Page History

PDF Version of this Document

Knox suggests (in The Early Church and the Coming Great Church: 74) that "the true way to ask the christological question," namely, "Must Jesus not have been divine to have been the center of so divine an event?" parallels the question about the resurrection, namely, "Must not Jesus have arisen from the dead, since he is the present living center of the church's life?" His suggestion takes on particular significance when it is related to Marxsen's analysis of the second question, according to which the experience of Jesus as present and alive after his crucifixion, together with the Jewish concept of the resurrection (of the martyr?), lies behind asking this rhetorical question. So, too, one could say, does the experience of Jesus as explicit primal authorizing source, together with the Jewish [?!] concept(s) of such a source, lead to asking the parallel rhetorical question about his divinity. To be sure, where Knox's reasoning seems to break down is with the claim that, in the sense of ''the earliest statement of faith, the first 'creed,'" i.e., "Jesus is Lord and Christ" (68), the words "Lord" and "Christ" indicate that Jesus "was, of course, believed in as divine" (73). For Knox also allows that "there is no convincing evidence that [Jesus] was called 'God' in the first century, and indisputable evidence that he was not generally called by that name," although "it is clear "that [Jesus] was thought of as being related to God as no other man could be" (73). In other words, even though Knox himself appears to hold that "Lord" and "Christ" in their earliest senses did not indicate that Jesus was believed in as divine, he nonetheless claims the contrary! (Or is he distinguishing between being divine and being God, and using "divine" so broadly as to mean simply "being related to God as no other man could be"? -- in which case, he would be saying much the same sort of thing I have characteristically said.) In any case, the essential point of his argument remains. Given certain religious or philosophical presuppositions (i.e., warrants), a certain kind of experience (i.e., datum) naturally leads to drawing a certain inference (i.e., conclusion). Of course, the conclusion is, in effect, an interpretation of the datum in terms of the presuppositions; and the question remains whether there is anything about the presuppositions that has more than a merely relative validity.

...