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All that Bultmann regards as forbidden is any attempt to justify the truth of the kerygma empirical-historically, as well as any attempt to legitimate its Christianness by exhibiting its continuity with the empirical-historical Jesus. The kerygma is legitimate because or insofar as it agrees with the earliest kerygma -- or, alternatively, more or less adequately explicates the faith that Jesus' having come was itself the decisive event through which God has summoned his eschatological congregation, just that being, as Bultmann says, the real content of the Easter faith that God has made Jesus the Messiah. This faith, for Bultmann as much as for Marxsen, was a pre-, not merely a post-Easter faith. In other words, what Bultmann recognizes, rightly, is that one may speak of Christian faith only as and when one may speak of a faith that (1) by its very nature, is a response (immediate or mediate) to Jesus; and (2) only becomes fully explicit Christologicallychristologically, as in the Christ-kerygma, with its proclamation of the cross and resurrection as saving event.

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