The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Marxsen and others are clearly right in holding that Christian faith originates in the apostles' existential experience of Jesus, not in their encounter with the Christian kerygma. And they are also right in inferring from this that the kerygma, or any formulation of it, has to be validated as appropriate by appeal to this original and originating experience.

But where they go wrong is in not clearly and consistently distinguishing this existential experience from empirical experience of "the historical Jesus," in the senses in which the quests of the historical Jesus, old and new (and "renewed"!), understand the term.

September 2000

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