scientific age to understand or appropriate the mythological language of apocalyptic, miracles, and resurrection? Following the arguments of William Wrede in 1897, most New Testament scholars gave up the explicit attempt to address the current, normative problems of the day and confined their activities to describing the history of primitive Christian religion.29 Only Bultmann in the past century has self-consciously attempted to draw together the historical and the normative, “What it meant” and