New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Message, often shortened to New Testament and Mythology, is an influential and controversial theological essay by Rudolf Bultmann, published in 1941. The essay is generally considered one of the defining theological works of the 20th century. In it, Bultmann stresses the need to understand the New Testament, particularly the Gospels and their account of Christ, as being mythological in nature.
Famous quotes containing the words testament and/or mythology:
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)