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“Rudolf Bultmann was the greatest New Testament theologian of the 20th century. He was an exegete, a Classicist and a historian, but also a theologian. He was a professor of theology relating what he knew as a historian to what he believed as a Christian. The reason I picked him out—in a book that is now 90 years old and therefore in some ways out of date (it was written before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947)—is that he was writing after 60-odd years of people writing lots of lives of Jesus. What he is saying is, ‘That’s not the point.’ A positivistic historical picture of Jesus misses the main point about him, and misses the main point about history too. History is about an encounter with the past, it’s not just a description. It’s about our own relationship to the past, our identity. So when he was asked to write yet another historical book about Jesus, he agreed, but he thought he would try and write one which communicated some sense of why Jesus was important to him.” Read more...
Robert Morgan, Theologians & Historians of Religion
