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Bultmann's Estimate of Jesus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Extract

The name of Rudolph Bultmann has recently become specially associated with the proposal to demythologise the New Testament and reinterpret it in terms of a Christian existentialism. The discussion of this proposal will be further stimulated by the recent publication in English of Kerygma and Myth, which contains Bultmann's original essay on the subject and a selection of the contributions made by German scholars in the ensuing controversy. It appears to the present writer that insufficient attention has been given in discussion to the connexion between Bultmann's opinions on the historical Jesus and the proposal now so prominently before us. It may be that in Bultmann's teaching there is an underlying interplay between his criticism of the history and his hermeneutic proposal; such that on the one hand his estimate of the historical Jesus is influenced if not controlled by his general philosophical and theological assumptions, while on the other hand his radical conclusions regarding the history have tended to lead him to his extreme position as an interpreter.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1954

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References

page 341 note 1 Jesus and the Word, pp. 27 ff.

page 341 note 2 Jesus and the Word, pp. 9, 39, 213; Theol. N.T. (Eng. Transl.), pp. 9, 29 ff.

page 343 note 1 See Barth's Rudolph Bultmann: Ein Versuch, ihn zu verstehen, in which he deals with Bultmann with the utmost politeness, and almost tenderness, as with an erring brother, but succeeds in making clear how far he is from agreeing with some of Bultmann's positions.

page 344 note 1 Rudolph Bultmann: Ein Versuch, ihn zu verstehen.

page 345 note 1 Jesus and the Word, p. 152.

page 345 note 2 ibid., pp. 151, 161 f.

page 346 note 1 Theol. N.T., pp. 311, 314.

page 346 note 2 ibid., p. 24.

page 347 note 1 Jesus and the Word, pp. 48, 110 f, 118, 135. Theol. N.T., pp. 18, 23.

page 347 note 2 Jesus and the Word, pp. 77, 108. Theol. N.T., pp. 12, 34.

page 347 note 3 Jesus and the Word, p. 122.

page 348 note 1 More fully defined in Kerygma and Myth, p. 10, as ‘the use of imagery to express the other-worldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life, the other side in terms of this side’.

page 349 note 1 Discussed in this connexion by Schumann, F. K. in Kerygma and Myth, p. 190Google Scholar. The definition is disputed by J. Schniewind on pp. 47 ff.