Did Jesus Actually Preach the Gospel?

It is a fact that among many scholars of earliest Christianity believe Jesus preached the kingdom of God, in and around Capernaum especially, and it was the earliest church that preached Jesus. Mark, which most take as the earliest of the Gospels, opens with this: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” and some of the best early manuscripts append “Son of God” after “Jesus Christ” – but, to be fair, it was tendency of early manuscripts to expand the text. So, Son of God gets only a C rating in the UBS commentary. That doesn’t matter for this Substack today.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

The issue is whether we should translate “the gospel of Jesus Christ” as “the gospel preached by Jesus Christ” or “the gospel about Jesus Christ.” That is, a subjective or an objective genitive. This leads me to an essay in C. Kavin Rowe collected essays in Method, Context, and Meaning in New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2024). Chapter two, “The Kerygma of the Earliest Church,” takes on board a discussion of the importance of Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament, in which he has an essay on the kerygma of the early church. Two very bold and discipline-shaping conclusions drop out of Bultmann’s mailbox onto the lecture table, and these quotations are Bultmann’s as presented by Rowe. (In what follows I will put Rowe in parentheses when I quote his own words.) First, that “the message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.” Second, and this one is longer: “Christian faith did not exist until there was a Christian kerygma; i.e., a kerygma proclaiming Jesus Christ – specifically Jesus Christ the Crucified and Risen One – to be God's eschatological act of salvation. He was first so proclaimed in the kerygma of the earliest Church, not in the message of the historical Jesus … Thus, theological thinking – the theology of the New Testament – begins with the kerygma of the earliest Church and not before.”

The fundamental shift occurs when the Proclaimer (Jesus) became the Proclaimed (Jesus the Messiah). That is, quoting Bultmann, when “he who formerly had been the bearer of the message was drawn into it and became its essential content.” Instead, Jesus preached the “radical demand of God.” The church shifted the content from kingdom to Jesus.

The heart of this chapter by Rowe sketches the four options Bultmann rejected as ways to conceive of Jesus. (1) The early church did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah during his earthly life; (2) one cannot explain the early Christian shift as a result of Jesus's powerful preaching or prophetic ministries; (3) It was not Jesus great personality that led to Jesus becoming the one who was proclaimed. Thus, Rowe’s summary: “Jesus's gravitas, his charisma, his ability to call disciples to himself – none of this explains the move from Proclaimer to Proclaimed” (Rowe). And (4) the shift did not occur because the church suddenly grappled with the significance of jesus's role in history.

So how did this shift occur? Rowe puts it this way: “By means of its self-understanding as the eschatological congregation, the earliest church implicitly commented upon the significance of Jesus's life: it was the eschatological occurrence” (Rowe). That is, eschatological existence for the earliest church led to eschatological perception of Jesus himself. The practices of baptism, common meals, speaking prophecies and in tongues, reading scripture, and mission prompted the shift. And for Bultmann, “eschatological means a community that is living under the expectation of an imminent end and with a substantively different sense of time than that of the normal, everyday running of the world.”

At the heart of how different scholars have perceived this shift is the radical difference between the first three Gospels and the fourth Gospel along with the apostolic writers, especially Paul and John. The Synoptics, it is argued, reveal a different mindset: about God, about kingdom. The apostles: about Jesus.

Rowe goes on to note some weaknesses in Bultmann, but I thought it would be worthwhile here to weigh in with some other considerations.

One cannot talk about the earliest Christian kerygma in the terms of Bultmann and be done with it. Famously, C.H. Dodd, in his famous lectures published as The Apostolic Preaching, saw Paul’s gospel in seven major themes: the prophecies are fulfilled with the new age inaugurated, Jesus was born of the seed of David, Jesus died according to the scriptures to deliver us, Jesus was buried, Jesus rose on the third day, Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God, and Jesus will come again as judge and savior. What struck Dodd was the similarity between Paul's gospel and the gospel of the earliest church in Jerusalem, as seen in the sermons in Acts 2-4. And this is what the author of Acts meant by preaching the kingdom of God.

I want to add to this a brand new monograph by Morten Høning Jensen (The ‘Gospel’ in the Gospel of Mark), who examines the “gospel” according to the Gospel of Mark. His conclusion is this: a gospel is an epoch-making proclamation of a kingly victory (often on the battlefield) that leads to cultic renewal and celebration. When it comes to Mark’s Jesus-version of an epoch0-making proclamation, he concludes “to Mark, the story of Jesus is euaggelion – and to be precise: to euaggelion – since Jesus, through his life, death, and resurrection, re-establishes covenantal community with and proximity to God through kingly victory and temple-cultic renewal.”

Finally, I am for one not persuaded that we can erase self-proclamation by Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. I have a section about this The King Jesus Gospel. There is a lot of self-reflection in those Gospels. The dialectic of Bultmann between the Proclaimer and the Proclaimed or between the Synoptics and John/Paul, or between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, while there are tensions is not as wide or deep as has often been stated. Which means, if the gospel is a message about the Proclaimed One, and that is Jesus, then there is evidence Jesus initiated the sermon outlines himself.