Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.4 The Flight from History
torical Jesus? and Need we know anything about the life of Jesus? Bultmann had
delivered a resounding No! 48 But that No! soon came into question itself.
It was the issue of theological legitimacy which sparked off the reaction. In
a famous lecture in 1953, Ernst Käsemann made two important observations.
First, there is a danger in posing a too sharp discontinuity between the historical
Jesus and the Christ of faith; for the earliest Christians the identity of the exalted
Lord and the earthly Jesus was of first importance. Failure to appreciate the historical
particularity of the man from Nazareth, to whom the eschatological event
was bound, ran the danger of dissolving the event itself into a myth, the danger of
docetism. 49 'To cleave firmly to history is one way of giving expression to the extra
nos of salvation'. Moreover, second, the Synoptics themselves allowed considerable
intrinsic importance to the past; their very format indicated that they
saw the life-history of Jesus as constitutive for faith. 50 Or as the point was later
developed, the Gospels are also kerygma, documents of the church's faith, but
they did not simply repeat the message that Jesus had lived and died; rather, they
were considerably concerned with the what of the pre-Easter history of Jesus —
a history, of course, seen from the standpoint of faith, but the history of Jesus
nonetheless. 51 Consequently, if what we know of the historical figure of Jesus
proved to be inconsistent with the kerygma proclaimed by the Gospels, that
would be serious. 52 Here history reappears as a potential threat to faith: it may
not be able to prove faith, but it may once again cause embarrassment to the
(would-be) believer who takes its findings seriously.
Bultmann had also distanced Jesus from the faith/theology of the church.
In the opening sentence of his Theology of the New Testament, Bultmann asserts
that 'The message of Jesus belongs to the presuppositions of the theology of the
New Testament and is not part of that theology itself , 53 The kerygma began at
Easter. So, when he wrote his Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting,
he included the proclamation of Jesus under the heading of 'Judaism' . 54 A sen-
48. In an influential conclusion to his Einleitung, Wellhausen had already made the
point: 'We cannot get back to him, even if we wanted to' (115).
49. 'Docetism' (from dokeö, 'seem') describes the belief evident towards the end of the
first century (cf. 1 John 4.1-3; 2 John 7) and strongly held in Gnostic circles that Jesus' humanity
and sufferings were apparent ('seeming') rather than real.
50. E. Käsemann, 'The Problem of the Historical Jesus' (1954), Essays on New Testament
Themes (London: SCM, 1964) 15-47 (here 25, 31-34, 46; quotation from 33).
51. G. Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (1956; ET London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960)
22-26; Robinson, New Quest ch. 4 (particularly 85-92). 'Kerygma without narrative is sheer
church assertion; narrative without witness is ambiguity and offense' (Keck, Future 134).
52. Perrin, Rediscovering 231, 244.
53. R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament vol. 1 (1948; ET London: SCM/New
York: Scribner, 1952) 3.
54. (ET London: Thames and Hudson, 1956) 71-79.
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