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As regards the second point, it is generally agreed that the only sources available to us for historical knowledge concerning Jesus and the origins of Christianity are the so-called synoptic gospels, i.e., the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But literary and form criticism of these gospels has long since established beyond serious question that they themselves, as they have come down to us, are neither our earliest sources nor anything like straightforward historical sources at all, in the modern sense of the words. Rather, they are, in a broad sense, samples of the preaching and teaching -- in a word: the witness -- of certain segments of the Christian church during roughly the last quarter of the first century after Christ. Moreover, even the earlier sources of which the gospels are, in turn, redactions are at best secondary sources for the events they purport to be about, being primary sources solely for the faith and witness of the Christian communities to which we owe them. Significantly, however, in these very earliest sources -- roughly speaking, the narrative pericopes of Mark and the sayings source commonly called "Q" -- there is little or no explicit christology, in the sense of explicit claims about Jesus, his decisive meaning for us, his being in himself, and so on. This, of course, is why students of New Testament christology have increasingly come to the conclusion that the beginnings of explicit christology do not lie in Jesus' own witness, and perhaps not even in the witness of the earliest Christian community, but rather in the developing reflections on this earliest witness on the part of the early church. Thus, while the earliest stratum of witness is very definitely witness to Jesus, it is a witness to him in which he himself appears as a witness -- not to himself but to the imminent coming of the rule of God, and to its gift and demand already present in his own witness. Even so, implied by this earliest witnessby witness by the fact that it was borne as a witness of faith, even if not by what it explicitly asserted -- was a definite claim for the decisive significance of Jesus himself. To this extent, the developing christology of the early church consisted in more and more explicitly formulating, in some concepts and terms or other, the christological assertion already implied by the witness of the earliest community, as well as, presumably, by Jesus' own witness to the coming reign of God (as attested, e.g., by a saying like Lk 12:8 f.; cf. Mk 8:38).

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