Bultmann, Rudolf

(1884–1976)

   Theologian.

   Bultmann was educated at the Universities of Marburg, Tübingen and Berlin. Subsequently he returned to Marburg where he taught the New Testament for thirty years. He was a pioneer in the form-critical method of analysing the text, and in his book Die Geschichte der Synoptischen Tradition, he adopted a position of extreme scepticism. Influenced by the philosophy of Martin heidegger, in his Jesus, he interpreted Jesus’s call to discipleship as an existential moment of decision. In his commentary on the Gospel of St john, he argued that the writer was greatly influenced by the Gnosticism of the first century, and in his essay ‘Neues Testament und Mythologie’, he insisted that the Gospel needed to be ‘demythologised’ of all its extraneous superstition and mythological elements. Bultmann is generally regarded as one of the most important New Testament scholars of the twentieth century and he has been influential on theologians since the Second World War.

   Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament Theology (1952–5);

   C. Braaten and R.A. Harrisville (eds), Kerygma and History: A Symposium on the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (1962);

   D. Fergusson, Bultmann (1992).