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                                                                   What do we learn from the earliest stratum of Christian witness?

1. We learn that the earliest Christians seem to have understoood themselves as the promised eschatological congregation of God, which God had already called into being through the decisive event of sending Jesus as the Christ. Because of this event, eschatological existence – -- existence as human beings will live it in the eschaton, seated around God's table, and so on – -- is already possible here and now. Thus the earliest community bore witness to Jesus as the Messiah, or the Christ, of God, whom God had appointed to this office by raising him from the dead. No doubt the full christological implications of their self-understanding and witness dawned on them only gradually. But implicit in their understanding of themselves as the elect community of the last days, and hence the true Israel of God, was an understanding of Jesus as well as of themselves as eschatological phenomena.

2. If we ask now how the earliest community came to this understanding, the most reasonable answer is that they came to it by accepting the claim for Jesus' decisive significance and for their own status as already accepted by God through him that was at least implicit in his own witness – -- if not in its "what," or content, then certainly in its "that" as actual event. Whether or not Jesus taught anything in the way of an explicit christology, it is only reasonable to conclude that he did point to the fact of his own presence as decisive for his hearers, in that, through him, they already had the possibility of living eschatologically. The actual event of his bearing witness to them as prophet and teacher, and of their being addressed by his witness, was itself the decisive event of God's salvation, already anticipating in the present the final judgment of the coming Son of Man. In any event, it seems clear that Jesus' own witness of faith was simply pure Judaism, or, as we may also say, radical Judaism. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, he came demanding obedience to God's will, consistently understood as a moral will, and hence as demanding obedience to God's moral law. The difference between Jesus' view and that of the prophets is that he utterly and completely radicalized the moral law, as demanding radical obedience – -- not simply the doing of right things, but the doing of right things rightly, not simply justice, but love.

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4. If this is so, however, it is clear that, from its earliest beginnings, the Christian witness has represented Jesus as more -- indefinitely, if not infinitely, more – -- than merely another prophet and teacher. Correspondingly, Christians have understood themselves more or less clearly and consistently as something qualitatively different from yet one more historical movement oriented to a certain founder or leader – -- as something indefinitely, if not infinitely, other and more than a Jewish sect or denomination made up of those who follow Rabbi Jesus.

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