Albert Schweitzer, in the chapter of his "Quest of the Historical Jesus" dedicated to Bruno Bauer, writes that a feeling of hatred guided some of the best critical exegetical scholarship into the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus; Bauer's meticulous and frank investigation of the New Testament gospels was driven by his contempt for the religious and political conservatism of his day. In the paper that I'd like to propose, I will investigate the way in which such hatred guides the biblical research of another scholar, Charles Dupuis, a member of the National Convention during the French Revolution, whose "Origine de tous les cultes" had a widespread influence during the course of the nineteenth century, and who, like Bauer in his work on the synoptic gospels forty years later, notoriously denied the historical reality of Jesus. My goal is to identify the ways in which the feeling of hatred, as well as the presentiment of revolutionary-apocalyptic transformation that went along with it, that can be traced in Dupuis' text opens and conditions the then non-existent field of comparative religion. Thus I want to demonstrate how an emerging scientific orientation towards ancient texts and the encyclopedic erudition that went along with it was made possible and constrained by an affective orientation towards the political and religious world of revolutionary France. This investigation will open in broader terms onto a consideration of the role of 'violent' emotions like hatred or vengeance in critical scholarship on the Bible, and will beg the question of whether these can ever be rigorously extricated from the scientific orientations that they make possible.