 The event that precipitated the gradual dissolution of the Hegelian synthesis of faith and knowledge that Marx and Engels later referred to sardonically as the “putrefaction of absolute spirit” was the publication in two volumes in 1835–36 of D.F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Here Strauss used the tools of the “Higher Criticism” he had acquired from his Tübingen teacher, F.C. Baur, to reveal the historical unreliability of the accounts of the life of Jesus preserved in the canonical gospels, and interpreted the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ as a mythological expression of the philosophical truth of the identity of the divine spirit and the human species (conceived as the community of finite spirits existing throughout history, and not as the historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth). The appearance of Strauss’s book confirmed the suspicions of theological conservatives like E.W. Hengstenberg and Heinrich Leo that Hegel’s philosophy, despite its use of Christian terminology, is incompatible with the historical faith, and the editors of the Berlin Annals felt compelled to publicly discredit Strauss’s Hegelian credentials. It was in the wake of these events that Arnold Ruge established the Halle Annals for German Science and Art, which served for several years as the principal literary organ of the Young Hegelians, and to which Feuerbach began to contribute essays and reviews in 1838, including in 1839 an essay entitled “Toward a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy”, in which he first began to distance himself publicly from the Hegelian cause, calling for a “return to nature”—and to a naturalistic explanation of the mysteries of Christianity, and of religion more  generally.[4]