Before the flourishing of Bultmann's career, New Testament scholarship had been dominated by literary
criticism, which attempted to uncover the secret of how the texts were compiled; by investigation of the Hellenistic background, especially the mystery religions
surrounding the
early church, as part of a sociological critique of the history of religion; and by excitement about the apocalyptic content of the teaching of Jesus as a first century Jew.
Though Tuttle's work is now canonical, it was met with fierce
criticism early in his career: the artist's 1975 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art was received terribly by many prominent critics, most famously by Hilton Kramer of the New York Times, and curator Marcia Tucker — who went on to found the New Museum of Contemporary Art later that year — was fired from the museum, allegedly because of the controversy
surrounding the show.