Dunn's Partings Baur to Sanders

I'm skimming back through the revised edition of James D. G. Dunn's The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity. The preface to the second edition, as you would expect, catches up on developments these fifteen plus years since the first edition.

Dunn's main acknowledgements in this section relate to the work of individuals like Judith Lieu's Neither Jew Nor Greek, Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines, and the compilation, Ways That Never Parted. These are books on my shelf that, unfortunately, I've only dabbled in thus far.

But the basic thrust of these books is clear. It is anachronistic to speak of a hard and fast departure between Judaism and Christianity before the late 300's. Boyarin speaks of a partitioning rather than parting of the ways, by which he means that there were no hard and fast lines of orthodoxy at that time to decide exactly what was in and what was out.

Another good insight is that the term Judaism at the time of Christ did not refer to all Jews but to those who were particularly keen to follow the Law in the manner of the Maccabees. Similarly, Dunn wonders if Ignatius' Christianity might have been a similar subset of Christianity at the time.

But alas, this post was supposed to review Dunn's first chapter. Not much startling here. It is largely a review of the missteps of the last 100 years on the relation between Judaism and Christianity.

F. C. Baur: Baur of course famously applied an evolutionary model to early Christian history and the New Testament. Jesus represented some Hegelian ideal that was immediately corrupted by Jewish Christianity. Pauline Christianity came along with a purer antithesis, only to be corrupted again in the Catholic synthesis.

J. B. Lightfoot rightly trashed Baur's chronology by establishing the authenticity of seven of Ignatius' letters. In order for Baur's evolutionary scheme to work, he had to date them to the late second century. But interestingly, Lightfoot really only shifted the chronology earlier. His scheme was just as skewed in its perspective toward early Jewish Christianity as inferior to Paul and his supposed Jesus.

A. Ritschl added a middle ground between supposed Gentile Christianity and the Primitive Jewish church, namely, Hellenistic Christianity. This was the church of Stephen and the Hellenists.

But all of these had as their implicit agenda the distancing of Jesus and Pauline Christianity from Judaism. And the attitudes of so many German scholars went hand in glove with Nazi attitudes toward the Jews some forty years later.

Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer accepted the apocalyptic aspects of Jesus, but found his essence in his ethic. Rudolph Bultmann spent a mere 30 pages on Jesus in his 600+ page Theology of the New Testament, finding the essence of the gospel an existentialist message about authentic existence.

Dunn ends this chapter with what was in 1991 the maturing turn to Judaism as the background of the New Testament and Jesus. The third quest for the historical Jew was nearing its peak, with its emphasis on Jesus as a Jew. It left us wondering how a century's worth of such exploration had missed such a basic point.

The new perspective on Paul with its renewed understanding of Judaism was going strong and its detractors had not yet mustered their voice. It made us wonder how for so long Christians had misrepresented Judaism.

At the same time Jacob Neusner had brought sanity to the use of rabbinic material in the study of Judaism at the time of Christ. Once again, we wonder how Joachim Jeremias could miss so many obvious conclusions, seriously calling into question Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus.

More to come...