Demythologization
Demythologization as a hermeneutic approach to religious texts seeks to separate or recover cosmological, sociological and historic claims from philosophical, ethical and theological teachings. Mostly applied to Biblical texts, demythologization often overlaps with philology, Biblical criticism and form criticism.[1] The term demythologization (in German: Entmythologisierung) was introduced by Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) in existential context,[2] but the concept has earlier precedents.
Hans Jonas's analysis of Gnosticism[edit]
Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was a German-Jewish philosopher, whose studies were supervised by Martin Heidegger and Rudolph Bultmann (see below). Graduating in 1929, the topic of his doctoral dissertation was the concept of (Gnostic) Gnosis, based at large on the demythologization of Gnostic myths.[14] [15] He published a revised version of his dissertation in two volumes. The first volume, titled Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I: Die mythologische Gnosis (Gnosis and the spirit of late antiquity I: The Mythological Gnosis), was published in 1934, and focused on a relatively direct application of Jonas's phenomenological analysis of Gnostic qua phenomena. Due to World War II, the theoretical part was published in late 1954, as Gnosis und spätantiker Geist II: Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie (From Mythology to Mystic Philosophy). Thus, Jonas's contributions to demythologization were available for a select few scholars as of 1929 (including Bultmann and Scholem, Jonas's personal friend), but were published later than their seminal works during the late 1930s and early 1940s.[14]: 111–112 [15]: 78
