Book Review: James Dunn's A New Perspective on Jesus

This short book presents a number of presentations that Dunn gave while he was working on his much longer tome, Jesus Remembered. The longer book is Dunn's answer to the historical Jesus question and the first in a projected series called Christianity in the Making.

In the first chapter of A New Perspective on Jesus, Dunn talks about the impact Jesus would have made on all those in the environs where he talked and did things. Here I would translate his argument as follows:

1. It seems implausible to say that the impact of Jesus would have continued post-resurrection if he had not made an impact on those around him pre-resurrection.

2. He would have made such an impact each time he spoke or did something. In an oral world where there were no blogs, electricity, or TVs, people would have gathered in the evening to tell stories. Jesus would have likely featured regularly.

3. Thus it seems inappropriate to divide sharply the "Christ of faith" after the resurrection from the "Jesus of history" before the resurrection. Jesus must have created a kind of faith in those around him while he walked the earth or else it wouldn't have continued afterward.

Item of note: One of the most interesting comments to me Dunn makes in this chapter is that we should not be surprised that the "Q" material has a Galilean character without any clear passion material. After all, if much of it came from Jesus, it would come from Galilee before the passion. This is an item worth further discussion.

In the second chapter, Dunn dives into the oral nature of ancient culture in contrast to the literary paradigm with which most of us operate. He points out that by most estimates more than 90% of those in Palestine would have been illiterate.

However, we should not assume that this means they did not know the biblical texts or that they were prone to mess stories up, as if in that kind of world things have to be written down to be remembered.

In particular, stories belong to communities and they are retold in groups of related stories. There are individuals with particular story telling gifts to whom communities turn to tell their stories. Story telling involved a certain flexibility within a certain fixity. Thus we should not be surprised that the gospels often differ on details while holding certain cores to stories relatively fixed.

No account of the gospel material is adequate that does not take oral tradition into account. This does not lead Dunn to abandon Markan priority or the idea of some sort of written "Q" source, but orality is a required component.

Item of note: One of the most interesting things Dunn suggests in this chapter is that it is hard to speak of an "original version" of oral tradition. I would add "unless that which survived post-resurrection only emerged from one oral witness." But Dunn is correct, numerous "original" oral traditions would have arisen the first night after Jesus said something, and Jesus would likely have said similar things over and over again (so also Werner Kelber).

In the third chapter, Dunn presents his ideas on the historical Jesus. In this chapter he argues that we should look for the characteristic Jesus, rather than asking whether Jesus said this particular saying or did this particular event. So we ask what kinds of sayings and events Jesus must surely have said given the impact that reverberates in our sources about him (not a completely new idea, admittedly, see A. E. Harvey's Jesus and the Constraints of History and E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism for similar results from slightly different approaches).

Dunn creates such a list:

1. Basic Jewish concerns (Jesus came to Jews and would have echoed their concerns)

2. mission in Galilee (Jesus' activities must have been in Galilee)

3. preaching of the kingdom (Jesus must have talked mostly about the coming of the kingdom of God. Dunn believes he must have spoken both of it as coming and present in him.)

4. son of man/Son of Man (Jesus must both have referred to himself as the son of man and preached the return of the Son of Man)

5. Exorcist/healer (Jesus must have cast out demons and healed people)

6. Aphoristic wisdom (Jesus must have spoken a good deal of pithy wisdom, short wise sayings)

7. Amen (Jesus must have used Amen of his own words--quite authoritative)

8. John the Baptist (Jesus must have connected his ministry with that of John the Baptist in some way)

9. This generation (Jesus must have faced some rejection in the course of his earthly ministry)

Appendix
The appendix is another lecture, although related to the ones he gave as the bulk of the book. It was given as the presidential address of the 2002 Society of New Testament Studies meeting in Durham, England.

It largely covers the same ground as his other lectures, but here he goes into more exegetical detail in comparing specific passages from the gospels. After rehearsing why virtually all scholars believe there is a literary relationship between the gospels (the precision of verbal agreement at points), he shows that many passages show exactly what we would expect of oral agreement.

In particular, we find what Kenneth Bailey calls "informal, controlled tradition." That is, we find differences on insignificant matters of detail (precise wording, precise scenario, like whether he was going into or out of Jericho). But we find basic agreement on something like the fact that there was the healing of a blind man. And we often find a core of a story that is almost verbatim the same from one version to the next.

Perhaps the most insightful thing to me Dunn says in this last part is that even presuming that Matthew and Luke were using Mark and Q as sources, their renditions of them would often have taken the character of "oral re-presentations." In other words, the wording and form of the story might shift in its details even though they were following a written source.

The long and the short of it is that it becomes nearly impossible to define the limits of Q for we don't know when we are getting an oral re-presentation of a written source or common oral tradition. It becomes more difficult also to speak of precise redactional intention on the part of Matthew and Luke because they may simply be following a different oral version.

A nice little read.

By the way, you can see how absurd a strict, "Chicago Statement" understanding of inerrancy is on close examination (the kind that drives you to try to harmonize details of the gospels together). "The rules" of ancient oral tradition re-presented things in the retelling. That was the name of the game. It would be seriously anachronistic to call such things "errors." To think the goal is to get as precisely historical as possible is a textbook case of cultural myopia in biblical studies.