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1. To ask about the meaning of Jesus for us here and now in the present is to be related to Jesus as a historical figure as surely as to ask about the being of Jesus in himself then and there in the past.

2. This is so because, in either case, one could not ask the question at all apart from particular historical experience of Jesus – -- mediate if not immediate.

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10. Whether or not the earliest witness is true, however, is an existential-historical, rather than an empirical-historical, question: therefore, any reasoned answer to it requires not only empirical-historical inquiry to reconstruct the witness and existentialist interpretation to determine its meaning but also metaphysical and moral reflection on the necessary implications of the witness for belief and action.

                                                                                                                                               Original

1. To ask about the meaning of Jesus for us here and now in the present is to be related to Jesus as a historical figure as surely as to ask about the being of Jesus in himself then and there in the past.

2. This is so because, in either case, one could not ask the question at all apart from particular historical experience of Jesus – -- mediate if not immediate.

...

8. This explains why any attempt to answer the second question is and must be peculiarly problematic – -- namely, because in the absence of any primary historical source, any control on inferences from the earliest witness to the being of Jesus in himself must first be reconstructed by just such inferences.

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