By Schubert Ogden
Why did Jesus become the one proclaimed?
Jesus did become the one proclaimed because, in his own proclamation, he was already implicitly that, the earliest community that came to proclaim him only making more or less explicit what he himself had already implied.
Why did Jesus have to become the one proclaimed?
Jesus had to become the one proclaimed because what the earliest community took to be decisive about him was his "that," not his "what" – not what he had said and done by way of teaching and example, but what God was, and was still, saying and doing through him.
n.d.; rev. 25 January 2005