Walter Bauer

1877-1960. German evangelical theologian and lexicographer. Professor at Göttingen (1916-45), he was the author of Rechtglaubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (1934; ET 1972), which is still provoking fruitful discussion, though its thesis is not universally accepted. In contrast with the traditional view that heresy was a departure from an already existing orthodoxy, Bauer suggested that what later became known as heresies were at first widely held forms of Christianity, and that orthodoxy was the outcome of the centralizing orderly influence of Rome overcoming various less coordinated but not necessarily less legitimate types of Christianity. Bauer was responsible also for the Griechischdeutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des NT und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur, a definitive NT lexicon which was the basis of the English Greek-English lexicon... edited by W.F. Arndt and F.W. Gingrich (1957).