As Bultmann assumed that he knew a certain amount about Jesus, so he assumed that he knew a certain amount about the early church: that it began as a kind of variant on Gnosticism, though using some Jewish language; that it developed in two strands at least, one of which carried on the Gnostic or ‘wisdom’ tradition, while another interpreted Jesus within a more Jewish-style development; that these two were combined in the writing of the first canonical gospel; that Christianity quickly spread beyond its original base, which merely happened to have been Jewish, and that it translated the
...more
