The Great Depression and Its Fifty-Year Shadow

Rudolf Bultmann, a highly acclaimed New Testament scholar, was born in the former German state of Oldenburg. His theological training, which began at the University of Tubingen in 1903, was subsequently carried out at the universities of Marburg and Berlin. Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Johannes Weiss rank high among professors who most influenced Bultmann. In the course of his distinguished teaching career, brief appointments at the Universities of Marburg (1912-16), Breslau (1916-20), and Giessen (1920-21) were followed by a lengthy tenure at Marburg (1921-51) that put him in close association with the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Already enamored of Herrmann's insight that theology must engage experience as well as concepts, Bultmann was drawn to Heidegger's understanding of existence with its distinctive emphasis on two modes of being-authenticity and inauthenticity. That perception of the human struggle significantly informed Bultmann's understanding of the New Testament message as a clarion summons to authentic existence. While Bultmann did not slight Paul in his biblical scholarship, most of his publications centered on the Gospels.

During his residency in Breslau, Bultmann completed his first major work (1921), whose English translation appeared in 1963 under the title The History of the Synoptic Tradition. The analysis quickly established Bultmann as a leading biblical scholar. It endorsed Martin Dibelius's idea that, if New Testament scholars were to further their understanding of the Gospel traditions, they would do well to adopt the form-critical methodology that Hermann Gunkel had successfully applied to Old Testament traditions.

Focusing on diverse literary forms as the starting point of his investigation into the nature of the earliest Christian communities, Bultmann seriously questioned the assumptions of liberal theology that the historical Jesus was, in fact, knowable in the Gospel narrative. He regarded as un