1104.Twice on the same page ...

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Twice on the same page (Der Exeget als Theologe: 99) Marxsen emphasizes that the arc of relationship between Jesus and the witness is by no means identical with revelation, or the Lord, even though revelation, or the Lord, is not to be reached apart from the arc of relationship, but only through it.

But, then later, in another essay in the same book (136), he says exactly the opposite -- that revelation and the apostles' witness to revelation, and thus the real canon, are identical.

Clearly, if the second position is correct, Marxsen is as vulnerable, in his way -- the way of what might be called his "Jesus-kerygmatic docetism" -- to the criticism he makes both of Bultmann's appeal to the Christ-kerygma and of the appeal conservatives are wont to make to the Bible, or the New Testament (cf., e.g., Anfangsprobleme der Christologie: 54 f.). If, on the contrary, the first position is correct, he evidently has to make much more clearly and consistently than he does something like my distinction between the empirical-historical Jesus, on the one hand, and the existential-historical Jesus, on the other.

 In that way, he could hold that, although the existential-historical Jesus is to be reached only through the earliest layer of Christian witness, he is not identical with that witness any more than he is identical with the empirical-historical Jesus, on the one hand, or with either the Christ-kerygma or the New Testament canon, on the other.

20 February 2000