The group was formed at the University of Berlin. Its leader, Bruno Bauer was a student who had attended Hegel’s lectures and was then asked to defend the position of the Old Hegelians against the claims of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus. After reviewing the book however, Bauer was converted and became even more radical than Strauss, becoming an atheist and arguing that Christianity was not only historically baseless, but was also irrational and a barrier to progress.