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Who is the Jesus who is said to be Christ?

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But if these alternative ways of answering the question are taken seriously, there can be no reason for anyone to suppose that talk of Jesus who is said to be Christ is nothing other or more than a way of speaking about some event – -- any event – -- of decisively re-presenting the possibility of authentic self-understanding. For even if the generally accepted empirical-historical account of Christian origins were to prove false – to the extent, say, that the explicit primal ontic source of the apostolic witness were discovered not to have been a single human person whose proper name was "Jesus" – -- the Jesus who is said to be Christ would still have to be someone or something such that he, she, or it could have been believingly experienced by the apostles as the decisive re-presentation of the possibility of authentic existence and thus as the explicit primal ontic source of their witness of faith. In this sense, the existential-historical Jesus who is the subject of the christological assertion is and must be every bit as historical as the empirical-historical Jesus, since we can have to do with neither except through the mediation of the apostles' believing experience and witness.

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