Rudolf Bultmann wanted to strip the myth out of the New Testament
A German Lutheran scholar argued that faith needs almost nothing from history about Jesus: only that he lived, preached and was crucified. Rudolf Bultmann called his method demythologizing. It scandalised many, yet he dismissed as unfounded any doubt that Jesus had existed.
Bultmann, a minister's son, was born on 20 August 1884 in Wiefelstede, Oldenburg. He studied theology at Tubingen, Berlin and Marburg, finishing in 1910 with a dissertation on Paul's letters, and returned to Marburg as a full professor in 1921 after short spells at Breslau and Giessen. He stayed until retiring in 1951. His students included Ernst Kasemann and Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt attended his classes too.
At Marburg he befriended Martin Heidegger, and between 1923 and 1928 the two kept up an open, lively dialogue. Heidegger's existentialism shaped Bultmann, though he insisted the New Testament was not a doctrine about human nature but the announcement of a liberating act of God. His 1921 History of the Synoptic Tradition made him the leading exponent of form criticism, which tries to recover the original shape of a story, saying or parable and to peel away later additions.
In 1941 he published two provocations. One detected a lost Signs Gospel behind John. The other, a lecture on the New Testament and mythology, argued that modern minds formed by science cannot simply resurrect an ancient mythical worldview by willpower, and that demanding it would turn faith into a mere work. Supernatural imagery should instead be read in existential terms, leaving the proclamation, or kerygma, at the centre of belief.
He opposed Nazism from the start. He fought its grip on universities and the Protestant church, rejected the Aryan paragraph barring people of Jewish descent from the clergy as incompatible with Christianity, and joined the Confessing Church. Late in the war his family sheltered Uta Ranke-Heinemann, who had fled bombing in Essen. West Germany gave him its highest Order of Merit in 1974, and he died on 30 July 1976. Critics such as John P. Meier later faulted his arguments as evasive.
Source: Rudolf Bultmann
