Word: bultmann
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...Know Nothing." During the 1920s, Bultmann sealed the doom of the old quest, as far as Europe was concerned.* He argued that the Gospels were interested not in presenting a dispassionate portrait of Jesus but in expressing the kerygma-the proclamation of the early church's faith in a Risen Christ. This meant that although the New Testament might be a primary source for a study of the early church, it was only a secondary one for a life of Jesus. Since the faith of later generations was really based upon the shining faith of the first Christians...
These efforts to write miracle-free biographies of Jesus-summed up in 1906 by Albert Schweitzer in his classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus-ended in failure. For one thing, explains Bultmann Disciple Günther Bornkamm, "it became alarmingly and terrifyingly evident how inevitably each author brought the spirit of his own age into his presentation of the figure of Jesus." For another, such turn-of-the-century theologians as Johannes Weiss and Wilhelm Wrede proved conclusively that the Gospels were not simple historical accounts but highly sophisticated theological works in which the oral tradition preserved by Christ...
...Bultmann himself later moved a step farther to the theological left and argued that to become credible for modern man, the kerygma must be "de-mythologized"-stripped of such unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework. But demythologizing, Robinson points out, threatened to end up with "the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth." Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol...
Inevitably, the reaction set in. In 1953, at the annual seminar of Bultmann's "Marburg Disciples," Dr. Ernst Kasemann argued that it was time for theology to relate the Jesus of history to the proclaimed Christ of the kerygma. The proposal quickly found supporters, largely among Bultmann's students and disciples, who hold many top professorships in Biblical studies: Bornkamm and Erich Dinkier at Heidelberg, Käsemann at Tübingen, Herbert Braun at Mainz, Hans Conzelmann at Göttingen, Gerhard Ebeling at Zürich, Ernst Fuchs at Marburg's Institute of Hermeneutics. Initially...
...laden, deny the accuracy of any of the Evangelists' chronologies. Of the detailed Passion narratives, they accept as historically sound the bare facts that Jesus went to Jerusalem at the end of his ministry, supped with his disciples sometime toward Passover, stood trial before Pilate and was crucified. Bultmann's disciples also reject, as a creation of the post-Easter church, any saying of Jesus that refers to his filial relation to God. The disciples unanimously regard the Trinitarian formulations of the early church as later, metaphysical interpretations of Christ's relationship...