[160] He is not in the files; there are birth registers of ALL of them who lived then, but he didn’t exist there. Now what then?* Now in this concreteness, you must sometimes be able to imagine the question. You can also do it in a more modern American way, without police, namely imagine that there was a time Time [Magazine] reporter, and he couldn’t discover it! Now if you ask such questions, you see what I mean with "historical research." We must STAND such possibilities, even if they are infinitely small in comparison with all probabilities, even from the point of view of historical research. But if we never face the extreme possibilities, we never face what is NOT extreme, in its true character. Boundary situations have the great advantage that they reveal what is WITHIN the boundaries. But if you never GO to the boundaries and ask the question, you will never be able to find out what is within the boundaries, what its real character is, because you can find that out ONLY if you trespass the boundary line. I don’t know whether I said that in this or the other class, but I will repeat it: Heidegger^a has made one very great statement, namely that if man were not able to run ahead to his death and to trespass, in his imagination, the boundary line of his life, he wouldn’t know what his life is all about, he wouldn’t be what HE IS, a centered, united person which looks ahead in the future and back into the past. In the same sense, I have tried --------------------------------------- *In the discussion period after a lecture at the Philosophy Club of Boston University, Dr. Tillich replied to a similar question, concerning the absence of the name of Jesus in archaeological records: "Then the Man had another name!" —implying that there MUST have been a flesh-and-blood personality behind the Christian movement, but whether or not "Jesus" was His name does not validate or invalidate the truth of faith. - Ed.