Twelve Days of Jimmy!

1. Yesterday, Professor James D. G. Dunn shuffled off this mortal coil. He was my doctoral advisor at the University of Durham from 1993-96. Those were the great years of my late twenties. Although I was on a budget, trying to say something intelligent in a dissertation, wrestling with issues of my faith, and longing for a life-long partner, they were great years. :-)

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a little about my England days, so you can find some memories of my interactions with "Jimmy" there. He and his wife Meta treated his former doctoral students a little like their own children and he followed our families as they grew. Many years at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting there was a Dunn Reunion where we all got back together.

In my first years at Indiana Wesleyan, Jimmy connected me to adjunct some for Notre Dame. In those days I would occasionally send a hail Mary of an application to a research institution, and he and Loren Stuckenbruck were always willing to brush off the old reference for me. Jimmy was instrumental in getting me my first sabbatical in Tübingen in 2004, and of course it was he who connected me with St. John's College in Durham at the very beginning.

He once said that he and I had a similar faith pilgrimage. I took him to mean that he started out with a somewhat fundamentalist background and wrestled through its inadequacies toward a more historically grounded faith. He was very much a "modernist," although perhaps not quite as "chastened" a modernist as I like to think I am. He began in the more mathematically oriented field of economics and statistics, as I started off with chemistry. He thus had a quasi-scientific approach to interpretation, which is what attracted me to him as a scholar.

2. For the next 12 days, I thought I would pick a book a day of the great Jimmy Dunn and feature it. He had a way of approaching a question that I found deeply attractive. He truly tried to be objective. Of course none of us are completely, but some of us do much better job than others. He did better than most. You almost could not predict where he would come down on a question until after he had studied it and come to a conclusion in the light of the current evidence. I certainly don't feel that way about a whole lot of scholars today.

In light of the hope of resurrection, I want to start with The Evidence for Jesus. It was one of the first of his works that I encountered. In the early 90s, I was looking for historical arguments for the resurrection. I had come to the conclusion at Asbury that the resurrection was the cornerstone on which Christian faith rested. Perhaps I might nuance that today and say that the resurrection is the key historical datum in relation to Christian faith.

For example, you cannot prove the incarnation by way of history. Even if you could prove the virgin birth, that would not necessitate incarnation. Matthew and Luke do not mention the incarnation, and John does not mention the virgin birth. I do not think you can demonstrate the divinity of Christ by way of history. Even C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" argument may come up just a little short of fully persuasive for reasons that may be clear by the twelfth day.

But you can show the historical plausibility of the resurrection. It still requires faith, to be sure--if you don't believe resurrections happen you will come up with a different explanation. But there is significant historical evidence in its favor. If you allow for the real possibility of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus is very likely. And if the resurrection of Jesus happened, then it is very easy to believe that we shall also bear the image of that heavenly man (1 Cor. 15:49)!

3. The book, The Evidence for Jesus, came out in 1985. It illustrated Dunn's canny to ride the wave of educated popular interest. His books were more advanced than your average popular Christian book, but they appealed greatly to a certain educated, faith-filled, non-fundamentalist audience. Actually, it was always interesting to me how his work remained of great interest to "conservatives" even though it usually seemed to stand just across the border. Most of his doctoral students were people like me, coming from a conservative background. I should make clear that, when you take into account the full spectrum of scholarship, his actually is more on the "conservative" side.

I remember the Evangelical Theological Society asking him to speak once. I don't remember the subject. Perhaps it was on the new perspective on Paul. You had to sign a belief in inerrancy to participate, I guess. I remember him saying he just didn't look down while he was signing. But it showed that his voice was in demand even in circles a little more conservative than he was.

In 1984, there had been a series on British tele called Jesus: The Evidence. Apparently, they had some crazies on. For example, one of them argued that Jesus wasn't even a real person. That's not liberal. It's incompetent scholarship.

As I look over his response, I see comments that have been evident in my own teaching. For example, he quickly dispatches the idea that several decades between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels would automatically imply inaccuracy. "In societies where the spoken word was the chief means of communication... memories were better trained and almost certainly a good deal more retentive" (2).

However, his chapter on the historicity of the Gospels does not simply reinforce tradition. He also concludes--after very detailed comparisons of the Gospels--that the Gospels do not present the words of Jesus with "pedantic precision" (27). I will return to some of his later work in relation to the "historical Jesus" during these twelve days of Jimmy.

4. I must have read this book before I went to Durham, for my notes are in pen in cursive. I started taking notes in pencil in my books after a snide remark from fellow John's tutor Helen Fox. :-) I found the book persuasive on the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

I'm pretty sure that it was from this book that I took the arguments I have given ever sense when I get to 1 Corinthians 15 in any New Testament Survey or when I am presenting arguments for the existence of God in an introductory philosophy class. It is a two pronged argument.

First, there is the empty tomb. Dunn goes through the accounts. He puts them side by side and shows their tensions. He does not shrink back from showing what is there. But in looking at the report of the guards in Matthew 28, he concludes, "the emptiness of the tomb was not a point of controversy, only the explanation of why it was empty" (67). I have made this point as well. The only evidence we have of disagreement on the resurrection from that period assumes that the tomb was empty.

Similarly, Dunn notes that "women were probably regarded as unreliable witnesses in first-century Judaism, simply because they were women" (65). Another point I have regularly made. If you were going to make up an empty tomb, would you have women as your first and key witnesses?

The second prong in the argument are the eyewitness accounts. People would not normally conclude that someone has risen from the dead when they find an empty tomb. Such a conclusion, Dunn suggests "is without any real precedent" (73).

He does, however, draw a debated conclusion on the nature of Jesus' resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15. "Paul's understanding of the resurrection body as a spiritual body strictly speaking does not require an empty grave" (75). I'm not sure I find that conclusion the most natural way of reading Paul.

The number of separate resurrection appearances is quite remarkable. If this were a trial, "the counsel for Christianity would want to argue that such a sequence requires a starting event of sufficient significance to explain what followed" (60). We might add here that our traditions suggest that many of these witnesses were willing to die for what they believed they had seen. The core of these traditions seem very likely (e.g., the martyrdoms of Stephen, James, Paul, and Peter).

5. And so we look for the hope of resurrection, including the resurrection of Jimmy Dunn. We want to know "the power of Christ's resurrection, becoming like him in his death, if somehow we might attain to the resurrection of the dead" (Philippians 3:10-11).