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1. The New Testament is "the oldest preserved book of the church's sermons" (Marxsen).

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6. Analysis discloses two main lines of tradition leading back to the primary texts or sermons: (1) the tradition of the Jesus-kerygma that preceded even our earliest gospel (i.e., pre-Marean Marcean Jesus-traditions, possibly earlier collections thereof, especially a pre-Marean Marcean passion narrative; and the sayings source commonly called "Q"); and (2) the tradition of the Christ-kerygma of the pre-Pauline Palestinian and Hellenistic Christian communities.

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9. Recognizing this, one has every reason to acknowledge the formal normativeness of the oldest Christ-kerygma alongside that of the oldest Jesus-kerygma – -- and to recognize those who first proclaimed the Christ-kerygma as also apostles in the strict sense of first preachers, the text of whose sermons is Jesus Christ and whose sermons themselves, because this is so, are in turn primary texts for all later Christian sermons.

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9. Recognizing this, one has every reason to acknowledge the formal normativeness of the Christ-kerygma alongside the Jesus-kerygma -- and to recognize those who first proclaimed the Christ-kerygma as also apostles, in the sense of being first preachers, whose sermons had as their text the primal text, Jesus Christ and which, in turn, became the texts for later sermons that, in turn, became the texts for still later sermons-and so on, up to the New Testament writings as we now have them.

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