If we remove myth, what's left? Without myth, what is Jesus Christ worth to
us? All we would have left is what he ‘said’ to us, and as we have established
earlier in this blog, and drawn from the efforts of biblical scholars, even
Jesus Christ’s words are quite arguably the words of the gospel writers about
what Jesus Christ said, not necessarily the actual words of Jesus Christ.
When we remove the mythology, much of the special romance
and sacred trappings go right out the door with it. The shepherds watching in the night of Jesus's
birth, the guiding star, the Virgin birth; all of these sacred yet mythological
stories go away. What historical
scholarship tells us is that a person was born and lived up to age 30, wherein
the particulars of the story of his life begin.
What that leaves us theologically, is a man called Jesus
appearing to John the Baptist in the River Jordan at around age 30, who according
to his disciples’ writings, unites with his Christ like nature, and has varying
experiences in his life for the next three years, until his death and
resurrection. The historical
significance, sans myth, could be summed up to be: the life-changing impact of
this man on the lives of his followers and on subsequent generations.
Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most controversial scholars in
the European theological world, says, “We must realize that much of its (New
Testament) thinking is in mythical terms. It pictures a three-layer universe:
heaven, the earth, and underneath the earth Gehenna or Hades, as the case may
be."[1]
Bultmann proposed that when we demythologize the New Testament and Jesus, what
we have left that is significant is solely the impact that Jesus Christ has on
the individual believer, nothing more.
[1] Johnson,
Sherman. “Bultmann and the Mythology of the New Testament.” Anglican
Theological Review, January 1, 1954, 31.
Really a poignant message. As we go through this process of stripping our own mythology around Jesus, we are forced to look at the bottom line. As you succinctly put it, it's about the impact of the man Jesus on the individual. Even though in this stripping away there is grieving of the loss of some aspects of the miraculous nature of Jesus coming into the world. There is no sadness in the legacy we can look to in Jesus' spiritual attainment and the sharing of what we can also attain as well.
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