[167] QN: If Christianity^a is the message that Jesus of Nazareth^b is the Christ^c, why would it not destroy Christianity if it could be proven there was no Jesus? PT: ... These two questions are difficult, but point to the same reality. It is a little difficult that I have to go into theological problems which belong to the system of theology, in order to answer these questions in a lecture on religion and culture generally, but l will try to do my best because I have been asked these questions for twenty-two years without interruption [laughter], and never was able to answer them---but nobody else was able [to] either! [laughter], so we are all in the same boat. There are only two answers which are unambiguous. The one is that you accept what the Bible^d says---and that is that there is no problem except that there are some hidden problems to know what the Bible really says [laughter], but these problems I will not take too seriously at this moment--- there is certainly an assurance about innumerable facts about the life of Jesus. The other unambiguous answer is that faith ^eis a kind of belief, beliefs are always in the realm of probability, and if the existence of Jesus, or any other statement of religion, is a matter of very questionable belief, then faith also is questionable. Now these are two unambiguous answers; both, in my opinion, are either meaningless (the latter one, for instance) because then we would not have faith at all; we would have only belief. The other is dependent on the relationship of research to faith, and if you define faith as being-ultimately-concerned, then you must take historical research^f seriously. So the two unambiguous answers are very simple answers and very wrong answers, as simple answers very often are.