In Burton Mack's latest book, entitled "The Christian myth. Origins, logic, and legacy", he raises challenging arguments with regard to those issues of the Christian myth mentioned in the title. The aim of this review article is to by means of this book introduce the reader to his research. In the first part of the article, Mack's viewpoint and argument are summarized and in the second part, it discusses the research of the literarkritische formgeschichtlichen German researchers who paved the way.

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The gospel myth of Christian origins

Flip Schutte (Witbank)

*

Research Associate: Department of New Testament

University of Pretoria

Abstract

In Burton Mack's latest book, entitled "The Christian myth. Origins,

logic, and legacy", he raises challenging arguments with regard to

those issues of the Christian myth mentioned in the title. The aim of

this review article is to by means of this book introduce the reader

to his research. In the first part of the article, Mack's viewpoint and

argument are summarized and in the second part, it discusses the

research of the literarkritische formgeschichtlichen German

researchers who paved the way.

1. INTRODUCTION

Burton Mack's latest book The Christian myth. Origins, logic, and legacy

traces his intellectual evolution, from a creative analyst of ancient texts, to a

scholar searching for the motives and interests of Jesus' followers who

composed those texts, and the social logic of the Christian myths they

created. Traditionally the gospel is known as the story that documents the

origins, reveals the logic, and constitutes the legacy of the Christian faith. With

this experiment of Mack (2003:17) he asks the reader of his book to see

differently!

The first challenge for Mack (2003:18) to consider the gospel as myth

is that the customary direction of cause and effect at the beginning of

Christianity will have to be turned around. The gospel will no longer be the

document that tells the story of Christian origins. The portrayal of Jesus in the

gospels will have to be seen as myth and accounted for as mythmaking. The

second challenge has to do with the need for developing a theory of religion

that runs counter to the way in which religion is understood by most

Christians. It means that, in order to understand the logic of the gospel as

myth, one has to reconstruct the social situation in which it first came together.

The third challenge is to take a sweep through the legacy of the Christian

*

A review article of Burton L Mack 2003. The Christian myth: Origins, logic, and legacy. New

York: Continuum. Dr Flip (P J W) Schutte (DLitt et Phil, DTh, PhD) is a research associate of

Prof Dr Andries G van Aarde, Department of New Testament Studies, Faculty of Theology,

University of Pretoria.

HTS 62(1) 2006 123

The gospel myth of Christian origins

myth for the past two thousand years to ask about the way it has worked and

continues to work even in our era.

All people tell stories about their past that set the stage for their own

time and place in a larger world (Mack 2003:11). For some reason early

Christians came to think of their own stories of the God of Israel and father of

Jesus as true in a way that made all of the stories of other peoples false and

dangerous. It was not long before Christians used the term "belief" to express

their acceptance of the truth of the gospel story (Mack 2003:13). Only the

stories of the gods of other people were called myths. The gospel story, by

contrast, was referred to as the gospel and it was imagined as "true" in ways

that other myths were not (Mack 2003:17).

That it was a story of the gods, in some ways like other stories of the

gods and heroes known to all in the Greco-Roman age, is clear. But one of its

features that Christians were expected to believe, was that the high god of the

gospels had plans to expand his kingdom and rule over the whole world, and

that the inaugural event happened "under Pontius Pilate". This introduced a

combination of mythos and historia which is very tight, and especially so in

that the event of importance was definitely dated and of recent, not archaic

history. This is an exceptionally odd feature of the Christian myth, and

Christian apologists have always used it to claim that the gospel is not "myth,"

but "history." However, Mack (2003:13) made it clear in his book that the

"setting in history" of the gospel story is one of its more obvious mythic

features.

For long it was taken for granted that the gospels were the confused

attempts of early Christians to write a biography, and that the task of the

modern scholar was to correct their mistakes by critical reconstruction and

rearrangement (Mack 2003:27). But according to Bultmann, it was not

possible to know anything about the historical Jesus except for the fact that

(Dass ) there had been an historical Jesus, and that he had proclaimed the

arrival of the kingdom of God (see Ashcraft 1972:47). This point of view was

unacceptable for a great deal of American scholars, and a new quest for the

historical Jesus started.

2. MACK AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS

First Mack acknowledges the work done by scholars such as Robert Funk,

Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Richard Horsley, E P Sanders, and Paula

Fredriksen. He then criticises them for not producing "any agreement about a

textual data base from which to work" (Mack 2003:34). He also points out that

"none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all the

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Flip Schutte

movements, ideologies, and mythic figures that dot the early Christian social

landscape" (Mack 2003:35).

Mack rejects depictions of Jesus that have emerged from the quest for

the "historical Jesus" such as peasant teacher, revolutionary leader, mystical

visionary or miracle-working prophet, on the grounds that they are based on a

priori assumptions about Jesus, and are therefore contradictory. He argues

that these portrayals are untrue to the many images of Jesus produced by the

early Christians.

According to Mack (2003:36) then, the link is missing between the

historical Jesus as reconstructed by scholars and the many figures imagined

and produced by early Christians. It thus means that the quest has failed. The

object of the quest has purportedly been to remove the, as Mack (2003:35)

calls it "fantastic and miraculous features of the Christ myth and gospel from

the 'real Jesus of history,'" and to account for the diversity of mythic claims

about him. But no reconstruction of the historical Jesus has done or can do

that.

Another criticism of Mack (2003:36) is that "the link between the

teachings of Jesus on the one hand and the story of his crucifixion on the

other is missing." None of the scholars that start with the sayings of Jesus has

ever been able to account for the crucifixion of Jesus on the basis of those

teachings. When put together, the teachings and the crucifixion should make

sense, but they do not.

Mack's (2003:38) fourth criticism on the quest is that the assumption

from the public and the books published were that "Christian faith and self-

understanding" could be rectified and rejuvenated by the search for the

historical Jesus because an uncontaminated Jesus can provide an account of

Christian origins. But it cannot.

3. THE QUEST FOR CHRISTIAN ORIGINS

According to Mack (2003:40) we need to start over with the quest for Christian

origins and the place to start is with the observation that the New Testament

texts are inadequate for a Jesus quest. They are data for an entirely different

phenomenon. The notion that one source accounts entirely for Christian

origins must thus be dismissed. The texts are data for early Christian

mythmaking and to read them with a historical Jesus interest is to misread

them.

Mack (2003:42) argues that the New Testament, far from representing

historical facts, is the product of a process in which the countercultural

sayings of Jesus were transformed into a universally acceptable myth. He has

taken on the daunting task of explaining the social structure of the world in

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The gospel myth of Christian origins

which the New Testament was written and how it affected and influenced its

writers. Accordingly, Mack takes into account the general influence of the

disruption of society by the rise of the Greek and Roman empires, and

specifically the influence of the destruction of the Jewish Temple State (Mack

2003:52). These factors, Mack (2003:105) asserts, led to a social need to

invent an entirely new theology that could compete in the pagan Roman world

of late antiquity, and at the same time accrue to itself the extensive history of

the Jews and their religion. Using modern anthropological and social

psychological insights as a backdrop, along with his own extensive

professional knowledge of the New Testament, Mack succeeds in devising a

very credible explanation of a mythology that was capable of raising an

obscure Jewish sect into a world-changing power and, as Mack (2003:198)

points out, that power is still very much in evidence when one considers the

popularity of such phenomena as creationism in modern day America. To that

I would add the remarkable staying power of fundamentalism in the face of

modern biblical scholarship.

4. MACK AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

Christianity began, according to Christian imagination when Jesus entered the

world, performed miracles, called disciples, taught them about the kingdom of

God, challenged the Jewish establishment, was crucified, appeared after his

resurrection, established the church, and sent the apostles out on a mission to

convince the Jews and gentiles to convert into thinking that God had planned

the whole thing in order to start a new religion (Mack 2003:59). According to

Mack (2003:60) this point of view is no longer sustainable. The time has come

to account for Christian origins some other way. A redescription of Christian

beginnings is necessary, one that has to account for the emergence of the

gospels themselves. It can be done by turning the gospels into interesting

products of early Christian thinking instead of letting them determine the

parameters within which all of our data find a place to rest.

According to Mack (2003:42), the only items in the gospels genuinely

deriving from Jesus are collections of pithy aphorisms, labeled Q by scholars

for over a century, that focus on a very this-worldly, social concept of the

kingdom of God. Mack (2003:107) envisages the existence of various groups

of "Jesus people," such as those whose Jewish influence can be seen in

Matthew's Gospel or others, of a distinctly Gnostic bent, who produced the

Coptic Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945.

The Christianity of the New Testament, we are told, was a

sophisticated myth that grew out of the groups' need to show that their

kingdom of God movement had the backing of the God of Israel, even though

126 HTS 62(1) 2006

Flip Schutte

it repudiated the ethnic exclusiveness of traditional Judaism. Mack (2003:120)

argues that Paul's letter to the Galatians is the first elaboration of the Christ

myth's logic that gentiles could belong to Israel. In this scenario, the formation

of the Christian Bible as a closed "canon" of inspired writings was due to the

demands of Constantine, who wanted Christianity to be a monolithic state

religion throughout his empire.

Mack (2003:172) hopes that his demythologising the Christian Bible will

enable Americans to treat it in a less simplistic way, but some of his premises

will alienate many believers, e.g. that Jesus' teachings must have been purely

social and that the gospel accounts of his miracles are "preposterous."

Although he makes a plausible case, Mack never gets near to actually proving

that his version of Jesus lies behind the extant texts.

5. THE SOCIAL SETTINGS AS ANSWER

A new theory of religion, one based on social situations must be launched.

Using systematic analysis, Mack (2003:60) seeks to describe and understand

the cultural and anthropological influences on the conception and adoption of

Christian myths and rituals. This analysis must take into account the

conditions in which Christian origins emerged. We need to understand the

process of social formation and myth making that underlay the foundation of

building a church. Scholars must abandon the "notion of divine intervention

miracle" which is such a significant source of how Christians view the world

(Mack 2003:104). Instead, the same academic rigor shown in the

investigations of other mythologies must be applied to the Christian one.

A major element long omitted from Christian scholarship is the

upheavals Eastern Mediterranean society endured. The Jews, subjected to

incessant invasions and exiles, were amenable to a healer's voice. Jesus,

who probably lived, became the focus of scattered and disparate groups of

students recording, discussing and distributing his teachings. Essential to

understanding Christian origins are the document known as the "Q" teachings

(2003:56). These may have survived for a time as a collection, but

incorporated into the Synoptic Gospels in various ways. Fundamental in this

process, Mack proposes, is the redefinition of society found in these writings.

The redefinition uses four devices to accomplish its goal. Mack (2003:155)

calls them the "building blocks of a monocratic mythology." These are the

concepts of God, Christ, the church, and the Bible.

By recycling and re-interpreting the Jewish scriptures, the Christians

came to the conclusion in their redefinition that Jesus as the Christ (Messiah),

and the church as the new Israel, had been the proper goals of the story of

Israel all along. The church was exactly what the God of Israel had in mind

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The gospel myth of Christian origins

from the creation of the world (Mack 2003:160). Therefore the God of Israel is

also the father of Jesus. This can all be read in the Bible, but only if you read

the Bible as an allegory with the "true" meaning "hidden" (Mack 2003:161).

Since single ancestral gods are almost a human universal, the

transformation of one of these into one, absolute and uncompromising, deity

was a major innovation. While the Jews had adopted, and sometimes cast

aside, a variety of deities in their history, the writers of the Synoptic gospels

declared such indulgent practices unacceptable. Now, using the figure of

Jesus as an instrument to lever a local concept into a global one, a new,

absolute divinity acts as a canopy over all people. This approach set off the

expansion of intolerance unfinished today. Mack (2003:139) declares this

monocratic method "audacious" in scope.

In order to further the idea of restructuring society as a divine

manifestation, the gospel narratives added the fiction of miracles and

resurrection to the earlier "Q" teachings. By building on widely known stories

of "kings' sons" performing prodigious feats, the gospel writers display their

knowledge of their intended audiences. Nothing truly innovative was

introduced beyond the idea that this god and his son were actually one. The

one being the universal deity, however, placed it in a position of universal

judge of all humanity. Mack (2003:109) finds the amalgamation and use of

miracles as "proof" a "fantastic" stroke of creative writing.

As the various Jesus groups debated just what Jesus said, and what

those sayings meant, they exchanged ideas among the neighboring ones.

These schools of Jesus, which crossed the recognised cultural boundaries of

the Near East, became "communities" of commonly-held views. Having

moved "outside" their traditional allegiances, these communities generated a

new "super state." As the gospel narratives were circulated among its

"citizens" a new social structure, which Mack labels (2003:159) "imperious"

emerged within the Roman Imperium.

Finally, and to Mack (2003:122) a major consideration, the Bible

narratives became the tool for completing the social restructuring. It became,

he says, "an epic charter" by rewriting history while redefining society. The

Jewish Bible was transformed into a collection of forecasts of Jesus arrival. At

the same time it condemned the Jews for not reading the signals. This

allowed the Jesus movement to abandon its Jewish roots and embrace the

Gentile community. The use of textual form granted credibility to this

approach. Christian writers were then able to define history to suit their

agenda. By declaring their history the only true one, they used this fiction as a

bludgeon for conversion.

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6. AMERICA AND THE MYTH

At this point, Mack (2003:183) narrows his audience to citizens of his own

country. He then asks the question: How does the myth building process of

Christianity apply to people of the United States? He provides a brief

summary of expressions of the bits of the Christian myth. This is followed by

how it has been applied there. Tracing its roots is difficult, since the

Enlightenment, not Christianity, is usually seen as the more significant

influence. Thus, Christianity was considered an essential element in North

American society from the theft of the land from indigenous peoples through

the hypocrisies of slavery to "manifest destiny." Mack concludes with the

warning that the Christian call for conversion and obedience is invalid in

today's "multiethnic, multicultural world." It is a caution that needs wide

expression and acceptance.

7. WHO PAVED THE WAY?

For Mack (2003:112) then the answer to the origin of the Christian myth is the

practical situation in society. He boils it down to the congregation of mixed

constituency who saw themselves as the people of God. This created a

Jewish question which could only be answered with a Greek answer of

"faithfulness unto death" and "apotheosis." The rest of the myth followed this

logic.

Mack's answer makes a lot of sense to me and it explains the whole

evolution and growth of the myth and its narratives. But, long before Mack

started to search for his answer in the social circumstances of the first

congregations, the literarkritische formgeschichtlichen German researchers

did so as well. They made us aware of the fact that the synoptic Gospels were

composed of small self-contained units and they made us aware of these

small units' sociological importance. In the rest of this article I want to

concentrate on their contribution, because when understanding their research,

one also understands Mack's conclusions even better.

Form criticism is a sociological approach to understanding a text. A text

is only understood when the narrating community is drawn into the exegesis

and when the social settings have been recognized. The sociological setting

refers according to Gerhard Iber (cf Güttgemanns 1979:54) to a societal

reality, which has become customary through its use in a particular culture

and which plays such a definite role for speakers and hearers or writers and

readers that the utilization of a particular linguistic genre becomes necessary.

Therefore, one can state with Dibelius (in Güttgemanns 1979:54) that it was

not the personality of the individual evangelist that determi nes the formalizing

of the material, but rather the collective, the congregation, that creates

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The gospel myth of Christian origins

particular genres. Form criticism according to Schmidt (in Güttgemanns

1979:53) talks thus about the community out of whose collective life the

literature was composed.

Mack argues thus correctly when he uses the text as a window to look

through. What one should actually see is the world behind the text. One must

always remember, as Gunkel (cf Güttgemanns 1979:237) said that the oldest

genres did not originate on paper, but in life, therefore they were brief and

short units. It was the expression of particular occasions of actual life. The

sociological setting is, according to Bultmann (1963:368) the relation of a

literary segment to a general historic situation out of which the genre that

belongs to that segment developed. The sociological setting of the gospel

narratives for instance was the preaching and life in the early congregations.

First, I would say, there was the Easter faith. Where the kerygma of the Easter

faith was proclaimed, people believed. These believers shared the kerygma

with others and they also believed. Then, the social need of people who

believed the kerygma and who want to hear more, caused them to form a

congregation. And then, the tradition was born, according to Dibelius (cf

Güttgemanns 1979:373) out of the desire to illustrate the preaching. This

social situation started a whole evolution. As the congregation grew and an

institution came into being, the church needed material for edification,

paraenesis, church discipline, propaganda, apologetic, and preaching

(Bultmann 1963:368). All of these sociological situations in real life asked for

forms. The forms were thus functional for use in the congregations.

The collection of the material, as Mack (2003:48) also said, began in

the Palestinian primitive community who created no new literary genres, but

took over those long developed within Judaism (Bultmann 1963:368). The

small units were arranged within a larger narrative framework and eventually

the Christian myth grew out of it.

There were especially three literarkritische formgeschichtlichen

German researchers who were interested in the kerygma of the early church.

They were Karl Schmidt, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann. They were

especially interested in the pre-literary stages of the small units of the gospel

narratives (Vorster 1982:97), and the Sitz im Leben out of which these small

units arose.

Since the oral Jesus, tradition was filtered through Christian preaching

and worship in a Greek world, form critics concluded that the stories and

sayings in the gospels reveal more about the early Christian community than

about the historical Jesus himself. Mack (2003:39) underlined this fact as well.

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Dibelius, Schmidt, and Bultmann believed that the literary form of the

individual pericope was a key to the text's Sitz im Leben (Osborne 1984:26).

The different Sitz im Leben of the early church called for Gattungen . The early

church was no longer Israel. It was a kerygmatic community, who needed

Gattungen to say that the old had passed, there is now something new. It was

a cult formed around a cultic figure, namely Jesus, and the kerygma of this

cult was the death and resurrection of Jesus. This death-and-resurrection-

event made the "new" a reality. It made a new way to live in relationship with

God a possibility. This new cult needed texts. They needed an etiological

narrative to legitimise their existence. Easter is the bottom line of this

narrative. Out of the kerygma of Easter developed texts. As time went by

some authority was given to these texts. Later, they were united in a collection

and they received the status of a canon.

The three formgeschichtlichen scholars mentioned above, has each

their own theory on how this foundational myth developed into what we today

call the gospel narrative. I will, in what follows shortly discuss these theories,

because their contributions enrich the viewpoint of Mack.

7.1 Karl Ludwig Schmidt

While deconstructing the gospel narratives, Karl Ludwig Schmidt realized that

there was a narrative framework in use in the early Church. The Gattung of

this framework was that of a biography, more specific that of a martyr's

biography. This framework consist of the Erzählung vom Tode des Täufers

and the narrative about the Tod und Auferstehung und der Kindheit Jesu

(Vielhauer 1981:23). The rest of the gospel narratives can be broken down to

isolated pericopes. According to Schmidt (Vielhauer 1981:17), the passion

narrative is the oldest unity in the Gospels. These isolated pericopes

(Einzelerzählungen ) were joined together in a narrative by the earliest

congregations.

Because the Sitz im Leben of each congregation differs, the gospel

narrative and the order in which the pericopes were joined, differs as well. The

pericopes were joined to the narrative framework like pearls that are laced into

a string. If the string holding them together is broken, the pearls may be

reassembled in another order without changing the nature of the string of

pearls. Thus, the Gospels in Schmidt's (1923:159) view are collections of

pericopes loosely strung together by the gospel writers. The narratives are

thus volkstümlicher Literatur that was shaped by the Sitz im Leben of the

congregation. Mack (2003:104) stresses the same point when he argues that

the origin of the Christian myth was the stories of Israel reinterpreted for a

new congregation.

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The gospel myth of Christian origins

Schmidt did not try to reconstruct the historical Jesus. He tried to reconstruct

the kerygmatic Jesus Christ based on the consensus between the kerygma

and the form in which the gospel narrative was transmitted. This Christological

kerygma is the geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit (Vielhauer 1981:20). That is what

the canon is all about. According to Schmidt, the Christological kerygma is the

canon, not a traditional collection of books. "Kanonisch ist, was mit dem so

gefassten Kerygma übereinstimmt, apokryph, was nicht mit ihm

übereinstimmt" (Vielhauer 1981:22).

Thus, for Schmidt, the genesis of the Christian myth is the

Christological kerygma. If there were no kerygma , there would have been no

gospel (Vorster 1982:99). This kerygma was transmitted within the framework

of the biographical martyr narrative of Jesus and John (Schmidt 1923:159).

The evangelist joined all the other pericopes to this framework in the

sequence that addressed the Sitz im Leben of the congregation the best. The

passion was thus the first Gattung in the kerygma and the rest of the Gospel

was a prelude to the kerygma .

7.2 Martin Dibelius

Martin Dibelius also recognized that the Gospels are collections of material,

which was chosen, limited, and finally shaped by the evangelists but not given

by them their original molding. He also laid great emphasis upon preaching in

the early church as the medium of transmission of the tradition of Jesus'

words and deeds. The materials contained in the Gospels were selected from

a much larger mass of recollections that the very earliest followers of Jesus

possessed. According to Dibelius (1939:vi) these recollections were handed

on because of their usefulness in preaching. In the beginning, Dibelius said,

there was the sermon! The actual content of the tradition turns out, upon

examination, to be all related to preaching (Dibelius 1971:9). This argument of

Dibelius underlines a problem that I have with Mack. The Christian myth is not

only a sociological declaration to legitimise a certain type of constituency in

society. It is in the first instance a spiritual narrative which relates to a certain

group's faith in whom they call God. The myth's first field of operation is thus

in the congregation related to the preaching!

Dibelius' analysis of the Gospels' portraits of John the Baptist

convinced him that these were not historical reports but passages designed

for Christian preaching. The portraits of Jesus were according to him,

developed for the same purpose (Dibelius 1971:2). Thus, the Gospels can

never be regarded as history.

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The gospel writers were according to Dibelius not authors but collectors. They

did not fabricate their preaching material but merely polished the elements of

previous oral traditions (Dibelius 1929:24). Mack and Dibelius have

consensus on this issue. Dibelius insisted that nothing is remembered or

communicated without some form and that the form in which something is

preserved shapes the content. He distinguished two basic kinds of stories in

the gospel namely paradigms and tales (Dibelius 1971:11). Paradigms are

example stories designed for preachers, and storytellers for entertainment

designed tales or novelle of miracles. In explaining how the Gospels were

composed out of paradigms and tales, he insisted that the prime motivation

was each writer's own theology of history. Thus, as Mack said, myth

reinterpreted to address an issue in society.

The Gospels were, according to Dibelius (1939:xvii), written a

generation or two after Jesus. When they arose, the Christian church already

had a knowledge of Jesus. Stories about him and sayings from his lips

circulated both orally, and in writing, were memorised and were read in public

worship. The Gospels were not written by their authors upon their own

responsibility and all at one sitting, they were compiled out of these narratives

and sayings that were already in use. At first, Dibelius (1939:123) said, that

there was no account of Jesus' career comparable to a biography instead;

there were only the separate narratives, single sayings, groups of sayings,

and parables.

The origin of these earliest traditions is most closely connected with the

faith of the early Christians, but not so closely with their knowledge. In spite of

the fact that they were eyewitnesses of Jesus' life, they did not become

biographers. That is proved by the mosaic character of the contents of the

Gospels and by the absence of the ordinary biographical data and of every

trace of personal recollection (Dibelius 1939:124). The authors of the tradition

were according to Dibelius (1939:127) rather preachers than biographers.

For Dibelius Christian faith is Easter faith. It was the Empty Tomb and

Emmaus legends that made present and real the Easter faith of the earliest

community (Dibelius 1939:181). It was for him in particular the Emmaus

legend that made vivid the powerful change that had taken place, from doubt

to faith. Out of this legend, the whole Jesus tradition started to develop

(Dibelius 1935:75). The Emmaus legend was like a nucleus out of which

everything else developed. All the elements for the life of the congregation are

present in the narrative, namely the preaching of the prophets, the breaking of

the bread, the passion, the resurrection, et cetera.

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The gospel myth of Christian origins

But even older than the Easter faith is, according to Dibelius (1949:125) the

"Überzeugung, dass Jesus nicht im Tode geblieben sei, dass er jetzt bei Gott

weile und dass er als Messias-Menschensohn wiederkommen werde."

According to Dibelius (1939:181) the "how" of the Easter event is left unsaid. It

is only the faith in the Risen One that is of interest. That is the content of the

preaching. The Christian message does not close with the account of Jesus'

death, but with the witness to his resurrection. It is also important to emphasis

that the Christian religion have no account of the resurrection but only various

stories relating its effect. The preacher of this message could hardly been

satisfied with such brevity. If he was to substantiate what was thus stated, he

must have made use of narrative (Dibelius 1939:131).

Thus, with Easter as the meta-narrative and the Emmaus legend as

nucleus the rest of the narrative started to develop on an evolutionistic way.

One pericope asked for the next, and so the narrative grown.

The passion narrative seems thus for Mack and Dibelius to be the

oldest unity and oldest narrative in the tradition. "Die Leidensgeschichte ist der

einzige grössere Abschnitt in den Evangelien, der Begebenheiten im

geschlossenen Zusammenhang erzählt" (Dibelius 1949:118). According to

Dibelius (1939:145), we must assume that the passion narrative was already

in existence before the Gospel of Mark was written. The preacher used the

narrative. He further gave examples of Jesus' deeds and mighty works of

healing, since it is these that proved that God was with him (Dibelius

1939:131) and this is how authority was given to the kerygma of the cult.

The preaching of the kerygma asked for more detail. "Those early

communities were not concerned with the writing of history, but with the

preaching of the gospel – and whatever proclaim ed the meaning of that

message was welcomed by them" (Dibelius 1939:159). That is why Dibelius

(1949:6) could say: "Die Gesichtspunkte des Glaubens und der Geschichte

lassen sich nicht einfach verbinden. Man kann nicht das, was der Glaube

sagt, geschichtlich beweisen. Glaube ware ja nicht Glaube, wenn man ihn

jedem anbewisen könnte."

7.3 Rudolf Bultmann

The form critical approach of Rudolf Bultmann does not differ essentially from

that of Martin Dibelius. According to Bultmann the aim of form criticism is to

determine the original form of a piece of narrative, a dominical saying or a

parable (Bultmann 1921:231). He summarised certain presuppositions, which

are now to be taken for granted, such as the following: (a) Mark is the oldest

of the four Gospels and even Mark is the work of an author who is steeped in

the theology of the early church [Mack's social experimentation (2003:104)];

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(b) there is a fundamental assumption that the synoptic tradition consists of

individual stories or groups of stories joined together in the gospels by the

work of the editors; (c) the distinction between traditional and editorial material

in the Gospels is an established procedure; (d) the respective literary form

which the form critic assigns to the respective gospel units is a sociological

concept and not an aesthetic one, although one piece of the tradition is

seldom to be classified unambiguously in a single category; (e) form criticism

has to move in a circle, inasmuch as the forms of the literary tradition must be

used to establish the influences operating in the life of the community, and the

life of the community must be used to render the forms themselves intelligible

(Bultmann 1921:241). The immediate historical effect of Bultmann's research

was to put the brakes on most research on the life of Jesus for the next half

century, because, to analyse the life of any person one needs historically

reliable data and a chronologically accurate sequence of material. So, if the

gospel stories and sayings were molded by early Christian preachers for

situations after Jesus died and, if the narrative framework of the Gospels was

created by even later writers, then writing a historically accurate biography of

Jesus is virtually impossible.

Bultmann argues that we must allow the tradition of Jesus, as it stands

assembled in the Gospels, to speak for itself. The Christian church called by

the word and ever and again reconstituted by the word, does indeed need

tradition (Bultmann 1955:119). It must say what it has to tell us, especially

about the conditions under which it arose. This is also what Mack is interested

in.

To understand Bultmann, one has to make the distinction between

Historie and Geschichte. " Historie designates what actually happened. It

points to those events which take place in the cause-effect and which can be

studied by historians employing scientific methods" (Ashcraft 1972:35). By

contrast, Geschichte designates an event of history, which continues to have

influence or meaning on later persons and events. "It deals with the encounter

of persons, and its emphasis is on the personal meaning of events, or

existential history" (Ashcraft 1972:36). Mack pays attention to both Historie

and Geshichte in his experiment. The Historie he traces back to the social

settings in the first centuary of the common era, and the Geschichte is still

evident for him in present day America.

Bultmann rejects Historie as the basis for faith and contends that

Christian faith is grounded in the geschichtliche event of Christ. The only

sources that we have to study the history of Jesus are the Gospels, and in

them Christ was presented as the one in which the disciples believed. He was

Lord and Savior. They were not interested in the scientific Historie , but rather

HTS 62(1) 2006 135

The gospel myth of Christian origins

in the great events as an event of Geschichte , which had profound meaning

for their lives (Ashcraft 1972:43).

The basic reason why Bultmann rejected Historie as the basis of faith is

that he believes God spoke and speaks now to man through the proclamation

of the Christ event (Ashcraft 1972:36). It thus all boils down to the kerygma.

Of greatest significance in Bultmann's understanding of the historical

Jesus are two theological factors. The one is according to Ashcraft (1972:46)

that he thinks that the theology of the New Testament deals with the Christ of

the kerygma and not with the historical Jesus. Secondly, Bultmann thinks that

the nature of faith makes the historical Jesus irrelevant.

The theology of the New Testament, largely from Paul and John, deals

with Christ of the kerygma and not with the historical Jesus. "Paul was not

influenced by the historical Jesus directly or indirectly. He based his claim to

apostolic authority (Gl 1:12-17) not upon his knowledge of or acquaintance

with the historical Jesus but upon an appearance of the risen Lord (see Van

Stempvoort 1972:22-25). In all of his writings, he claimed the authority of

Jesus' teachings in only two instances (1 Cor 7:10f; 1 Cor 9:14), and these

are not crucial for faith" (Ashcraft 1972:46).

Paul preached that Jesus had come, died, and had been raised. This

was the proclamation he had heard, and he was thereby forced to decide

whether he would acknowledge that God had acted redemptively in this event.

When he decided to acknowledge Christ, he proclaimed what he had heard,

which were neither Jesus' own teachings nor information about him, but rather

that the event had happened and that it was God's saving act. Jesus was not

a teacher with a new concept of God, nor a hero or an example. The cross

was not a symbol according to Bultmann (Ashcraft 1972:47) but a naked fact

of history, in which it was claimed God's judgment and salvation came to man.

In like manner, Christ confronts men only in the proclamation of this

gospel. The kerygma was the beginning of faith and of the New Testament

theology. There was no "Christian" faith before it. Therefore, according to

Bultmann (Ashcraft 1972:47), the teachings of Jesus are a part of Judaism,

not Christianity. To put it another way, a complete historical knowledge of

Jesus' teachings and deeds would not be the kerygma , or the occasion of

faith. Jesus' message is therefore the presupposition of theology in the New

Testament. Christian faith becomes possible only when the Christian kerygma

proclaims that the Crucified and Risen One was the event of salvation. For

Bultmann (cf Painter 1987:166) the kerygma is the criterion of authentic

existence and is accessible only in the faith of the believing community.

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Flip Schutte

Although Bultmann considers cross and resurrection as a single event, an

event of redemption, it needs to be remember, that he does not regard the

resurrection as historical or physical (Painter 1992:169). That does not mean

that he rejects the resurrection. Jesus really is risen and the disciples did

encounter him, not as an objective event but in some other way. The disciples

were convinced that he was risen because of the way believing in him

transformed their lives and believing that he was risen is not regarded as

believing in an illusion. It is a truth available only in faith. Jesus is risen in the

kerygma (Painter 1987:172). Christ meets us in the preaching of the cross

and the resurrection, according to Bultmann (see Ashcraft 1972:72). This can

only mean that the proclamation is a part, or continuation of, the saving act of

God. Thus, salvation "happens" only in the proclaiming and hearing of the

proclamation of Christ (Johnson 1987:239). So, preaching is God's saving act,

not communicating information about past events which may, or may not, be

established apart from faith. It is God's eschatological event of salvation

(Ashcraft 1972:74). This proclamation of the kerygma happened in the

preaching of the gospel. According to Bultmann (1963:370), Christ who is

preached is not the historic Jesus, but the Christ of the faith and the cult.

Hence in the foreground of the preaching of Christ stands the death and

resurrection of Jesus Christ as the saving acts that are known by faith, and

become effective for the believer in Baptism and Lord's Supper. It thus

happened in the cultic life and cultic gatherings of the congregation. Preaching

asks for more than just the kerygma. It asks for narratives. Thus for Bultmann

did "Mythus und Kultus verbunden und die Evangelien geformt" (Schmidt

1981:116 ). The kerygma of Christ is thus cultic legend and the gospels are

expanded cult legend. They are expanded illustrations of the motifs of the

kerygma that one finds in, for example, 1 Cor 11:23-26 and 15:3-7.

8. CONCLUSION

What I learned from Mack in this latest book of him is the fact that the spiritual

needs of people cannot be divorced from their social and psychological reality.

Mack's viewpoint encompasses more than the historical point of origin of the

Christian myth. Myths are universal and their meaning is existential. Therefore

one can say that the story of Jesus and the Christ is not a new story. It is a

new nuance in an old story. Kerygma as phenomenon existed before Christ

and provided many people with spiritual guidance.

The main difference between Mack and the literarkritische

formgeschichtlichen German researchers is that Mack considers the content

of the kerygma to be just one foundational myth amongst many others that

were created by early Jesus movements and Christian cults. He tries to offer a

HTS 62(1) 2006 137

The gospel myth of Christian origins

social explanation of all of these. He complemented and broadened thus our

perspectives by adding to the results of scholars like Dibelius and Bultmann.

Indeed, an insight to take note of!

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Bultmann, R [1921] 1931. Die Geshichte der synoptischen Tradition. Zweite

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Bultmann, R 1963. Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsatze, IV. Tübingen:

Mohr.

Dibelius, M 1939. The message of Jesus. London: Nicholson & Watson.

Dibelius, M 1949. Jesus. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Dibelius, M 1971. Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums . Tübingen: Mohr.

Gütgemanns, E 1979. Candid questions concerning Gospel form criticism: A

methodological sketch of the fundamental problematics of form and redaction

criticism. Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press.

Hahn, F 1985. Zur formgeschichte des Evangeliums. Durmstadt: Wissenshaftliche

Buchgesellschaft.

Johnson, R 1987. Rudolf Bultmann: Interpreting faith for the Modern Era. Auckland:

Collins.

Mack, B L 2003. The Christian myth: Origins, logic, and legacy . New York:

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Osborne, G R 1984. The resurrection narratives: A redactional study . Michigan, MI:

Grand Rapids.

Painter, J 1987. Theology as hermeneutics: Rudolf Bultmann's interpretation of the

history of Jesus. Sheffield: The Almond Press.

Schmidt, K L 1923. Die Stellung der Evangelien in der allgemeinen

Literaturgeschichte, in Hahn 1985:126-228.

Van Stemvoort, P A 1972. De Brief van Paulus aan de Galaten. Nijkerk: G F

Callenbach.

Vielhauer, P 1981.Karel Ludwig Schmidt, in Schmidt 1923:13-36.

Vorster, W S 1982. "Formgeschichte" en "Redaktionsgeschichte", in Klijn, A F J K

(red), Inleiding tot de studie van het Nieuwe Testament, 95-111 . Kampen:

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Painter, J 1987. Theology as hermeneutics: Rudolf Bultmann's interpretation of the history of Jesus. Sheffield: The Almond Press.