Friday Review: Dunn's Jesus Remembered 1

From now until Easter, I plan on Fridays to work through James D. G. Dunn's Jesus Remembered, the first of three planned volumes in a series entitled Christianity in the Making. The second volume, Beginning From Jerusalem, is due out anytime. I hope to work through tht volume on Fridays throughout the summer. If you want to read through Jesus Remembered along with me, I will be trying to cover around 60 pages a week (I'm already a week behind, surprise).

Chapter 1: Christianity in the Making (1-7)
Dunn justifies a series on Christian Origins such as he has planned. He notes that it hasn't been done for some time, with the exception of Tom Wright's slowly moving series. I gave up waiting in the early 90's for new volumes of his series. Back then I was salivating in anticipation of his historical Jesus volume. Now we're waiting for Paul.

But I've long since given up salivating. You just get too dehydrated waiting. They're nice little presents when they finally come out, years after you wanted them too. But then again, I'm not as much of a groupee as I was when The New Testament and the People of God first came out.

It would be fun to read through these series with a group of classes, like I did Hermeneutical Spiral and Is Their a Meaning in this Text. Those days of delicious overloads are gone at IWU, I hate to say. But writers like Wright or Dunn are worthy of whole semesters. Of course if someone wants to set me up on a nice salary to blog continuously through series like these for the next ten years, I'm available. :-) Then again, I seem to be doing it already for free. No wonder I drive a 1997 Dodge Grand Caravan with a heater that hardly works!

Anyway, Dunn suggests three reasons at the beginning of the third millennium to work on such a series: 1) the crisis in interpretive method that has taken place, occasioned by postmodernism, 2) fresh interactions with disciplines like sociology, and 3) the glut of texts the twentieth century has dug up, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi.

The three great questions for students of Christianity's beginnings are 1) What was it about Jesus that explains the impact he had on his disciples and why he was crucified? 2) Why did the movement that followed him branch out beyond first century Judaism and in fact become unacceptable to rabbinic Judaism? 3) Was the predominantly Gentile second century Christianity stand in real continuity with its first century version?

Chapter 2: Introduction (11-16)
In this brief introduction, Dunn mentions three dimensions to discussion of the historical Jesus: faith, history, and hermeneneutics. "[T]he principal concern for the present historical study will be what might be called the hermeneutical dialogue between faith and history" (13).

Chapter 3: The (Re-)Awakening of Historical Awareness (17-24)
I was a little uneasy about this chapter. I wondered whether our typical sense of the Middle Ages as having little sense of history is really accurate. Petrarch in the 1300's is credited with the beginning of a revival of interest in the study of antiquity. The rise of textual criticism is seen as an early product.

So we have "the first hermeneutical principle which emerged from the Renaissance's 'revival of learning': historical texts have to be read first and foremost as historical texts" (19). Thus we see the rise of historical philology (the study of the meaning of words in the original language) and textual criticism (determining how the original text read).

"[N]o self-respecting student of the NT will be without a copy of the Bauer lexicon, as an earlier generation had relied on Grimm-Thayer" (20). :-)

From Renaissance he looks at the Reformation briefly. I had a little trouble getting into this chapter. Maybe it's me. In this section he speaks of the primacy on the plain meaning of Scripture and the literal sense that the Reformation emphasized.

Finally he mentions a recapturing of the humanity of Jesus in the perceptions of this period, well typified in the suffering of Jesus in some of the art of the period, such as the Isenheim altarpiece.

Chapter 4: The Flight from Dogma (25-65)
In the final chapter for today, Dunn gives a brief history of the quest for the historical Jesus from its beginnings in the Enlightenment to the present. I'm not sure why I've had such trouble getting in the mood for this chapter. There is some good stuff in it.

He starts with the rise of "scientific history" and the rise of the historical-critical method. The earliest historians thought that they could actually, objectively state "how things really were." Everybody today would acknowledge that the selection of events in itself perspectivizes the telling of history and that no historian is objective.

So Dunn notes four questionabl assumptions: that historical facts are objects to be uncovered, that the historian can be entirely impartial, that reason is a sufficient measure of what is true and false, and that the world operates like a machine.

The rest of the chapter proceeds through the usual suspects:

1. Spinoza, Reimarus, and Strauss with the exit of miracles and revelation. Reimarus says that the disciples give us the gospels, so we do not have a straightforward Jesus. Strauss considers the gospels to have mythical elements as unhistorical representations of ideas.

2. The liberal Jesus of Schleiermacher, Renan, Harnack etc. lets the influence of Romanticism in the door, with a focus on religious feeling, Jesus as the perfect human embodiment of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity. Kant brings in Jesus as the supreme example of human morality.

3. F. C. Baur removes John from discussion. For him John is strictly a theological rather than a historical presentation. It differs too much for him from the Synoptics.

4. The Synoptic question removes Matthew and Luke from discussion as Mark and Q become the historical substratum beneath them.

5. Albert Schweitzer ends the liberal quest. Jesus was not some mirror of Western polite society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jesus preached the end of the world. "He comes to us as a stranger" to our ways.

6. Martin Kähler re-introduced the question of faith into the equation. We have no access to this historical Jesus. We have only the gospels. Similarly Wrede points out that even Mark is a document of faith whose presentation of Jesus is not straightforward history. Bultmann is in the next chapter but would go here in a straightforward historical presentation.

...

7. The 70's saw the rise of the application of sociology to the study of Jesus, here we have names like Gerd Thiessen, John Gager, and especially Richard Horsley.

8. Finally Dunn mentions the "neo-liberal" Jesus. The work of people like Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, Dominic Crossan, Helmut Koester, and Marcus Borg. Using non-canonical sources like Thomas, Gospel of Peter, and their specially constructed versions of Q, these scholars have managed to reconstruct a Jesus who, like the Jesuses of the late 1800's, is a very attractive mirror of polite society at the beginning of the twenty-first century.