Chapter 8 - The Mythos of Christ

Summary

In the first section of this chapter, I critique Rudolf Bultmann’s emphasis on stripping away the ‘mythological’ apparel of the Gospels in order to access something behind or beneath the New Testament text by suggesting a way of reading that leaves the mythos intact and able to ‘speak’ on its own terms. In the second section, I suggest how Jesus’ own myth-making is inseparably bound up in his identity and the emergence of God’s presence in history, appealing to the work of Eberhard Jüngel and Hans Urs von Balthasar to re-place the kerygma inside the mythos itself as a ‘quasi-sacramental’ presentation of the divine.