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But now, as accurate as this account may be in principle, the important discontinuity to which it draws attention may only too easily obscure a more fundamental – -- and, I believe, more important – -- continuity. Even as the discontinuity in question is twofold – with respect to how Jesus is thought and spoken about, whether as a human being appointed by God or as a divine being who became man, and with respect to the conceptualities and terminologies employed in thinking and speaking about him, whether Palestinian or Hellenistic – -- so, too, is there a twofold continuity.

In the first place, whether Jesus is thought and spoken about as a human being whom God appointed or as a divine being who became man, he is in any case understood as the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized. On the most probable reconstruction of Jesus' own ministry, he may be said to have had the same understanding of himself at least implicitly. Although he certainly appears as a man, as a prophet and teacher, and offers no explicit teaching concerning his own person, he nevertheless implies a christology insofar as he calls for a definitive decision in face of his own word and person. This he does by implicitly claiming to have been sent by God and thus to be the explicit primal ontic source of all that is divinely authorized. Thus, whether or not he knows himself to be the Messiah is of no consequence, because in either case he definitely implies a christology in this sense, and when the earliest community calls him the Messiah, it but expresses in its own way that it has understood him and has made the decision for which he calls. The proclaimer has to become the one proclaimed because he is experienced implicitly, if not explicitly, to be the explicit primal ontic source of all that is
authorized by God. Whether Jesus did or did not so understand himself, implicitly or explicitly, he certainly is so understood throughout the whole course of christological development from the earliest community onwards, whether he is thought and spoken of as the man whom God has made Messiah
or rather as the God who assumed the nature of a man.

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