I might not have said anything about Rudolf Bultmann, except that it seemed that some skeptic thought that I have been "avoiding" talking about him. Far from it. Bultmann is a pinpoint on the Bible-critical map these days, and especially in the context of this page, since I have been addressing the modern holders of versions of his ideas already (the Jesus Seminar, for example). Rudolf Bultmann was not the full father of modern skeptical/liberal biblical exegesis, but we can give him credit for being the one who systematized and popularized it for the early 20th century, and some people out there still think his way of thinking is that cat's meow. In fact, a number of Bultmann's fans get downright weepy when talking about him, to the point that they will highlight even his most irrational moments and say, "You may of course disagree with Bultmann on this point, but isn't he just such a genius for thinking of this?" Defending the idea in question, though, never seems to be part of the package.

I would probably be called remiss if I didn't note that Bultmann was a brave soul in his own right. He took some big risks by standing up to Nazi attempts to make it so that only Aryans could be ministers--no one can doubt that he was in many ways a sincere man with strong principles that he bravely stood for. With that said, Bultmann's bravery in no way proves that his ideology was correct, no more than Gandhi's bravery proves Hinduism. One admirer of Bultmann says that while it may be legitimate to criticize Bultmann for his theology and exegesis, and it inappropriate to say that he was not a Christian; if we do, "it is only fair that (the critic) should answer the question whether he himself has risked so much for Christianity as Bultmann has." [Hen.RB, 3] All right...what's the chain of logic here? "Christian" is defined as someone who risks himself for the sake of principles associated with Christian faith, even if he happens to say that most of what has been held to be orthodox Christianity is bunk?

So where did Bultmann get his ideas, and therefore, what is the true genesis of those who now hold his views? His ideas grew out of a certain radical historical skepticism that was in fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries...you know, the sort of people who declared that the entire works of Tacitus and Pliny were wholesale forgeries. (Greco-Roman scholarship has grown beyond this sort of thing; liberal Biblical scholarship hasn't caught on to the joke yet!) This ribald skepticism attributed to the Biblical writers "the language of the childhood of the race (of man)" and "ignorance of causes and consequently an attributing of all events to God." [Hen.RB, 7] (Or perhaps the critics just read the texts too woodenly: There is no doubt that the Jews considered God to be sovereign, and this of course led to language of attribution, since even if God does nothing, His sovereignty is such that doing nothing is an expression of His power; yet the critics seem to think that the Jews believed that God dropped every raindrop personally!) And yes, bigotry was involved: One early writer who had a profound influence on Bultmann's thought "had a radical distrust of orientals as eyewitnesses," [Hen.RB, 9] and other writers implicitly assumed that the recorders of Biblical history were too biased to be trusted (whereas, of course, they assumed themselves to be paragons of objectivity!). I won't say that Bultmann went as far as bigotry, for there is no evidence that I have seen of it; yet he did accept uncritically the thought of those who preceded him, and that was enough to lay the foundation for what became his methods of form criticism.

Philosophically, much of Bultmann's thought can be traced to a way of thinking called existentialism--a very broad range of thought, one we won't bother explaining to any great extent, other than that it emphasized personal experiences and understandings. It is this way of thinking that ultimately led to the last two of the three Bultmaniann methods we shall discuss below.

So what are the basics of this form criticism? It can be broken into three fallacious methods of thinking:

• Arbitrarily mixing literary classification with naturalistic assumptions. Bultmann divided Biblical stories into genres--and had he stopped there, all would have been well; but he went on to assume that each story could be examined within the genre and that we could deduce stages in formation in order to ascertain a story's genuineness. "(T)he literature in which the life of a given community, even the primitive Christian community, has taken shape, springs out of quite definite conditions and wants of life from which grows up a quite definite style and quite specific forms and categories." [Bult,HST, 4] In other words, this is the old "simpler is earlier, more complex is later" fallacy: we have seen it in action time and again in Biblical criticism. As yet I have seen no attempt to logically prove this dichotomy, much less prove it evidentially by comparison to a body of literature with known composition dates. Beyond that, Bultmann also had that same "kerygma vs. history" bugaboo I've found in the works of numerous other critics: The Gospels are faith-based documents; what they report therefore cannot be trusted. Yet how, then, could anyone possibly objectively report a resurrection, in Bultmann's eyes? He has ruled out the possibility of doing so at all, because any such report would be perceived as a faith-report. Moreover, there is that old assumption that the church wrote the Gospels to meet needs: If the church had a complaint about the Pharisees, they made up a story where Jesus slammed the Pharisees on the point at issue. (That the church might have selected the story from an authentic witness is not even given consideration in the two-dimensional world of the critics. On the other hand, Bultmann was far from the radical leanings of the Jesus Seminar: Where that body will assume that any saying of Jesus that is like a common proverb of the day was foisted upon Jesus' lips, Bultmann acknowledged that it was "by no means impossible" [Bult.HST, 104-5] that Jesus used widespread proverbial sayings for his own purposes. The Seminar has gone far beyond Bultmann in its conclusions.)
• Anachronistically assuming modern values and terms upon an ancient text. The classic example of this is Bultmann's attempt to define the soma ("body") described by Paul as "the objective aspect of the self." [Hen.RB, 29] As Gundry has shown, this definition is far away from that of the ancient Greeks; yet Bultmann found it convenient for his purposes to assume this definition--for it made it much easier for him to dismiss the Resurrection of Christ. The Resurrection of "the objective aspect of a self" isn't the sort of thing were we would have to worry about evidence! (Not that Bultmann paid any attention to Jewish concepts of Resurrection, either...where it suited his purposes, he freely anachronized: The most famous example is his analysis of the Gospel of John as a document influenced by a Gnostic redeemer myth! It took years of arguing, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, to break Biblical scholarship out of this false dichotomy.) Bultmann, interestingly, was aware of his own anachronizing presuppositions, but excused it by saying that everyone did the same thing [Bult.JM, 40]!

  Bultmann was also famous, of course, for his dismissal of the miraculous. His famous notions that we who today use electricity to flick on a light switch cannot believe in miracles is often repeated as a microcosm as his thought. Elsewhere he implies that to believe in the miraculous is ridiculous, for we do not read in our newspapers about how demons affect the political or economic scene. [Bult.JM, 37] Well, of course we don't: Demons tend not to grant interviews, and if their presence were that obvious, we might want to do something about it; apparently Bultmann thought that belief in demons required that demons be painfully obvious about their activities. In fact, the implication of the Biblical record is that most such activity is rarely conspicuous. (And beyond that, if we accept a pretrist eschatology, Satan and his cohorts are now bound and out of the picture anyway!)

• Demythologizing, and remythologizing. Since Bultmann found the idea of a physical resurrection unbelievable, how did he maintain that he was still a Christian? Through the process of existential demythologizing and re-personalizing the event, making a new myth out of it. Having renounced physical resurrection as impossible, the Resurrection now became, for Bultmann, "something here and now...entering into a new dimension of existence, a being set free from the past and from guilt and from care and being made open to one's fellow-man in love." [Hen.RB, 35] Needless to say, this is a far cry from Paul's insistence that if Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain. Bultmann's Christ is a myth for our age, and his purpose was to make Christian faith "meaningful" to modern, skeptical man: he openly admits that his hermeneutic "takes the modern world-view as a criterion." [Bult.JM, 35] There were no miracles: In fact, asking for miracles is a sin, as is shown by Christ's comment to the Pharisees. (Though their sin was in asking for a special sign when they had already seen enough to be convinced...and compare this line of thought to Robert Price's conclusion in Jury Chapter 9. Yea, the thought of Bultmann is alive and well!)

We can close by looking at some samples of the ways in which Bultmann treated certain Biblical stories. We'll start with Mark 3:1-6:

And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had a withered hand. And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him. And he saith unto the man which had the withered hand, Stand forth. And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their peace. And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other. And the Pharisees went forth, and straightway took counsel with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.

Bultmann writes, "...we have some editorial trimming in the concluding v. 6 which reveal a biographical interest otherwise alien to the conflict and didactic sayings, and which is not relevant to the main point of the story--the principle involved in healing on the Sabbath." [Bult.HST, 15] Really, now? Why is this "alien" to the conflict and the sayings? Just because it represents a change in subject? Any such change could be labeled an "editorial trimming" by someone with a preconceived idea of floating literary forms. Bultmann never explains why the "biographical interest" is "alien"; he merely says that it is, with no logical explanation. The implication of the story is that Jesus had at previous times healed on the Sabbath ("he entered again") and what we have here is something of an examining committee composed of Pharisees that came specifically to check out the reports ("they watched him"...why would they do this, unless they had been told that something was going on?). V. 6 is far from "alien" to this context; it is a natural outcome of Jesus' actions. Mark does indeed place it in a standard sort of form, but this is what we would expect in a pre-literate society. The form says nothing about the genuineness of the story as a whole, or about v. 6, and this is where Bultmann's logic simply breaks down.

Now let's consider what Bultmann had to say about Mark 2:23-28:

And it came to pass, that he went through the corn fields on the sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn. And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the showbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

Bultmann asserts that this passage is "the work of the Church," for "Jesus is questioned about the disciples' behaviour; why not about his own?" Hence, the logic is apparently, the church was justifying their own behavior, and in the process created this story out of whole cloth (again, rather than selecting it from an authentic witness, which is never an option in Bultmannland)...apparently forgetting that they left the door open to say that Jesus behaved always the way the Pharisees wanted, while his disciples didn't, and that they were therefore rogues from their master. That Jesus may not have picked grain himself because a) he wasn't hungry or b) one of his loyal disciples offered to do it for him (or maybe, some of them did it for the group) isn't even considered; natural variations in human behavior just aren't possible for Bultmann. Of course, Bultmann does go on to point to parallel sorts of passages as evidence of churchly invention: Mark 2:18 "And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast: and they come and say unto him, Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not?"...This no more means that Jesus did not fast than it means that John or the Pharisees did not. A teacher was considered responsible for the behavior of his disciples, so that the implication is that the disciples behaved as they did because of what Jesus did (or did not) teach them; beyond that, since the church would be "inventing" this statement in the context of a time when the bridegroom was no longer with them (v. 20), and they would fast, why would they now need to excuse their past behavior in not fasting? Bultmann is simply drawing false conclusions without considering the context of such statements as a whole.

In conclusion...one may ask, why on earth would anyone want a Jesus emasculated of the Resurrection, or miraculous power, of godhood; one who never claimed to be Messiah, never predicted his passion? A fan of Bultmann excuses this by saying that "such a portrait of Jesus may be inadequate but it is at least relevant." [Hen.RB, 43] To which I say: Who gives a flying leap about relevance? It serves us no good purpose to remake God in our image and likeness. The theology of Rudolf Bultmann was based upon Bultmann's intellectual and emotional inability to come to terms with the truth and with a Jesus that strongly conflicted with his own infected worldview. The world does not decide what Jesus should be like, and our own personal problems do not dictate history and what is real. Bultmann, who was so intent upon dismissing the NT records as offering an imputed myth, did no more than impose his own modern, soon-to-be-irrelevant myths upon the text. How much different is the Jesus Seminar?