as the unity of universal and particular could now be grasped in more tangible and earthly forms. Christianity was a necessary but now transcended stage in the development of the human spirit, to be supplanted by new expressions of autonomous self-consciousness.