Walter Bauer

[2] Bauer pushed against the overwhelmingly dominant view that for the period of Christian origins, ecclesiastical doctrine already represented what is primary, while heresies, on the other hand somehow are a deviation from the genuine.Bauer's conclusions contradicted nearly 1,600 years of writing on church history and thus were met with much skepticism among Christian academics such as Walther Völker.Bauer writes in a dynamic and highly sophisticated manner, mixing precision with irony and even insinuation, pictorial language with careful presentation of the historical evidence, hypotheses and caveats with the subtle use of overstatement and understatement in cleverly nuanced expressions.Long sentences with closely interrelated parts appear alongside brief, sometimes cryptic or oblique comments couched in clever, often scholarly German idiom.Frequently the presentation flows along rapidly in an exciting manner, despite the difficulties of the subject matter— but its flow is such that the motion is difficult to capture in translation, and is sometimes even difficult to follow in the original.An early critic of the Bauer thesis, Anglican theologian H. E. W. Turner in his Bampton Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 1954, said of Bauer, "His fatal weakness appears to be a persistent tendency to over-simplify problems, combined with the ruthless treatment of such evidence as fails to support his case.