Concluding Remarks
Concluding Remarks
As I draw this essay to a close, I would like to remind us all that who a person is, who a person claims to be, and who others say a person is can be different. The age-old question “Who do you say that I am?” is actually preceded by the historical question, “Who did Jesus think He was, and whom did He claim to be?” There is continuity between Jesus' self-understanding, His self-presentation, and the later theologizing that was done about Jesus. They are not identical, but a historical continuum binds these things together.
The earliest disciples after Easter had been Jesus' disciples before Easter; and Easter, whatever it entailed, did not have the effect of creating massive amnesia on the part of these persons. A historian has to explain how the high Christology of the church could have arisen after the unexpected and precipitous demise of Jesus through crucifixion. This conundrum becomes more puzzling, not less, for those who don't believe in Jesus' rising from the dead than for those who do.
Martin Dibelius, the old German form critic, said that one must posit a large enough X to explain how Easter faith could have arisen after the shaming and crucifixion of Jesus. On any showing the crucifixion should have put an end to the Jesus movement once and for all in an honor and shame culture like early Judaism. The disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 were not heading for a spiritual retreat experience; they were leaving town with their tails between their legs mumbling “we had hoped [past tense] that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (v. 21). Their actions spoke as loudly as their words: they had abandoned such hope until fate, in the form of an appearance of a stranger, intervened. The X which Dibelius spoke of, which bridges the life of Jesus and the rise of Christianity, must include the fact that Jesus made some exalted claims about Himself directly and indirectly long before His disciples responded in kind. He is, as Eduard Schweizer once said, “the man who fits no formula.”2 In this regard He was as much of an enigma as the visions He related to His followers. It still takes divine intervention from above to decode the man and His mysterious self-revelation, for “no one knows the Son except the Father”—or so I'm told.3