341. Two main types of Christian witness in NT

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That there are two main types of Christian witness represented in the New Testament is clear enough. There is the type represented, in Marxsen's terms, by the Jesus-kerygma of the synoptic tradition, and there is the type represented by the Christ-kerygma of pre-Pauline and Pauline witness as well as of all other epistolary literature in the New Testament and of the Gospel of John.

Marxsen, for one, infers from the fact that these two types evidently developed as long as they did more or less independently that Christian faith and witness have a double rather than a single root in two distinct communities and their traditions -- the Galilean community and the Jerusalem community.  But is this inference really necessary? Why can't one argue, alternatively -- following Bultmann and, in his own way, Knox -- that the Easter faith of the disciples was their way of remaking the same decision they had already made by following Jesus during his lifetime and that the cross came to have the kind of meaning it had for them because it raised once again the same question that had already been raised by Jesus' proclamation?

One can argue in this alternative way, I believe, provided one doesn't suppose that the individual traditions making up the synoptic tradition are anything other or less than kerygma in the full, even if still only implicit, sense of the term. By this I mean that one must allow that, through each of these individual traditions, Jesus is somehow re-presented as the one through whom God is even now offering the possibility of eschatological existence, and so not merely as one who, in the past, himself re-presented God's offer. Granted, the christology here is "implicit christology," being implied by the sheer fact that each of the traditions is kerygma, not historical reportage, rather than in any way made explicit by one or another type of christological predication. Still, it is the fact or event of Jesus – his sheer "that," as Bultmann puts it -- that they somehow re-present as the prevenient act of God's love. And even "explicit christology," properly so-called, intends to re-present nothing other or more than this.

So, if one allows the full kerygmatic character of the Jesus-kerygma, one can see it as deriving not simply from Jesus' own proclamation as an empirical-historical report, but also from the existential experience and faith of those who so responded to his proclamation as to be able to attest it -- in the individual traditions of the Jesus-kerygma -- as the decisive saving act of God. In other words, the Jesus-kerygma derives from the original decision of the disciples already made by following Jesus during his lifetime, whereas the Christ-kerygma derives from their having to remake that decision in face of his crucifixion and out of the experiences after it that found expression in their witness to his resurrection.

In sum, Christian faith and witness need not be seen as having a double root in two different communities, even if they are to be viewed as originating out of a single community whose emergence was marked by two stages-distinct but inseparable.

n.d.; rev. 16 January 2005