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That someone, in fact, represents a certain possibility of self-understanding, together with the claim, implicit or explicit, that it is our authentic possibility, can be verified readily enough simply by appeal to particular empirical-historical experience such as anyone might possibly have. But that this representation is efficacious, in that it is experienced by an individual as confronting her or him with just such a personal decision about her or his self-understanding is not a matter of empirical-  -but of existential-historical experience. The individual has to experience the representation as confronting precisely her or him with this fundamental decision. Moreover, that the claim made or implied by the representation is true, that the possibility it represents is, in reality, one's own authentic possibility, also cannot be validated by appeal to any particular empirical-historical experience or procedures of verification. It can be directly validated, if at all, only by again appealing to one's existential-historical experience that it answers one's underlying existential question about the meaning of one's existence more adequately than any alternative answer. Indirectly, of course, it can also be validated more objectively by following properly metaphysical and moral procedures of verification so as to verify its necessary metaphysical and moral implications respectively, although these procedures, also, go beyond any required to verify strictly empirical-historical assertions.

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Notwithstanding their insistence, however, the appropriateness of the christological assertion is as little dependent on showing that Jesus made at least an implicit christological claim as on showing that he taught an explicit christology. Because the subject of the christological assertion is Jesus in his
meaning for us, not Jesus in his being in himself, whether he did or did not imply a claim for the decisive significance of his own person has no bearing
whatever on the appropriateness of this assertion. Whether he implied such a claim or not, the fact remains that what those to whom we owe even the earliest Christian witness mean in so speaking of him is the one through whom they themselves have felt confronted with such a claim and who still confronts their hearers therewith through their own witness of faith.

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The other thing that must be kept in mind is more important: all christological formulations must be justified as appropriate, and the only way to justify them is by empirical-historical inquiry. Nothing is more obviousr obvious even in the writings collected in the New Testament, than the variety of formulations whereby the constitutive christological assertion has been expressed or implied. Moreover, if one avoids an unhistorical harmonization of these various formulations, one can hardly fail to observe that many of them are sufficiently different in certain respects to be mutually exclusive. Consequently, since all of these formulations purport to express one and the same witness of faith, it is necessary to inquire of each of them whether it appropriately does so. But if this makes clear why christological formulations all have to be justified, it is equally obvious that there is no way to justify them except by testing their claim to express the one Christian witness appropriately. And this can be done only by inquiry back behind each formulation to the formally authoritative and therefore normative witness of faith that it claims to formulate. But this clearly necessary process of empirical-historical inquiry ultimately becomes, not a quest of the historical Jesus -- nor even, I may add, "a historical quest of Jesus" (Marxsen) -- but rather a quest of the earliest Christian witness. Because the subject of the christological assertion is not Jesus in his being in himselt himself but rather Jesus in his meaning for us, it is precisely this earliest Christian witness, in which the decisive significance of Jesus is first expressed, that is the formally authoritative and therefore normative witness of faith by which the appropriateness of all christological formulations must be justified.

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Something very like this account probably provides as reasonable an explanation as one can presently give of the origins of Christianity. By affirming that Jesus' own christology was at most implicit, it takes account of the fact that there is no explicit christology in the earliest stratum of Christian witness. On the other hand, by maintaining that Jesus' own proclamation and summons to decision at least implied a christology, it explains the apostles' faith and witness as well as the early church's explicit christological assertion as the kind of responses to Jesus that they give every apperance appesrance of having been. But whether or not this is indeed a reasonable account, it is in no way necessary to a constructive christology that would make the point of christology today. Whether Jesus did or did not imply the kind of claim of which the church's christological assertion is the explication in no way alters the fact that, even in the earliest stratum of witness accessible to us, what is meant by Jesus -- and the only thing that is meant by him in asserting or implying the christological assertion -- is the one through whom God confronts all who encounter him with just such a claim. Provided, then, that this earliest witness is what, for us today, must count as the witness of the apostles, and hence as formally authoritative and the formal norm or canon for judging the appropriateness of all Christian witness and theology, the significant thing is not that Jesus at least implicitly claimed to be the Christ, however probable it may be that he did exactly that; rather, the significant thing is that what the apostolic community understood by Jesus -- the Jesus to whom they themselves bore witness, implicitly if not explicitly, as the Christ -- was the one through whom they had experienced, and who, through their own witness, was still to be experienced, as confronting women and men with just such a claim.

The sufficient evidence of this is that even the earliest witness of the apostles is precisely that -- witness of faith to Jesus, not historical report about him. Even if Jesus did in fact assert or imply the very christological claim he is represented as making or implying in the earliest stratum of witness -- and, as we have seeseen, one can reasonably infer that he did exactly that -- still, the point of the witnesses in so representing him was not to report what he did in the past, but rather to bear witness to what he -- or, rather, God through him -- was doing in the present, not only to them, but, through their witness of faith, also to their own hearers. Jesus, they claimed, is the one through whom both they themselves and then, by means of their witness, all of their own hearers as well are decisively re-presented with the gift and demand of God's love, and thus with the possibility of authentic existence in faith and returning love. Accordingly, to accept their claim in no way requires one to assent to the truth of certain empirical-historical assertions about Jesus – to the effect that he himself asserted or implied the same claim now represented in their witness of faith. On the contrary, whatever the truth or falsity of any such empirical-historical assertions, to accept the claim represented in the apostolic witness as Jesus' claim is to accept a strictly existential-historical assertion – the assertion, namely, that Jesus means love – not that Jesus meant love, however true that may be also, but that Jesus means love, in the sense that, through him, the gift and demand of God's boundless love are made decisively explicit as authorizing our own possibility of authentic faith and love.

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The point of the original myth of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, no less than of "the full-grown myth" of Jesus' deity as formulated at Nicaea and Chakedon Chaledon (Mackey), is to assert that the man Jesus is infinitely more than a mere man, indeed, is on the same level as God, even though also distinct from God as the one through whom God is decisively encountered. Although the earliest form of the myth is indeed cast in terms taken over from Jewish religious tradition, and thus represents Jesus as in every way human, in no way divine, its point nevertheless is to place him on God's side of the relation between God and human beings generally, not on the side of human beings who more or less fully believe in God. As he whom God has made Messiah by raising him from the dead, Jesus is not merely a believer in God, not even the "original and originating" believer, but is rather the one through whom God has spoken and acted in a final decisive way to re-present the possibility of faith to all who would believe.

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