Taylor-made Bultmann, again

In his book, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933), Vincent Taylor has a remarkably perceptive comment about the potential authenticity of material in the gospels that scholars might, for whatever reason, judge secondary. In context, Taylor is discussing Rudolf Bultmann's radical scepticism ("[I]t is not strange that [Bultmann] has been looked upon as Strauss Redivivus" [14]) and the "Barthian sympathies" evident in Bultmann's 1925 book, entitled simply Jesus.

In this book "community-sayings" often become a transparent veil. Bultmann will point out how characteristic they are, and that they could never have been formed if Jesus had not taught this or that. The procedure of the community, he argues, "is the best witness for the teaching of Jesus" (J. 72). The certainty with which the community put the eschatological message into His lips is hard to understand if He did not actually proclaim it, and one cannot doubt that the most important words which demand complete obedience to God's will go back to Him.The book did us the service of showing what ought perhaps not to have been doubted, that a "community-saying" is not an invention ex nihilo, but a construction which could not have existed apart from the movement created by Jesus Himself. (Taylor 1933:14–15)

To many of us, the idea of Jesus' followers creating any saying of Jesus will be inappropriate. But scholars have recently come to appreciate that even verbatim reproduction of another person's words is to (re)create them as our own (not unlike how I have recreated Taylor's words in this post, and Taylor himself recreated Bultmann's words). (Re)Creation is not necessarily falsification. Matthew may have said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," but he did so as a representative of the Jesus tradition and to the community of Jesus' followers. Apparently, Matthew expected his audience to accept that his words were also Jesus' words. Taylor's explanation of Bultmann's work clearly communicates this idea.

Taylor-made Bultmann

One of my perennial interests concerns the way we have distinguished Judaism from Christianity and the various ways this distinction has affected our historical, exegetical, and theological work. A lot of work in the post-World War II era has gone to expose and/or correct the anti-Judaic tenor of a lot of Christian scholarship, but even here the fundamental disjunction between Judaism and Christianity as separate things is frequently detectable.

Rudolf Bultmann, famously, attributed the creation and transmission of many of the miracle-stories in the gospels to "Hellenistic circles," by which I understand him to mean Greek (= gentile) Christian communities. The transposition of the Jesus tradition from Palestinian (= Jewish?) to Hellenistic circles is, for Bultmann, a major source of the distortion evident between Jesus and the gospels. Here, then, is an excerpt from British NT scholar Vincent Taylor explaining how Bultmann would have considered a parable to have escaped relatively unscathed the distorting effects of Hellenization:

For the parables he [viz., Bultmann] lays down the principle that the best criterion of genuineness is the presence of an opposition to Jewish morality and piety or of the eschatological attitude which characterized the preaching of Jesus, always providing that no specifically Christian details are present (G.S.T. 222). (The Formation of the Gospel Tradition [London: Macmillan and Co., 1933], 28)

is Bultmann's idea of Mark schizophrenic?

In my last post I presented, in his own words, Martin Dibelius's conception of those responsible for the Jesus tradition as the anonymous, unskilled community that passed on the tradition until the evangelists (especially Mark and Matthew, but also Luke) got their hands on it.

In his own landmark form-critical study, Rudolf Bultmann exhibits a different conception of the evangelists (or at least of Mark). Bultmann begins Die Geschichte der Synoptischen Tradition (1921) with a recapitulation of the previous generation's estimation of Mark as "the actual course of historical events" in the life of the historical Jesus, and he then revisits William Wrede's devastating critique of that view. In his revisitation Bultmann writes,

Mark is the work of an author who is steeped in the theology of the early Church, and who ordered and arranged the traditional material that he received in the light of the faith of the early Church—that was the result; and the task which follows for historical research is this: to separate the various strata in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author. (History of the Synoptic Tradition [trans. by John Marsh; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963], 1)

Dibelius, if I read him rightly, considers Mark and Matthew, especially, to be collectors of tradition, hardly authors at all and certainly not in any meaningful sense of the word. So he can dissolve the gospel narratives into their individual pericopae, because the evangelists strung them together, leaving the traditional units they collected more-or-less intact. Bultmann, following Wrede, sees Mark as a much more revolutionary presentation of Jesus. Mark—in this way of reading him—casts Jesus as Israel's messiah, but he well knows that no one during Jesus' lifetime thought of him in messianic terms. So he weaves a narrative in which the messianic secret develops organically from the very beginning, in which Jesus himself at first silences and then gradually affirms his messianic status.

So Bultmann's Mark—again, if I'm reading rightly—is a strange hybrid between two competing conceptions. Bultmann affirms Wrede's innovative Mark, who tells the story of man who never was and so is responsible for both the story and the man. But Bultmann also affirms Dibelius's traditional Mark, who collects the traditions told by others and so is responsible only for anthologizing stories already in circulation. Hence Bultmann's program: "to separate the various strata [viz., the innovative (Wredian) and traditional (Dibelian) strata] in Mark and to determine which belonged to the original historical tradition and which derived from the work of the author."

Those of you more familiar with the history of form-critical scholarship: Is this a helpful way to understand what I'm reading?