In the Beginning was the Word

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-148
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Michel Henry ◽  
John's Gospel ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Original Interpretation

Turning to the New Testament, the chapter examines the prologue to St John’s Gospel as an exemplary commentary on Christian vocation. However, this requires rejecting interpretations that have seen John’s logos in terms of Platonic ideas or ‘ratio’, as in much ancient and medieval commentary (Eckhart’s commentary is used for illustration). German Idealism (Fichte) refigures ratio in terms of will, and in the twentieth century, Michel Henry foregrounds ‘life’. A rediscovery of the word element is found in Ferdinand Ebner and Rudolf Bultmann. Their insights are used to develop an original interpretation of the Gospel, contrasting John’s existential focus on calling and the name with Platonizing interpretations.

scholarly journals Rudolf Bultmann: Sy mees invloedryke bydrae in die 20ste eeu: ‘Urchristentum’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Johannes’-kommentaar?

2011 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andries G. Van Aarde
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Current Phase ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Hellenistic World ◽  
John's Gospel

Rudolf Bultmann: His most influential contribution in the 20th century: ‘Urchristentum’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Commentary on John’s gospel’? This article pays tribute to Rudolf Bultmann as a scholar of faith who fulfilled the most influential role in the interpretation of Jesus and the New Testament during the twentieth century. In the article Bultmann’s leading publications are discussed against the background of the question of which one has been the most significant. Three important publications are identified, namely his book on the socio-cultural environment of the earliest followers of Jesus in first-century Semitic-Hellenistic world, his book on the historical Jesus, and his commentary on the Gospel of John. Various criteria are applied to value the significance of these three publications. They are Bultmann’s understanding of what the scientific nature of the theological discourse principally would entail; how modern-day believers could adhere to an ancient mythological discourse; the way in which today a historical discourse could existentially been engaged with and why Jesus of Nazareth would be regarded as theologically significant. Both the depth of Bultmann’s understanding of the substance of the theological discourse found in John’s gospel and the quality of Bultmann’s historical-critical analysis of John’s gospel lead to the finding that this commentary should be considered to be not only the most significant for the twentieth century but beyond that time even into the current phase of biblical and theological interpretation.

The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel

2005 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Nongbri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Justin Martyr ◽  
John's Gospel

The thesis of this paper is simple: we as critical readers of the New Testament often use John Rylands Greek Papyrus 3.457, also known as P52, ininappropriate ways, and we should stop doing so. A recent example will illustrate the problem. In what is on the whole a superb commentary on John's gospel, D. Moody Smith writes the following about the date of John:For a time, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, the possibility that John was not written, or at least not published, until [the] mid-second century was a viable one. At that time Justin Martyr espoused a logos Christology, without citing the Fourth Gospel explicitly. Such an omission by Justin would seem strange if the Gospel of John had already been written and was in circulation. Then the discovery and publication in the1930s of two papyrus fragments made such a late dating difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. The first and most important is the fragment of John chapter 18 … [P52], dated by paleographers to the second quarter of the second century (125–150); the other is a fragment of a hithertounknown gospel called Egerton Papyrus 2 from the same period, which obviously reflects knowledge of the Gospel of John…. For the Gospel of Johnto have been written and circulated in Egypt, where these fragments were found, a date nolater than the first decade of the second century must be presumed.

scholarly journals Apocalypse as Perpetual Advent: The Apocalyptic Sermons of Rudolf Bultmann

2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
David W. Congdon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

The apocalyptic interpretation of the New Testament was developed in the mid-twentieth century in explicit opposition to the work of Rudolf Bultmann, and this conflict has persisted despite the changes that have taken place within the field of apocalyptic theology. This article interrogates the relation between Bultmann and apocalyptic in two ways. First, it takes a second look at the history of twentieth-century theology and shows that the work of Ernst Käsemann, who was instrumental in retrieving apocalyptic as normative for Christian thought, contained two distinct definitions of apocalyptic, only one of which Bultmann rejected. The other definition became the dominant position in later apocalyptic scholarship. Second, the article gives a fresh hearing to Bultmann’s theology by exploring his often overlooked Advent and Christmas sermons. Whereas current work in apocalyptic theology focuses on Paul’s theology of the cross, Bultmann develops a distinctively existential apocalyptic on the basis of John’s theology of advent.

Ecclesia as Gathering Only? Evaluating the use of Scripture in Proposals of the “Knox-Robinson Ecclesiology”

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
C. Ryan Fields
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Church

Broughton Knox and Donald Robinson, Sydney Anglicans serving and writing in the second half of the twentieth century, offered various theological proposals regarding the nature of the church that stressed the priority of the local over the translocal. The interdependence and resonance of their proposals led to an association of their work under the summary banner of the “Knox-Robinson Ecclesiology.” Their dovetailed contribution offers in many ways a compelling understanding of the nature of the ecclesia spoken of in Scripture. In this paper I introduce, summarize, and evaluate the Knox-Robinson ecclesiology with a particular eye to Knox's and Robinson's use of Scripture in authorizing their theological proposals. I argue that while they provide an important corrective to the inflation of the earthly translocal dimension of the church, they are not ultimately persuasive in their claim that the New Testament knows only the church as an earthly/heavenly gathering.

The Confession ‘Jesus is God’ in the New Testament

1957 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-299
Author(s):  
A. W. Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
World Council

In a chapter of his book Glaube und Verstehen, recently translated into English under the title Essays Philosophical and Theological, Professor Rudolf Bultmann has discussed, by no means favourably, the Christological Confession of the World Council of Churches. The words of the Confession are: ‘The World Council of Churches is composed of Churches which acknowledge Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.’ Bultmann directs his attention chiefly to the confession that Jesus is God. In the New Testament he finds only one verse in which Jesus is un-doubtedly called God. That is John 20.28, in which Thomas addresses Jesus as ‘My Lord and my God!’ In contrast with this single example, there is in Bultmaann's opinion a great amount of evidence that the writers of the New Testament believed that Jesus was subordinate to His Father.

New Testament Archaeology Beyond the Gospels

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-63
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
New Methodologies

New Testament archaeology outside of the gospels traditionally focused on the eastern Mediterranean world and was directed to recovering inscriptional material, identifying sites, and documenting individuals mentioned in the New Testament. In the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists of the New Testament used archaeology to establish the backdrop to the New Testament (which frequently meant the urban worlds of Paul and the first Christians), and to reconstruct social and cultural contexts in the Pauline world. This chapter surveys these different approaches and considers how new methodologies and ways of thinking have provided a wealth of data beyond the physical space of the urban world. The chapter considers case studies from Cyprus, Asia Minor, Greece and Macedonia, and Crete.

In the Beginning Was the Image

2020 ◽  
pp. xxii-16
Author(s):  
David H. Price
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Northern Renaissance ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Culture ◽  
In The Beginning

Renaissance artists represented the Bible as the preeminent monument of classical culture well before humanist scholars began their revolutionary efforts to recover the ancient forms of biblical texts. Once Renaissance humanism and the Reformation turned decisively to biblical philology (and began overturning the authority of the Vulgate Bible and medieval theology), artists supported their creation of innovative conceptualizations of the Bible. Remarkably, the three most influential artists of the Northern Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger—made profound contributions to all the major Renaissance and Reformation Bibles in Germany and Switzerland and to the biblical humanist movement generally. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the history of biblical humanism, including the emergence of new authoritative Bibles beginning with Erasmus’s first edition of the New Testament in the original Greek.

scholarly journals Rudolf Bultmann as historikus

1987 ◽  
Vol 43 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 138-161
Author(s):  
Willem S. Vorster
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
Academic Activities ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Scientific Circle ◽  
Contemporary Context

Rudolf Bultmann as historianThe work of Bultmann has had a rather negative reception in South Africa, partly because of the fact that little attention has been paid to his historical interpretation of the New Testament. Unfortunately his name is linked only to his use of philosophical categories in Biblical interpretation. After a few remarks about his early study years and the ideas which framed his later research, the article deals with his work as historian. First he is treated as a historian of religion and then as a literary historian. An attempt is made to understand and describe his views in his contemporary context. The description is done within the framework of the academic context in which he received his training, and the scientific circle in which he performed his academic activities. In conclusion a few remarks of evaluation are made.

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