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I mean the Jesus who simply as a person or event of the past – -- in his sheer "that," as distinct from his "what" – -- is of decisive existential significance for us.

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Of course, the very Christian witness that so represents Jesus to us is sufficient evidence that it is as identified in this way that he must have already been experienced by those to whom we owe this witness but whose own experience of him neither was nor could have been mediated by some still earlier witness. Therefore, although we today can experience the existential-historical Jesus only through the Christian witness, this was not so for the first witnesses whose experience of him existentially was immediate. Moreover, the purpose of their "witness, as of all other Christian witness in communion with it is in no way to substitute itself for the Jesus whom it attested. On the contrary, its sale purpose, and the sole purpose of any other Christian witness that is at all valid, is to mediate an experience of Jesus himself – -- not, indeed, the empirical-historical Jesus in his being in himself then and there in the past, but the existential-historical Jesus in his meaning for us here and now in the present.

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