Word: bultmann
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Dates: during 1996-1996
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...Jewish sources, providing precious little corroborating data. Even if the standard for authenticity were agreement between the Gospels, there is less of that than one might imagine: the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are just two of several parables that appear in only one version. By 1926, Rudolf Bultmann of Germany's University of Marburg, the foremost Protestant scholar in the field, threw up his hands: he called for a halt to inquiries regarding the Jesus of history. So unreliable were the Gospel accounts that "we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus...
...disgusted is Johnson, in fact, that he, like Bultmann before him, counsels believers to ignore the search for the historical Jesus altogether. Does the Seminar condemn the Resurrection as unprovable? Rather than trying to assert the authenticity of the story of the empty crypt or backing up John's tale of Doubting Thomas, Johnson maintains that the Resurrection that has always mattered to Christians is the ongoing miracle, the "transforming, transcendent personal power" that marks the moving of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and among the communities of believers. "Christianity," he writes, "has never been able to 'prove...