Two outworkings of this method, in twentieth-century scholarship, have been (1) demythologization: the attempt to move away from the culture-specific first-century forms of speech and thought in which the timeless message or call was clothed, and (2) form-criticism: the means of analysing material, which at face value offers historical narratives about Jesus, in such a way as to let it reveal the (supposedly) ‘timeless’ faith of the early church.
