C.S. Lewis, in response to a comment made by Rudolf Bultmann about the personality of Jesus having no impact on the preaching of the church, said the following:

“So there is no personality of Our Lord presented in the New Testament. Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see? What evidence have we that he would recognize a personality if it were there? For it is Bultmann contra mundum [against the world]. If anything whatever is common to all believers, and even to many unbelievers, it is the sense that in the Gospels they have met a personality. There are characters whom we know to be historical but of whom we do not feel that we have any personal knowledge–knowledge by acquaintance; such are Alexander, Attila, or William of Orange. There are others who make no claim to historical reality but whom, none the less, we know as we know real people: Falstaff, Uncle Toby, Mr Pickwick. But there are only three characters who, claiming the first sort of reality, also actually have the second. And surely everyone knows who they are: Plato’s Socrates, the Jesus of the Gospels, and Boswell’s Johnson. Our acquaintance with them shows itself in a dozen ways. When we look into the Apocryphal gospels we find ourselves constantly saying of this or that logion [saying], ‘No. It’s a fine saying, but not His. That wasn’t how He talked.’–just as we do with all pseudo-Johnsoniana. We are not in the least perturbed by the contrasts within each character… in Jesus of peasant shrewdness, intolerable severity, and irresistible tenderness. So strong is the flavour of the personality that, even while He says things which, on any other assumption than that of Divine Incarnation in the fullest sense, would be appallingly arrogant, yet we–and many unbelievers too–accept Him at His own valuation when He says ‘I am meek and lowly of heart.’ “ (“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” Christian Reflections, 156-7)

When we encounter Jesus in the Gospels, the overwhelming impression that Jesus gives is that of personality. Here we are meeting a person who leaps off the page at us in His reality, whether through His striking actions, His striking claims, or His striking teaching. In fact, so strong is this personality that it has shaped the thoughts, actions, goals, and ultimate purposes for millions of people over the past two millennia. To speak of a ‘Christianity’ that is somehow separated or divided from the personality of Jesus is therefore patent absurdity. To speak of a Gnostic Christianity which derives its identity from various so-called gospels is also ridiculous. The man in the pages of those books is not the same man, and anyone who says otherwise is apparently wearing blinders of Bultmannian proportion. There is no such thing as Christianity without the Jesus of the Four Gospels. There cannot be, and has never been, any such thing whatsoever. In this, our greatest strength is always our greatest asset, and therefore whether in mission, in devotion, or in Church life, all our work must be to drive people to encounter and deal with the person of Jesus Christ. Not a theology. Not a set of propositions. Not an abstraction. But only a person. Nothing else truly matters.