ABSTRACT
Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), founder and center of the group of historicalcritical theologians known as the “Tübingen School,” had a pivotal early influence on the development of Søren Kierkegaard’s thought. Most prominently, Baur’s 1837 monograph on Socrates and Jesus, Das Christliche des Platonismus,1 is both cited and parodied repeatedly in Kierkegaard’s 1841 dissertation, The Concept of Irony. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s relation to Baur has been almost entirely ignored in the secondary literature, perhaps for one or more of the following reasons: (1) Kierkegaard does not refer to Baur in his works or journals from before 1837 or after 1841; (2) Kierkegaard appears to have owned only three of Baur’s early works, together with a few associated articles, all published between 1834 and 1839; (3) Kierkegaard exhibited little interest, during the main period of his authorship (the 1840s and early 1850s), in Baur or in his school; finally, (4) Baur and the Tübingen School have attracted comparatively little scholarly attention over the last century and are now fairly obscure even to scholars of the history of Protestant theology.2
