858. There are clearly many ...

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There are clearly many reasons for not exaggerating the differences between Bultmann's view of Christian origins and Marxsen's. Thus, when Bultmann says, for example, that "while it is true that Jesus did not demand faith in his own person, he did demand faith in his word," he anticipates almost exactly Marxsen's distinction between the "two separate branches of tradition" in the New Testament writings, i.e., Jesus-kerygma and Christ-kerygma. Or, again, even though Bultmann characteristically talks about Jesus himself, or "the historical Jesus," whereas Marxsen typically talks about "the Jesus-kerygma" and not about "the historical Jesus," Bultmann is also explicit in saying that what lies before us in the earliest stratum of the synoptic tradition is not Jesus' proclamation, but the proclamation of the earliest community, and in allowing, accordingly, that all he or anyone else could possibly mean by "Jesus' proclamation" as a historical phenomenon is "the complex of ideas" expressed in that earliest stratum. And yet Bultmann, as I said, characteristically gives all this one spin -- by proceeding to explicate the kerygma or proclamation of Jesus himself -- while Marxsen typically gives it another -- by explicating, instead, the Jesus-kerygma of the earliest church.

Even so, unless I am mistaken, this is no good reason for not reading Bultmann's Jesus as precisely an explication of what Marsen means by "the Jesus-kerygma," which, even by Bultmann's own admission, it actually is -- and, given the nature of our sources, has to be. But, then, in that event, Bultmann's explication, at the end of the book, of "the one estimate of [Jesus'] person that corresponds to his own intention," i.e., Jesus' own implicit christology, can be read as, in reality, an explication of the (likewise mostly implicit) christology of the earliest community. Thus, whether or not Jesus estimated himself to be "bearer of the word," this is precisely what he was estimated to be by those to whom we owe the earliest stratum of witness to him. For these earliest witnesses, at least, even if not already for Jesus himself, the sheer fact of his word and ministry -- as Bultmann says, its "Daß," as distinct from its "Was," or, in Marxsen's terms, "das eigentliche Geschehen in diesen Wirken [Jesu]" (NTBK: 121), or "das Moment . . . im Auftreten, im Reden und Tun Jesu, . . . das zu einer Stellungnahme zwang" (ET: 217) -- is the decisive judging-saving act of God now being represented as such through their own witness of faith. Thus, in representing what Jesus said and did without explicit christological qualifications of his person, they nevertheless represent the occurrence he enacted, or the moment in what he said and did that compelled decision, as the eschatological occurrence.

3 February 2000