I know I promised to review some more recent Lives of Jesus and I've been doing that, but late last year I picked up a copy of Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the Word in a second hand shop. Since Bultmann has made a couple of cameos in these reviews, I thought I'd tell you a little more about what he says. Jesus and the Word was first published in German in 1926, and translated into English in 1934. Bultmann had yet to embark on the project of "demythologising" Christianity which was to make him famous or notorious throughout the Christian world, depending on your viewpoint. Here in this book we can see the beginnings of that theology and understand both its strength and its weakness. One thing this book shows is how little the study of the Gospels has changed over the past century. Bultmann has a lot in common with the present day fellows of the Jesus Seminar . Like them, he sees the Gospels as layered texts, some parts recording the actual words of Jesus
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson