Giosuè Ghisalberti

Jesus, the Unprecedented Human Being


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is the fundamental argument to follow, and to stress Breech’s remarkable assertion as all others who provide us with an assessment of a unique human being. Jesus cannot be understood according to history. He is in his self-conception, not historical. He conceives of himself as unprecedented precisely because he is anterior to being, affirms himself as prior to all creation and therefore not determined by historical actuality – whether scriptural, or temporal. The following hermeneutic interpretation of the gospels of Jesus will attempt to radically disassociate him from any milieu; to define Jesus ethnically or philosophically (as Jewish, as a Hellenist) fails to consider him from a transcendence completely immanent – and when he utters such statements (or rather, is reported to have said such and such) the oral reports and the written documents are a testimony to the struggle of representing him. He cannot be represented; one can only approximate, from the limits of our consciousness, his self-understanding.

      We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the

      mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning

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      which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so,

      let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because

      we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation

      of the New Testament which tries to recover deeper meaning behind

      the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing – an unsatisfactory

      word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements

      If Bultmann’s project of hermeneutic de-mythologizing continues to be relevant and essential in the interpretation of the gospels, one of the tasks is the attempt to “uncover” a deeper meaning – one, for example, where any hint at “the kingdom of God” is treated with the same necessary hesitation as the thought of an ineffable divine, forcing the human imagination to extend beyond mere alternatives to history and to conceive an entirely other order of being. The gospels should consistently defy our assumptions and presuppositions; so when we invoke “the kingdom of God,” such an event and subsequent situation can in no way be compared to any human expectation – for example, of an altered political world. Such an anticipation reveals our human aspirations; and though they may be understandable, and perhaps even necessary in a world of the most atrocious violence and caused by our own excesses and fragility, to close off ourselves at the limit of our imagination negates whatever may still be possible for Jesus to reveal in the world and to transform it absolutely at the ontological level. What remains to be disclosed, and from the very place (and time) when Jesus conceives of himself – “before Abraham was, I am” – he represents the dynamic possibility of a time prior to history that has been fatally missed, hence the idea of sin as hamartia, not a flaw or a moral transgression reducible to a thought or an act, but a condition of being that has restrained itself within an imposed finitude, a determination Jesus now exposes not as some irreducible condition of the human (much less a biological or anthropological) but as the very creation from out of limited historical actuality. Jesus “overcomes” the world as he bequeaths, to us and all future generations, the work to accomplish, one that has to return, again and again, to think and reflect on the meanings of the gospels – and, for now, with four simultaneous beginnings: as the pre-creation logos, in the regeneration of baptism, and the two narratives of the virgin birth where Matthew will relate Jesus’ emergence in the world with a trauma to persist from Bethlehem to the crucifixion.

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