 In his critique of the Synoptics, Bauer’s object was more openly to negate dogmatic Christianity, mobilized in defence of the absolutist order. The incidents described in the gospels were products of the religious consciousness, rather than factual reports. Bauer’s critique of John convinced him that the gospel narrative was a purely literary product, and he now argued that the Synoptics too contained no historically authentic material. Bauer attempted to establish the historical priority of Mark, and the specific elaborations undertaken sequentially by Luke and Matthew. He depicted miracles as fallaciously displaying the immediate causality of the universal in nature, and criticized the naturalistic explanations favoured by theological rationalism. The third volume of the series denied the historicity of Christ. The Christian idea that God and mankind share the same essence appeared as the religious representation of a single empirical individual who assumed the universal power of spirit. Like his contemporaries D.F. Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, Bauer understood this synthesis instead as a project immanent in human history. As Bauer’s political writings from this period show, he proposed that the assumption of universality, and the transcendence of particular interest, were historical tasks, undertaken by the state and the republican citizenry. In the Synoptics texts, Bauer explicitly equated Christianity and feudalism, and defended the freedom and equality of self-consciousness. Religion and the absolutist state were mutually sustaining, sharing the essential features of alienation and repression. Christianity represented the completion of the religious consciousness in pure abstraction, and the dissolution of all genuine ethical bonds. Bauer contended that Judaism presupposed the subordination of nature to religious interests, but still maintained the natural links of kinship and ethnicity. Christianity eliminated this limited Sittlichkeit in favour of the purely abstract self, thus perfecting alienation and requiring its definitive resolution.