The Work
Jesus and the Word (Jesus, in German) was published by Bultmann in 1926 and translated into English by Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress in 1934. It is approximately 220 pages, organized around Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom of God, his ethical teaching, and his understanding of himself and his mission. It is not a conventional 'life of Jesus' - Bultmann explicitly states in the introduction that the sources do not allow reconstruction of the historical Jesus's personality or inner life - but an attempt to make Jesus's teaching existentially intelligible to modern readers.
The book was written shortly before Bultmann's mature hermeneutical program (the 'demythologizing' project announced in his 1941 essay) but already reflects its key commitments: the use of Martin Heidegger's existentialist categories to interpret the New Testament, the sharp distinction between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, and the conviction that the kerygma (the Christian proclamation) confronts the hearer with an existential decision that is independent of historical-critical questions about Jesus's life.
Biblical Engagement
Mark 1:15 - 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel' - is the eschatological proclamation that Bultmann treats as the core of Jesus's message. The 'kingdom of God' is not, for Bultmann, a program of social improvement or an institutional structure but an eschatological event that breaks in upon human existence and demands decision. The proclamation is not information about the future but a summons to the present: 'repent and believe' means reorient your existence now, in response to the inbreaking kingdom.
Bultmann's reading of the kingdom proclamation is shaped by Johannes Weiss (Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 1892) and Albert Schweitzer (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1906), who established that Jesus's proclamation was genuinely apocalyptic - oriented toward an imminent divine intervention that did not occur as expected. Bultmann accepts this historical finding but reinterprets its significance: the eschatological orientation of Jesus's preaching is not a naive cosmological error but an expression of the existential structure of authentic human existence, which is always living before the 'end.'
Luke 15:11 - 'And he said, A certain man had two sons' - opens the parable of the prodigal son that Bultmann treats as one of the most direct expressions of Jesus's proclamation. The parable does not argue for the reality of divine forgiveness; it enacts it dramatically, placing the hearer in the position of the son who returns and the son who stays away. Bultmann reads the parables as existential summons: they do not convey information but demand response, requiring the hearer to identify with one of the figures and thereby make a decision about their own existence before God.
Matthew 5:3 - 'Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven' - opens the Beatitudes that Bultmann reads not as ethical requirements but as descriptions of the existence of those who have already responded to the kingdom proclamation. The 'poor in spirit' are not those who try to be spiritually humble; they are those who, in responding to Jesus's proclamation, have abandoned every claim on God and every confidence in their own spiritual achievement. The Beatitudes describe the eschatological community of those who live before God as those who have nothing.
John 3:3 - 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God' - receives a characteristically Bultmannian treatment: the new birth is not a datum of psychological experience but an existential transformation, the transition from inauthentic existence (defined by anxiety, possession, and the attempt to secure one's own life) to authentic existence (defined by openness to the future, freedom from the need for security, and availability for the other).
Historical Critical Method
Bultmann was the most influential form critic of the New Testament in the twentieth century. His The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921) applied the form-critical method systematically to all the Gospel materials, categorizing each pericope by its literary form (pronouncement story, miracle story, legend, etc.) and assigning each to the community context that generated it. The result was a sharp reduction of what could be attributed to the historical Jesus himself: most of the Gospel tradition, Bultmann concluded, reflects the concerns of the early Church rather than the words and deeds of Jesus.
Jesus and the Word works within this skeptical framework: it attempts to present Jesus's proclamation without relying on the historical-critical question of which specific words are authentically from Jesus. The encounter with Jesus through the kerygma does not require historical certainty.
Author and Context
Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884-1976) was Professor of New Testament at Marburg from 1921 to 1951. He was formed by the liberal Protestant theology of Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann, and by the dialectical theology of Karl Barth (with whom he had a complex relationship of influence and disagreement). His mature theology synthesizes dialectical theology's emphasis on the Word's address to human existence with Heidegger's existentialist phenomenology and the form-critical method he had himself developed.
Reception and Legacy
Jesus and the Word was widely read in both theological and secular academic contexts. Its English translation made it accessible to American and British readers during the period when Bultmann's influence was at its height. The book's influence on mid-twentieth-century Protestant theology - particularly in Germany and the United States - was enormous: the 'New Hermeneutic' of Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling, the 'New Quest for the Historical Jesus' of Ernst Käsemann, and the debate about demythologizing all developed in response to Bultmann's work.