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We know for a fact that, as the tradition concerning Jesus grew, one of the ways of expressing his decisive existential significance – -- or, if you will, one of the ways of asserting him to be what the earliest witnesses asserted him to be – -- was to attribute words and deeds to him that he can hardly have said and done. Consequently, we have to be sensitive to the possibility that not everything that appears to have been assumed about Jesus really was assumed about him. In many cases, it was rather asserted of him as a way of asserting the one thing that the earliest community had to assert – -- namely, that Jesus is the decisive re-presentation of God through whom both they and all to whom they make the assertion are decisively confronted by God's own gift and demand of love and hence by the possibility of existing in faith in this love.

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Of course, if Bultmann's basic view is correct that Jesus' own proclamation already at least implied a christology, one could say that not only the Jesus-kerygma, but also Jesus' own kerygma can be analyzed in essentially the same way. Jesus at least implied, in other words, that in the significance that belongs to it, the empirical-historical event of his own ministry of word and deed has created a new existential-historical situation; and his implicit proclamation of this event, the event of his own ministry, asks his hearers whether they will appropriate this meaning, whether they will "follow" him.

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