On the Evidence for the Creative Role of Christian Prophets

Abstract

It has become almost a commonplace in New Testament scholarship to attribute to Christian prophets in the early Church a creative role in respect of sayings which the Gospel tradition presents as dominical utterances. The authority, among modern scholars, for this view is to be found in the formcritical analyses and conclusions of Rudolf Bultmann. Christian tradition, he affirms, took over certian Jewish materials and put them on the lips of Jesus (e.g. the Marcan Apocalypse): the Christian community also revised or reworked elements from older traditions (e.g. the interpretation of the Sign of Jonah in connection with the person of Jesus, Matt. xii. 40) and even formed logia which reflect its own interests and concerns. Such logia are ‘inauthentic’ (in the sense that they are not genuine dominical sayings) and, according to Bultmann, they may originally have gained currency as utterances of the Spirit in the Church, without their ascription to Jesus being initially intended. Sayings like Rev. xvi. 5 (in which the risen Christ speaks) and Rev. iii. 20 show clearly the process of the creation (or, reformulation) of such logia (den Prozeβ der Neubildung solcher Herrenworte). These sayings would only gradually (erst allmählich) have been regarded as prophetic words of the historical Jesus. ‘The Church drew no distinction between such utterances by Christian prophets and the sayings of Jesus in the tradition, for the reason that even the dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of a past authority, but sayings of the risen Lord who is always a contemporary for the Church.’

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