Rudolf Bultmann

• 1. Introduction

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  Rudolf Bultmann once told his students that it did not matter what happened throughout Jesus's life. To Bultmann, only that Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion mattered. He called this the difference between the "thatness" and the "whatness" of the Gospels' central figure.

  To Bultmann, chasing historical details about specific locations and events in Jesus's life was both futile and beside the point. The earliest Christian writings themselves, he argued, showed little interest in that kind of specificity. He built his career at the University of Marburg defending that argument, and it turned him into a deeply contested figure in twentieth-century biblical scholarship.

  What led a Lutheran theologian to strip away so much of the story his own church told? How did a controversial philosopher down the hall at Marburg sharpen that thinking, and where did Bultmann draw the line against the philosopher's own ideas? And what happened when the same scholar who doubted so many "facts" about Jesus faced a regime demanding total control over the church?

• 2. The Demythologizing Argument

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  In 1941, a lecture titled New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Message set out Bultmann's central case. Interpreters, he argued, needed to replace supernatural biblical claims with temporal and existential categories. The lecture treated the New Testament's miracle stories and cosmic imagery as pieces of an ancient picture of the world, one built for people who had never encountered modern science.

  His argument, in Bultmann's own account, reflected a hermeneutical adaptation of the existentialist thought of his colleague Martin Heidegger, but also drew on hermeneutic procedures developed by Hans Jonas, a Heidegger student and an exile from Nazi Germany. That line of thinking led Bultmann to reject doctrines such as the pre-existence of Christ.

  Bultmann framed the whole project as an act of evangelism rather than demolition. He believed that stripping away the ancient cosmology would let modern audiences, already immersed in science and technology, grasp the existential significance of Jesus's teaching. As he put it: "It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work."

  Bultmann later carried the same argument into a published dialogue with the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers made the case that Christianity could not be understood apart from its mythical framework, since myth was a necessary form of communication through symbol. Bultmann answered that modern scientific analysis of the text was required to separate genuine claims from miraculous ones and reveal the New Testament's true message.

• 3. A Radical Kind of Faith

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  Legalists who prided themselves on following the law and philosophers who prided themselves on their wisdom were, in Bultmann's reading, guilty of the same failing. Both displayed a "basic human attitude" of "highhandedness that tries to bring within our own power even the submission that we know to be our authentic being." Against that highhandedness, Bultmann set the New Testament's claim that people cannot free themselves from what he called their "factual fallenness in the world," and are freed from it only by an act of God realized in Christ.

  The Gospel narratives themselves, in Bultmann's view, still had work to do. They offered theology in the form of story, teaching through the familiar language of myth. He did not want them cut from the New Testament, only explained so a modern audience could understand them.

  Faith, for Bultmann, had to be a present-day reality. He described the people of his own time as caught in constant disappointment and turmoil, in need of faith as "a determined vital act of will" rather than a rehearsal of "ancient proofs." He put the stakes bluntly: "As from now on there are only believers and unbelievers, so there are also now only saved and lost, those who have life and those who are in death."

  Despite pushing his method far enough to put the historical value of the gospels in serious doubt, Bultmann rejected the Christ myth theory outright. In his book Jesus and the Word, he wrote that doubt over whether Jesus existed was "unfounded and not worth refutation," adding that "no sane person" could doubt that Jesus stood as founder behind the earliest Christian movement. On the relationship between body, soul, and spirit, he held a monistic view. That same certainty about Jesus's bare existence, paired with such skepticism about everything else in his life, would become the exact target of scholars who challenged Bultmann after his death.

• 4. Rewriting the Gospels

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  Bultmann's 1921 book, History of the Synoptic Tradition, still shapes biblical research today, even among scholars who reject his analysis of the gospels' narrative units, known as pericopes. Bultmann was the most influential exponent of form criticism, the historically oriented method behind that book.

  Bultmann defined the method's goal in blunt terms: "the aim of form-criticism is to determine the original form of a piece of narrative, a dominical saying or a parable." Doing so, he argued, let scholars separate secondary additions from the earliest layer of the tradition, with results that mattered for the whole history of that tradition.

  In 1941, Bultmann turned form criticism on the Gospel of John, arguing that John alone among the four evangelists had drawn on a now-lost source he identified as the Signs Gospel. His resulting monograph, Das Evangelium des Johannes, was highly controversial when it appeared and became a milestone in research into the historical Jesus. Decades later, that same method of breaking the gospels into component units would itself become the target of scholars determined to defend their historical reliability.

• 5. A Friendship with Heidegger

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  Martin Heidegger taught at Marburg for five years, and during that stretch he and Bultmann built what has been described as a "sort of comradery," grounded in an active and open dialogue that ran from 1923 to 1928. Heidegger's existentialism left a clear mark on Bultmann's thinking.

  Bultmann nonetheless resisted any suggestion that his theology simply repeated Heidegger's philosophy in different words. He insisted that "the New Testament is not a doctrine about our nature, about our authentic existence as human beings, but a proclamation of this liberating act of God." That dialogue between the theologian and the philosopher would not survive the following decade unchanged, as the politics of the early 1930s pulled at both men in different directions.

• 6. Marburg, Family, and Students

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  Rudolf Bultmann was born on the 20th of August 1884 in Wiefelstede, in Oldenburg, the son of a Lutheran minister named Arthur Kennedy Bultmann. He earned his Abitur at the Altes Gymnasium in the city of Oldenburg, then studied theology at Tübingen for three terms, at the University of Berlin for two terms, and at Marburg for two more. In 1910, Marburg awarded him his degree for a dissertation on the Epistles of St Paul, written under Johannes Weiss, with Hermann Gunkel and Wilhelm Heitmüller also among his teachers. Two years later he completed a habilitation and became a lecturer on the New Testament at Marburg.

  On the 6th of August 1917, Bultmann married Helene Feldmann. The couple raised three daughters, including Antje Bultmann Lemke, who became a librarian. Helene died in 1973.

  After brief lectureships at Breslau and Giessen, Bultmann returned to Marburg in 1921 as a full professor and stayed there until his retirement in 1951. His doctoral students included Hans Jonas, Ernst Käsemann, Günther Bornkamm, Helmut Koester, and Ernst Fuchs, and he also taught the philosopher Hannah Arendt. From the autumn of 1944 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, he took Uta Ranke-Heinemann into his household after she fled the bombing of Essen.

  Bultmann received honorary doctorates and elections to honorary societies over the course of his career. In 1974, the Federal Republic of Germany granted him the highest level of its Order of Merit. Two decades earlier, the same conviction that shaped his teaching had already put him at odds with a regime that wanted control of every German university, his own included.

• 7. Defying the Reich

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  Between 1933 and 1941, Bultmann's career turned into a running conflict with the Nazi party over its influence on German universities and the Protestant Church. As a Lutheran, he held that the Church could never expect the Nazi state itself to be Christian, and for that reason he stopped short of directly denouncing the regime's antisemitism.

  What he did object to was the Nazi claim of authority over every part of German life, universities and church included. He came to see it as his responsibility to preach that this claim was unChristian, a conviction that sharpened after Heidegger delivered his pro-Nazi rectorial address in 1933.

  He particularly rejected the so-called Aryan paragraph, which stripped anyone of Jewish racial background from civic organizations and many professions, including the clergy, and required the defrocking of any Christian minister with Jewish ancestry. Bultmann called the paragraph "incompatible with the essence of the Christian church," since the church itself made no distinction between Jew and Gentile. He joined the Confessing Church, a Protestant movement that had formed in opposition to government efforts to merge every German Protestant church into a single pro-Nazi Reich Church. That same instinct against centralized control over doctrine would echo, a decade later, in how Bultmann's own students eventually broke ranks with him.

• 8. Legacy and Backlash

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  In 1954, Ernst Käsemann, one of Bultmann's own doctoral students, raised what became known as "the question of the historical Jesus," asking whether knowledge of Jesus's life actually mattered for Christian faith. A number of Bultmann's pupils went on to stake out positions independent of their teacher's on that very question. Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling took a different path, building on Bultmann's existentialist analysis to develop what became known as the new hermeneutic, a method centered on the linguistic mode of human existence.

  Bultmann kept taking part in these debates with his former students for as long as his health allowed, before settling into a quiet life in Marburg, where he died on the 30th of July 1976.

  The historian Larry Hurtado later argued that Bultmann "approached the ancient Christian texts with a theological criterion, a particular formulation of justification by faith, which he used to judge whether the writings were valid or not." John P. Meier went further, describing Bultmann's "disconcerting way of solving problems with a few evasive sentences" and arguing that his conclusions "do not hold up, despite having been handed down for generations."

  Bart D. Ehrman, while agreeing with some of Bultmann's positions, has noted that "among our ranks there are no more form critics that agree with the theories of Bultmann, the pioneer of this interpretation." Werner H. Kelber put it more starkly, writing that "a whole spectrum of main assumptions underlying Bultmann's Synoptic Tradition must be considered suspect."

  Conservative biblical scholars including Klaus Berger and Craig Blomberg have challenged Bultmann's skeptical approach to the New Testament on separate grounds. Martin Hengel, Richard Bauckham, and Brant J. Pitre have gone further still, reasserting the older idea that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses. Whether eyewitness testimony sits behind the Gospels after all is a question their work has reopened, nearly a century after Bultmann first tried to close it.