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Old Testament scholar, Rolf Rendtorff turns 85 today, Wednesday 10 May. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Herr Professor!!
Rolf Rendtorff is probably most well known for his book Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch , 1977 (translated into English as The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch). In this book, Rendtorff demonstrated that the traditio-historical approach of Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth which had been developed in the early twentieth century (which examined large complexes of tradition stretching throughout the first five or six books of the Hebew Bible, such as the Exodus tradition, the Desert wandering tradition, the Sinai tradition, and the Patriarchal tradition) was fundamentally inconsistent with the documentary source critical method championed by Julius Wellhausen in the previous century – even though in practice von Rad and Noth had continued to pursue a form of documentary source analysis side-by-side with their new traditio-historical criticism. Rendtorff’s finding that the various traditio-historical complexes of tradition were largely independent at a late stage before their integration ruled out the documentary hypothesis in its classical form, requiring, as it would, continuous sources interweaving each of the traditions. Together with other challenges to the documentary hypothesis which emerged in the same decade, Rendtorff’s book opened up the way for a closer study of the development of the narrative traditions, unrestrained by the assumptions of the documentary hypothesis. To a large extent, and here lies the challenge, the necessarily radical project which he outlined remains to be carried out by subsequent scholars.
Rolf Rendtorff shares a birthday with Barth and Bono.
Ed Jones said:
Schubert M. Ogden writes: “none of the writings of the NT (the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT are apostolic witness to the HJ as the early church Judged them to be.” Thus not reliable sources for Jesus reconstruction. “All appropriate faith and witness are and must be apostolic- the witness of the apostles is still taken to be the real norm, even if we today have to locate this witness not in the writings of the NT, but in the earliest stratum of NT witness ascessible to us, given our present critical historical methods and knowledge.
Hans Dieter Betz writes: This source (the Sermon on the Mount seen as the earliest stratum) presents us with an early form – deriving from (the Jerusalem Jesus Movement) of the Jesus tradition as a whole. which had direct links to the teaching of the HJ and thus constituted an alternative to Gentile Christianity as known above all from the letters of Paul and the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT.
Reimarus the father of the Quest for the HJ wrote: Search the Scriptures and see if Christianity was not based on a historical mistake.
Just so all of this critical fun over NT myth may say we are only seeing the mistake..