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Confusing and confused as it seems to me to be, Knox's whole discussion of the church's memory of Jesus (including such claims as that "the Church remembers both more and less than the Gospels contain" \[50\] and that "there has come down within the body of the Church \-\- in, around, and underneath the Gospel materials and reflected more directly in certain statements in the Epistles \-\- an authentic remembrance of Jesus" \[53\]) serves to make a valid and important point. In fact, one might say of it what he himself says of the efforts of others \-\- namely, that "a sound instinct has been at work among those who have insisted on the reality and importance of an extrascriptural source of knowledge of the Church's own intimate past" (53, n. 3).

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Knox's discussion seems to me to be both confusing and confused, however, because, in making the distinction necessary to enforcing his essential point, he does not distinguish, as I do, clearly and sharply between the empirical-historical Jesus and the existential-historical Jesus, but rather distinguishes between what he usually speaks of a "the facts of Jesus' career," or "facts about him or his life," on the one hand, and "Jesus himself," or "the man himself," on the other (47, 50, 52). (He typically distinguishes, more generally, between "facts in the ordinary sense," or "factual data in the ordinary sense," and "the concrete quality, the felt meaning, of an event in the past" \[42, 53, n. 3\]. Or, again, he distinguishes, in the particular illustration of his father, between "the facts about him \-\- his appearance, his words, or his actions" and "his reality as as a person" \[38\].) Of course, this distinction as such is not confused; and I could conceivably appropriate it to say what I am concerned to say in distinguishing between the empirical-historical and the existential-historical Jesus. But the confusion involved in Knox's use of it becomes apparent when he proceeds to identify "Jesus himself" with "the inner personal life of Jesus" (56), as distinct, say, from "the concrete quality, or the felt meaning of Jesus for _our inner personal life_." (The similarity between Knox's view and Herrmann's at this point is, to say the least, striking.)

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On the other hand, the only way whereby the existential-historical experience, and thus the memory, of Jesus that is constitutive of the church can be mediated from one individual to another is through the first individual's witness to the second. Because this is so, it is hardly enough to say, as Knox does in speaking of what for him is formally normative Christian witness -- namely, the New Testament -- that it serves as "a check upon, as well as a resource for, the life of the Church (including its memory) in every age" (50). Formally normative Christian witness, whatever is rightly taken to be such, is not simply a check or a resource for the life of the church, but rather is the check (auctoritas normativa) and the resource (auctoritas causativa) therefor.

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Not surprisingly, therefore, Knox can say in yet another passage that "it would be more precisely accurate to say that its \[_sc_. the Event's\] importance lies in its having been seen than in its having been done, in something heard than in something said \-\- that is, if one has to say the one thing or the other" (21; cf. also 46, where, notwithstanding his insistence on saying both things, he glosses "the man Jesus" by speaking of "what he was _heard_ to say and _seen_ to do, what he was _{+}known{+}_ to be, what was _observed_ to happen to him" \[italics added\]).

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