Chapter 9

The Kerygma: The Core Gospel Message

The preceding sections have established that Luke-Acts and Paul’s epistles constitute the foundational written authorities of apostolic Christianity. Beneath these written authorities lies a further stratum, prior to every text and presupposed by every text: the Kerygma itself. The Greek word kērygma means “herald’s announcement” and refers to the substance of early Christian preaching before it was committed to writing. It is the core apostolic proclamation that existed before any text was written, the message that constituted the earliest Christian communities and that all subsequent written authorities presuppose.

Kerygma Usage and Background

The Greek noun kērygma belongs to a tight word-family built on the figure of the herald. The kēryx was a public official in Greek civic life, an authorized mouthpiece who stood in the marketplace or assembly and delivered official announcements on behalf of a king, magistrate, or governing body. The verbal form kēryssō means “to herald” or “to proclaim publicly.” The noun kērygma denotes the content of the herald’s announcement: not the act of proclaiming but the substance of what is proclaimed. The herald did not speak on his own authority. He spoke for someone, and his message was not a philosophical argument to be debated but an authoritative declaration to be received: a new law, a summons to war, the terms of a peace treaty, the accession of a king.

This civic background shapes every New Testament use of the word-family. When the apostles proclaimed, they were functioning as heralds, authorized agents delivering an announcement on behalf of God. The authority of the message resided not in the eloquence of the speaker but in the one who sent him. Paul makes this explicit in 1 Corinthians 2:1–5, where he insists that his proclamation did not rest on rhetorical skill but on the power of God.

The noun kērygma appears approximately eight to nine times in the New Testament, depending on textual variants, and a consistent profile emerges across these occurrences. In 1 Corinthians 1:21, the kerygma is set in direct contrast to sophia (“wisdom”): it is an announcement of an event, not a sophisticated argument. In 1 Corinthians 15:14, Paul ties the validity of the entire kerygma to a single claim, the resurrection of Jesus, declaring that if Christ has not been raised, the kerygma is kenon, “empty,” not merely incorrect but vacuous. In Romans 16:25, “my gospel” and “the kerygma of Jesus Christ” function as near-synonyms, suggesting that the kerygma is the core of what Paul means by “gospel.” In Titus 1:3, the kerygma is presented as a trust, something deposited with Paul for safekeeping and faithful transmission, language that anticipates the parathēkē (“deposit”) terminology of the Pastoral Epistles.

A functional distinction also emerges within the New Testament between kērygma (“proclamation”) and didachē (“teaching”). The kerygma is the initial, public, missionary announcement addressed to those who have not yet heard: God has raised Jesus from the dead; repent and be baptized. The didachē is the ethical instruction, liturgical practice, and theological elaboration addressed to those who have already responded. The kerygma creates the community; the didachē sustains it. Paul’s letters are almost entirely didachē. They presuppose the kerygma and work out its implications for communities that have already believed. The kerygma itself must be inferred from hints, allusions, and occasional summaries embedded within the didactic material. This distinction should not be pressed too rigidly, as the categories overlap in practice, but as an analytical starting point it remains valuable. There is a real difference between the initial announcement and the subsequent instruction, and recovering the former is the task that C. H. Dodd set for himself.

The Kerygma existed as oral proclamation for a substantial period before any part of the New Testament was written. The earliest Pauline letter, 1 Thessalonians, dates to approximately 50 AD, roughly two decades after the resurrection. Luke, on the priority reconstruction developed in the preceding sections, was composed in the mid-to-late first century, three to four decades after the events it records. During the intervening years, the apostolic message was transmitted almost entirely by speech: at baptism, at the eucharist, in catechesis, in public preaching, and in the daily instruction of new believers in Jewish, Greek, and Roman settings. Literacy levels in the first-century Mediterranean world were low, estimated at roughly ten to fifteen percent of the adult population, and most members of the earliest Christian communities encountered the gospel as something they heard rather than something they read.¹ Even after written documents began to circulate, Papias in the early second century still preferred what he called “the living and abiding voice” of oral apostolic testimony to books.² The Kerygma was therefore not merely pre-canonical but pre-textual in the fullest sense: a proclamation whose authority, content, and community-forming power were established in oral form and transmitted orally for decades before any written text gave it durable shape.

The Pre-Pauline Formulae in Paul’s Letters

The case for a pre-literary Kerygma rests finally on the textual evidence Paul himself provides. What remains to be established is whether this pre-literary proclamation is actually visible within Paul’s letters, and whether Paul was consciously transmitting tradition he had received rather than composing material of his own. Paul’s letters contain embedded formulaic fragments that answer both questions affirmatively. These fragments bear distinctive markers of received tradition: rhythmic structure, non-Pauline vocabulary, Semitic syntax, and explicit reception language. They open a window onto the pre-Pauline stratum of Christian proclamation, testimonies to a tradition that Paul inherited rather than invented.

The most compelling evidence for this pre-textual tradition comes from Paul’s own explicit citation markers and from observable stylistic discontinuities within his letters where he quotes received material. The technical vocabulary Paul employs in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is deliberate and unmistakable:

“Now I make known to you, brothers, the gospel which I preached to you, which you also received, in which you also stand, 2 Through which also you are being saved, by what word I preached to you, if you hold fast, unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” (1 Cor 15:1-5, AICNT)

The Greek verbs parelabon (“I received”) and paredōka (“I delivered” or “I transmitted”) are the standard Jewish terminology for the handing on of authoritative tradition, the same vocabulary used in rabbinic literature for transmitting halakha (the collective body of Jewish religious law derived from the Torah). Paul is explicitly flagging that this formulation pre-exists his own authorship.³ The content was received, almost certainly from the Jerusalem apostles during the visit to Peter described in Galatians 1:18, roughly three to five years after the crucifixion. This places the crystallized formula within living memory of the events themselves.

Romans 1:3-4 contains a further pre-Pauline fragment, widely recognized by its non-Pauline vocabulary: “concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” The phrase “Spirit of holiness” (pneuma hagiōsynēs) is a Semitic construction not found elsewhere in Paul, and the two-stage structure of the formula (Davidic descent and resurrection exaltation) reflects an early Christological framework that Paul embeds within his own broader theological framework in the surrounding verses.⁴ Additional formulaic fragments include the Lord’s Supper institution narrative in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25, which again employs the parelabon/paredōka formula; the compressed missionary summary of 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, with its focus on turning from idols and waiting for the resurrected Son from heaven; and the rhythmically structured confessional statement of Romans 10:9. Each of these exhibits markers (rhythmic structure, Semitic syntax, non-Pauline vocabulary, and explicit reception language) that signal Paul is drawing on a tradition that pre-exists his letters.⁵

Philippians 2:6-11, also widely regarded as a pre-Pauline hymnic fragment Paul is incorporating rather than composing, likewise coheres with the primitive kerygmatic stratum. Its structure of humiliation followed by divine exaltation reflects what James Dunn and others identify as an Adam Christology: Jesus as the new Adam who refused the grasping that Adam chose, and whom God therefore vindicated and exalted.⁶ On this reading, the hymn belongs to the same early resurrection-and-exaltation framework as the other pre-Pauline formulae rather than to the later theological elaborations of his nature.

The earliest recoverable layer of apostolic proclamation, embedded in Paul’s explicit citations of received tradition, is consistently centered on the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus, structured around God’s act of raising and vindicating the messianic Son of David, and focused on what God accomplished through Jesus rather than on later theological speculations. It is this kerygmatic core, attested in both the speeches of Acts and the pre-Pauline formulae of Paul’s letters, that constitutes the most primitive stratum of apostolic Christianity available to historical inquiry.

Several conclusions of consequence follow from this evidence. First, the oral tradition was geographically distributed before any text. Communities in Thessalonica, Corinth, Philippi, Galatia, and Rome had received the apostolic Kerygma before receiving a single written document. Second, Paul’s letters are themselves witnesses to the tradition rather than the tradition itself. When Paul cites or alludes to pre-Pauline formulae, the letters become transparent to something older, an oral Christological and kerygmatic deposit that predates even the earliest manuscript witnesses by at least a decade, possibly two. Third, the pre-Pauline formulae surveyed here converge with the kerygmatic speeches in Acts on a common set of themes and structures.

Dodd’s Reconstruction of the Apostolic Kerygma

In 1936, C. H. Dodd published The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments,⁷ a slim volume based on three lectures delivered at King’s College London the previous year, which set out to answer a single question: “How far is it possible to discover the actual content of the Gospel preached or proclaimed by the apostles?” The question was pointed. German form criticism (the scholarly method of analyzing the oral traditions behind written texts), led by Bultmann, had been treating the Gospel material as community creations, shaped by the liturgical and pastoral needs of early churches rather than by historical memory. Dodd did not contest the form critics’ literary analysis, but he asked a different question. Rather than dissecting the Gospels into community creations, he asked what the message was that created those communities in the first place. Before there were churches to shape tradition, there was a proclamation that brought those churches into existence. What was it?

Dodd began with Paul, not the Gospels or Acts, because Paul’s letters are the earliest datable Christian documents. His method was to sift through the epistles for places where Paul refers back to what he originally preached, or cites formulaic material that crystallizes the kerygmatic content. The key passage is 1 Corinthians 15:1–11, where Paul uses the tradition-transmission vocabulary discussed above. Paul dates this tradition early, to the Jerusalem visit of Galatians 1:18 discussed above.

Dodd was careful to note that Paul’s epistles are not themselves kerygma. They are didachē, instruction for people who have already believed. They presuppose the kerygma and expound its implications rather than proclaim it. But the Kerygma can be inferred from the epistles, because Paul occasionally gestures back to what he preached when founding his churches. From Paul, Dodd extracted a kerygmatic core: the death and resurrection of Christ, set within an eschatological framework (the transition from “this evil age” to “the age to come”) and accompanied by scriptural attestation (“according to the scriptures”).

Dodd then turned to the speeches in Acts, particularly those attributed to Peter (Acts 2:14–39; 3:12–26; 4:8–12; 5:29–32; 10:34–43) and to Paul (Acts 13:16–41), to test whether the Kerygma extracted from the Pauline epistles matched the Kerygma depicted in early Christian preaching. He recognized the methodological difficulty: Luke, like all ancient historians, composed speeches with a degree of literary freedom. The speeches in Acts are not transcripts. But Dodd argued that they preserve genuinely primitive material. The Acts speeches contain archaic christological terminology that was already falling out of use by the time Luke wrote: Jesus as God’s “Servant” (Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27, 30), “the Holy and Righteous One” (Acts 3:14), and “the Author of Life” (Acts 3:15). These are not Lukan creations; they are fossils from an earlier stratum. The speeches also present Jesus’ messianic status as conferred by God at the resurrection (“God has made him both Lord and Christ,” Acts 2:36), an exaltation Christology more primitive than the Pauline and Johannine Christologies that presuppose Jesus’ lordship from the outset. Luke would hardly have invented a Christology more primitive than his own theology if he were simply composing freely.

From the convergence of Paul and Acts, Dodd reconstructed the apostolic Kerygma as containing six essential elements: (1) the age of fulfillment has dawned, and the latter days foretold by the prophets have arrived; (2) this fulfillment has taken place through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus; (3) by virtue of the resurrection, Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of God as messianic head of the new Israel; (4) the Holy Spirit in the Church is the sign of Christ’s present power and glory; (5) the messianic age will shortly reach its consummation in the return of Christ; and (6) an appeal is made for repentance, with the offer of forgiveness and the gift of the Holy Spirit.⁸ This reconstruction has been rightly called one of the most influential contributions to twentieth-century New Testament scholarship.

The Convergence of Paul and Luke-Acts

At its heart, Dodd’s project was an argument for the fundamental unity of the apostolic proclamation. He was not naive about diversity. He acknowledged that different preachers emphasized different elements and that the Kerygma developed over time. But he insisted that beneath the variations lay a common message, and he identified this common message by demonstrating the structural convergence between Paul’s epistles and the Acts speeches.

When the Pauline Kerygma is set beside the Kerygma of the Acts speeches, the convergence is striking. Both proclaim the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy: Paul insists that Christ died and was raised “according to the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3–4), while the Acts speeches are saturated with scriptural citation, drawing on Psalm 16, Psalm 110, and Psalm 118. Both present the death of Jesus as part of God’s determined plan: Paul proclaims that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3), while Peter in Acts declares that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). The resurrection is the absolute center of both: Paul declares that “he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor 15:4), and Peter announces that “this Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:32). Both proclaim the exaltation of Jesus to God’s right hand, both citing or alluding to Psalm 110:1. Both understand the gift of the Holy Spirit as eschatological evidence, proof that the new age has dawned. And both terminate in a demand: Paul implores, “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20); Peter commands, “Repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38).

The differences between Paul and Acts have been catalogued many times, and some scholars have argued that the differences constitute separate or even incompatible proclamations. A closer examination, however, suggests that the differences are largely matters of emphasis and audience rather than substance. The Acts speeches use the older title “Servant of God” rather than Paul’s preferred “Son of God,” but both titles identify Jesus as God’s uniquely authorized agent, and the shift from “Servant” to “Son” reflects a development in vocabulary as the church moved from a primarily Jewish to an increasingly Gentile audience. Paul develops a detailed theology of Christ’s death as vicarious sacrifice, while the Acts speeches present the death as part of God’s predetermined plan without explicitly interpreting it as substitutionary atonement. But Paul himself received the tradition that “Christ died for our sins” from the Jerusalem church (1 Cor 15:3); the sacrificial interpretation is pre-Pauline, not a Pauline invention, and the Acts speeches simply do not always foreground it. The Cornelius speech (Acts 10:34–43) includes a summary of Jesus’ public career, while Paul’s epistolary Kerygma jumps from Davidic descent directly to the cross and resurrection. But Peter was preaching to people who needed to know who this Jesus was, a concrete figure who had recently lived and acted in Galilee and Judea, while Paul was writing to people who already knew the basic narrative or did not need the biographical detail to grasp the kerygmatic point. As Dodd observed, the Cornelius speech represents the full kerygmatic narrative, of which Paul’s cross-and-resurrection summary is a concentrated extract. The relationship is an abbreviation, not a contradiction.

The strongest argument for the unity of the apostolic Kerygma is Paul’s own insistence on it. In 1 Corinthians 15:3, he claims to be transmitting a tradition he was given, not creating a new one. In Galatians 2:1–2, 9, he submits his gospel to the “pillar” apostles in Jerusalem, and they add nothing to it. They extend fellowship, which is not the behavior of people who regard Paul’s message as a different gospel. It is the mutual recognition of a shared Kerygma.

Paul himself removes all ambiguity. After rehearsing the tradition he received about Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, and appearances, he declares: “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed” (1 Cor 15:11). The “they” refers to the Jerusalem apostles named in the preceding verses: Peter, James, and the Twelve. Paul is claiming, explicitly and without qualification, that his Kerygma and theirs are the same. This is not a theological inference drawn by later scholars; it is a first-person assertion by the earliest Christian author, writing within twenty-five years of the crucifixion, that the apostolic proclamation was unified from the beginning.

Dodd’s conclusion follows naturally: “Anyone who should maintain that the primitive Christian Gospel was fundamentally different from that which we have found in Paul must bear the burden of proof.” The convergence of Paul’s letters, the Acts speeches, and Paul’s own testimony to kerygmatic unity places the weight of evidence squarely on the side of a common apostolic proclamation.

This convergence between the Kerygma of Paul’s letters and the Kerygma of the Acts speeches is one of the strongest arguments for the historical grounding of the Luke-Acts and Pauline witness. It also illuminates the logic of the present collection. The Core New Testament centers on Luke-Acts and Paul’s epistles not merely because these are the earliest and most historically reliable written witnesses, but because these two bodies of literature independently preserve and attest the same underlying proclamation, the Kerygma that predates them both.⁹

The Regula Fidei and the Primitive Kerygma

The second- and third-century regula fidei (rule of faith) articulated by church fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen provides external corroboration for the primacy of the Kerygma. That a normative summary of apostolic teaching was transmitted orally and catechetically, and recognized as authoritative prior to the finalized New Testament canon, attests that the early church treated a received proclamation as foundational before any fixed collection of written texts had been settled. Irenaeus appeals to this rule as received “from the apostles and their disciples” and treats it as the interpretive norm by which Scripture itself must be read.¹⁰ Tertullian invokes it as the criterion of orthodoxy.¹¹ The distinction drawn in modern canon-formation scholarship between Scripture (texts a community receives as authoritative) and canon (the formally closed, exclusive list) helps clarify what the rule of faith attests.¹² The rule operated in the period between the apostolic proclamation and the canon’s formal closure, when the earliest apostolic writings were already received as Scripture, but the full canonical list remained unsettled. Its consistency across geographically dispersed second and third-century witnesses, in regions as distinct as Gaul, North Africa, and Alexandria, attests to its rootedness in the apostolic tradition rather than to late ecclesiastical invention. The pattern in both is consistent: a received proclamation, transmitted independently of any closed written canon, functioned as the authoritative measure of Christian belief.

Beyond its function as a summary of apostolic teaching, the rule of faith served as the interpretive standard by which Scripture itself was read. Tertullian makes this explicit in Prescription Against Heretics, where he argues that appeals to Scripture alone cannot settle disputes with heretics, since heretics quote Scripture as freely as the orthodox do. The prior question, Tertullian insists, is “With whom lies that very faith to which the Scriptures belong?”¹³ That is, within what community and under what rule the Scriptures are to be rightly interpreted. Irenaeus develops a parallel argument in Against Heresies, comparing the Scriptures to the tesserae of a mosaic: the same pieces can be rearranged by heretics to produce the image of a fox or a dog rather than a king, and only the apostolic rule discloses the true pattern.¹⁴ The rule of faith thus functioned not as an alternative to Scripture but as the received interpretive framework within which Scripture’s meaning was secured. This framework operated in practice long before the canonical list was closed.

The patristic rule of faith should not, however, be conflated with the primitive Kerygma itself. The regula fidei is an expansion of the apostolic proclamation, developed in response to specific second and third-century controversies. Against Gnosticism, which posited a lower creator-god distinct from the supreme God, the rule affirmed one God as creator of all things. Against Marcionism, which rejected the Hebrew Scriptures and severed the Christian God from the God of Israel, it affirmed the continuity of the one God across both Testaments. Against Docetism, which denied that Christ took on real human flesh or truly suffered, it affirmed the reality of the human Jesus and his genuine death. Against Modalism, which collapsed the distinctness of Father, Son, and Spirit into modes of a single person, it later articulated a more Trinitarian structure that went far beyond Kerygma. These elaborations are absent from the earliest strata. The reconstruction proposed in this study reaches behind those developments to the earliest recoverable stratum, preserved in the pre-Pauline formulae of Paul’s letters and the apostolic speeches of Acts. The patristic rule of faith thus stands as a witness that a normative proclamation preceded the canon; the present work aims to recover that proclamation in its most primitive form, rather than following the embellishments and elaborations of later traditions.

Criticisms and Their Limits

Dodd’s reconstruction has been subjected to sustained criticism on several fronts. The most common objection is that Dodd relied too heavily on the Acts speeches as historical evidence for early preaching. If the speeches are Lukan compositions, then the convergence between Paul and Acts may simply reflect Luke’s familiarity with Pauline theology rather than independent testimony to a common Kerygma. This is a genuine concern, but it is mitigated by the archaic, pre-Lukan material in the speeches documented above, at home in the earliest Palestinian community rather than in Luke’s own theology. Even if Luke shaped the speeches literarily, the parallels with Paul’s letters are too deep to be explained by surface imitation. The material may be transmitted by Luke, but it was not invented by Luke.

A related but distinct objection concerns the theological relationship between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the letters. Philipp Vielhauer’s argument that Luke’s Paul diverges from the Paul of the letters, addressed earlier at the level of historical reliability, recurs here at the level of kerygmatic convergence.¹⁵ If Vielhauer is correct, the convergence between Paul’s letters and the Acts speeches may be superficial, masking a deeper theological incompatibility. This objection, however, confuses the level at which the convergence operates. The argument of this study does not claim that Luke reproduces Paul’s theology in full. It claims that Luke and Paul independently attest the same kerygmatic core: the death and resurrection of Jesus as the fulfillment of scriptural promise, his exaltation to God’s right hand, and the call to repentance and faith. The differences Vielhauer identified belong to the sphere of theological elaboration addressed to particular audiences in particular settings, not to the substance of the initial proclamation. The kerygmatic convergence stands at a level prior to these elaborations, which is precisely why it is so durable.

Others have argued that Dodd’s six-point outline made the Kerygma look more fixed and formulaic than it actually was. But Dodd himself was less rigid than this criticism suggests. He acknowledged an immense range of variety in the interpretation given to the Kerygma across the New Testament, while insisting that the essential elements of the original Kerygma are steadily kept in view.¹⁶ He did not claim that every sermon repeated the same six points in the same order. He claimed that the six points represent the structural framework within which the early preaching operated, a framework flexible enough to accommodate different emphases and audiences but stable enough to be recognizable across the tradition.

The sharp distinction between kerygma and didachē has also been challenged on the grounds that the New Testament itself does not maintain a clean separation. This criticism has force, but it does not undo Dodd’s fundamental insight. The distinction between an initial announcement of saving events and subsequent instruction for the converted community is not artificial; it is a natural feature of any movement that expands through public proclamation. That the two categories overlap in practice does not mean they are identical in principle.

Despite these criticisms, Dodd’s contribution remains foundational. More than any other scholar of his era, Dodd demonstrated that behind the New Testament’s theological diversity lies a common proclamation: a message about what God had done in Jesus of Nazareth, rooted in Old Testament fulfillment, centered on the death and resurrection, and calling for the response of repentance and faith. This proclamation was not invented by Paul, nor was it a Lukan construction. It was the shared possession of the apostolic community from the earliest days.¹⁷