I am grateful to the committee and members of the Society for their permission for this pending publication. In the first place, of course, the letters are not of the nature of kerygma. He died according to the Scriptures, to deliver us from the present evil age.
This is the only passage in Acts i-iv that speaks of Christ's second coming. We can continue by comparing the two versions of the kerygma, in Paul and in the Acts of the Apostles. This applies to the consequences of the kerygma as we have it in the Acts of the Apostles.
And we are witnesses of all that He did in the land of the Jews and Jerusalem. It is clearly of the same substance as the kerygma in the early chapters of Acts. Paul must therefore have had the opportunity to relate the work of the Baptist to the Christian faith.
This conviction continues as fundamental to the Christian faith through all the changes throughout the New Testament.
The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments by C
Dodd
Chapter Two: The Gospels
These two documents clearly illustrate the character of the reconstructed eschatology of the early Church. It undoubtedly influenced the tradition of Jesus' teaching in the Synoptic Gospels.1. The First Gospel is most profoundly affected by it, but none of the three is completely exempt from it.
To raise a fantastic expectation that He will come in the thirties of the twentieth century is not primitive Christianity, whatever it may be. We have already seen that Paul's preaching was centered in the proclamation of the facts of the death and resurrection of Christ. The overthrow of the "kingdom of the enemy" is in eschatological tradition the coming of the.
For a more thorough assessment of Jesus' life in eschatological terms, we must turn to the Synoptic Gospels and, in the first instance, to Mark. The passion story itself takes up a disproportionately large part of the Gospel, almost exactly one fifth of the whole. He frees people from the obligations of law and tradition and declares.
However, we discern in Matthew and Luke some departure from the original view and emphasis of the kerygma. It is to some extent a rationalized and humanitarian rendering of the Gospel, designed to appeal to the average feeling man. It is surely clear that the fourfold Gospel taken as a whole is an expression of the original.
I have not considered here the question of the historical value of the Gospels as a record of facts. We must not think of the record in the Gospels as the ultimate raw material from which the Sermon is composed. The kerygma is primary, and it acted as a preservative of the tradition that transmitted the facts.
The closer we are in the Gospels to the subject of the kerygma, the closer we are to the source of tradition. Dodd is recognized as one of the greatest New Testament scholars of the twentieth century.
Chapter Three: Paul and John
To understand this, we need to pay some attention to the background of the idea. In the Book of Daniel, the ideal Israel appears as "the people of the saints of the Most High." In prophecy, the promise of the future was associated with the knowledge or vision of God.
When Jeremiah speaks of the new covenant, by which the true Israel of the future shall be. The knowledge of God that the evangelist speaks of is a function of the Christian community. It springs directly from the primitive Christian valuation of the facts of history and experience as.
The cleansing of the Temple foreshadows the new Temple, which is the Body of Christ (ii. 21). In the healings at Cana and Bethesda Christ gives life, as in the healing of the blind at Siloam He gives light. That the bread is Himself corresponds to the Church's experience of enjoying the presence of the Lord in the "communion of the Holy Spirit" which constituted the new life.
In this discourse, as we have seen, the prediction of the second coming of Christ is interpreted in the sense of His presence in the Church through His Spirit. Finally, the resurrection is recorded, as in the other Gospels, and in accordance with the form of the kerygma. The work of Paul and John represents the most significant and far-reaching developments of apostolic preaching in the New Testament.
At the same time, the kerygma exerted a controlling influence on the design of the liturgy. With these results in mind we can now do greater justice to the rich diversity of the central gospel which is expressed throughout. Indeed, it is clear that the primitive formulation of the gospel in eschatological terms is as.
Some similar process is clearly required of the preachers of the Gospel in our time. The real problem for the student of the New Testament is not whether this or that incident in the.
