Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.3 The Flight from History
These conclusions allowed the earliest form critics to take a decisive step
forward. The Liberal quest of the historical Jesus had been content with having
uncovered the two earliest sources of Jesus tradition (Mark and Q). But
Wrede's insistence on the theological character of Mark (see above, §4.5b) had
undermined the previous confidence in Mark as a source for historical information.
Now Dibelius and Bultmann offered the prospect of getting behind the
earliest sources. Dibelius defined the twofold objective of Formgeschichte
thus: 'it seeks to explain the origin of the tradition about Jesus, and thus to penetrate
into a period previous to that in which our Gospels and their written
sources were recorded . . . (and) to make clear the intention and real interest of
the earliest tradition'. 33 Bultmann similarly defines the aim of form criticism:
'to rediscover the origin and the history of the particular units and thereby to
throw some light on the history of the tradition before it took literary form'. 34
At first this might seem to give renewed hope to questers: to get back to the
earliest stages of the traditions regarding Jesus must surely bring one closer to
the historical figure of Jesus. But had such a hope been entertained, Bultmann
would soon have dashed it.
The way had already been closed off by the observation that the earlier
forms display no historical interest in locating particular episodes or sayings at
specific points within Jesus' ministry. Which is also to say that there was no interest
in these earlier stages of the Jesus tradition in tracing out any development
in Jesus or in his self-consciousness. 35 But that also means that there is no biographical
interest in or intent behind the tradition in its earlier forms. This is the
basis for Bultmann's much-quoted dictum: 36
I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and
personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either,
are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about
Jesus do not exist. . . . [W]hat has been written in the last hundred and fifty
years on the life of Jesus, his personality and the development of his inner
life, is fantastic and romantic.
33. Dibelius, Tradition v.
34. R. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921, 2 1931; ET Oxford:
Blackwell, 1963) 4.
35. A classic example is the Synoptic accounts of Jesus' baptism. They recount an event
which happened to Jesus, not an experience of Jesus. Dibelius expressed the point sharply: 'It is
not credible that the origin of the whole narrative goes back to what Jesus himself told of his inner
experience at the baptism, otherwise the section would have been preserved as a word of Jesus'
(Tradition 274). Despite this, most lives of Jesus have felt free to speculate about the sense
of vocation which Jesus received on that occasion; see further below § 11.5b.
36. R. Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (1926; ET New York: Scribners, 1935) 8.
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