ABSTRACT
Rudolf Bultmann was born on August 20, 1884, in Wiefelstede, a small town in the former German state of Oldenburg, as the eldest son of a Lutheran pastor. He attended a humanistic secondary school and in 1903 began to study Protestant theology at Tübingen university. Further theological studies were carried out at the universities of Marburg and Berlin, where Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), Wilhelm Herrmann (1826-56), Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932), and Johannes Weiss (1863-1914) rank high among the academic teachers who influenced Bultmann.
