On the Twelfth Day of Jimmy...

1. For the last twelve days I have been posting reflections on our beloved mentor Jimmy Dunn. I hope my affection for him as a person and my admiration for him as a scholar has come through. One always hopes that our dearly departed in glory have some sense of the love we share for them as we reflect on their lives.

Believe it or not, I have still not managed to mention all his books. I see that in 2013 he published a collection of his essays on oral traditions about Jesus, The Oral Gospel Tradition. I encountered its first chapter years ago and found it extremely intriguing. He wonders if some of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels were in fact charismatic prophecies, purported to come from the risen Jesus, spoken in the Spirit in the early church, rather than sayings from Jesus while he was on earth. Think about it. Would the saying, "Take up my cross and follow me" have made any sense to the disciples whatsoever prior to Jesus' death on the cross?!

Jimmy had a book come out even last year--Jesus according to the New Testament. I ordered it a couple days ago and it is on its way.

2. I should mention a couple Festschrifts that were made in Jimmy's honor. A Festschrift is a book written in honor of a major scholar upon retirement or a significant birthday. Usually, fellow scholars and significant students write chapters on a particular theme at the intersection of their mentor/colleague and their own scholarly work.

So the first tier got their shot in 2004, a year after Jimmy's retirement for his 65th birthday. It was aptly titled, The Holy Spirit and Christian Origins. The list of contributors is, as would be expected, a "Who's Who" of major New Testament scholars, including Durham colleagues Loren Stuckenbruck, Stephen Barton, and Walter Moberly. Three of Dunn's most prominent students also contributed, Scot McKnight, Paul Trebilco, and Bruce Longenecker.

But we younger folk were not to be outdone. B. J. Oropeza, Chuck Robertson, and Doug Mohrmann conspired with the rest of us to produce a "student only" Festschrift in honor of Jimmy's 70th birthday. The title was, Jesus and Paul: Global Perspectives in Honor of James D. G. Dunn. I might say that a number of Jimmy's heirs have a savvy for social media and informal marketing. I dare say that B.J. and James McGrath are quite adept, and perhaps I am not too shabby. Although Dunn was retired when Nijay Gupta came to Durham, he might easily be counted also as a Dunn protege.

So this student Festschrift included other Dunn students before me: Graham Twelftree, Don Garlington, and Helen Bond. It also included my contemporaries Jey Kanagaraj, Arie Zwiep, B.J. Oropeza, Allen Bevere and James McGrath. Perhaps the best known of the later Dunn students is Simon Gathercole. John Byron, now Dean of Ashland Seminary, also contributed, along with editors Chuck Robertson, Doug Mohrmann and several others. As a side note, Nijay was noting recently how many global students Jimmy had.

3. The yearly Dunn reunions at SBL have been mentioned by several in reminiscence. I posted a picture of the group in in my first post, taken in 2013. Although Jimmy and Meta did manage to come at least to one more SBL in 2017, there was a special gathering in 2013 as potentially the last of the transatlantic visits to SBL. Earlier that year, as I recall, Jimmy had experienced a TIA, often thought of as a mini-stroke. Meta assured us all that his theological mind was not in jeopardy. "He remembers theology just fine. It's his car keys that he can't find."

The Dunn yearly Christmas letter was always a treat. You could tell Jimmy lurked occasionally on Facebook. He felt strongly about matters of justice. He was grieved in 2014 when the British Methodists withdrew from Cranmer Hall at St. John's. He emailed a large number of those of us in the Methodist family in hopes to convince the British Methodists otherwise. He was grieved at the rise of Trump, grieved at Brexit, just as puzzled as the rest of us.

I did not know that Jimmy was suffering these last days. He had made it to his 80th birthday and beyond. Meta sometimes joked that Paul was a third person in their marriage. In her announcement passed on to some of us, she closed with this statement. "Paul in Romans 8 (Jimmy's favourite passage) surely must have the last word... 'I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus'."

4. You need read no further. That is the fitting end to this series. Let the rest of this post only be epilogue.

We have traveled through eleven major books by the magnificent James Douglas Grant Dunn:

1. The Evidence for Jesus (1985)
2. Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970)
3. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977)
4. Christology in the Making (1980)
5. "Once more, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ" (1991)
6. The New Perspective on Paul (2005)
7. The Partings of the Ways (1991)
8. The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (1996)
9. The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998)
10. Jesus Remembered (2003)
11. Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? (2009)

5. We now complete our course with the final installment of his three part series, Christianity in the Making. That final volume was Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity (2015). This final volume was 824 pages and a labor. The Christmas letter of 2014 was quite keen to get this volume "out of this house" and over to Eerdmans. Remember that this was after the TIA that the volume was completed.

No longer with student assistants at hand, he turned to some of us for help with the indexing. That was the year that I was returning to teach from being Dean at Wesley Seminary. I asked for some recommendations, and two students received a little spending money from IWU to help index the volume. Their names are memorialized forever in the Preface:

"I am most grateful to those who assisted in the final phase of the process, when time was pressing. Ellen Steinke and Ronald "Charlie" Hurlocker, graduates of the School of Theology and Ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University, did the main work in creating the Author and Ancient Sources indexes, spurred on by Ken Schenck, one of my own postgrads from past years" (xiv).

Neither of them had any idea of the immensity of the universe into which they were stepping. To be honest, it was a little surreal to me. It's no fault of the students that they did not know Emeritus Lightfoot Professor of Divinity James D. G. Dunn. They gladly did their work with no idea that their names would be forever inscribed in the last great work of the greatest biblical scholar of the late twentieth century.

This disconnect between the world of the church, even the church college, and the world of biblical scholarship, has always been part of the dichotomy that is my life. Church people and even ministers typically think they know the Bible. They may not know as much as they think.

I was struck in that year before more administration at the complete disengagement of even graduate students with biblical studies. I mentioned to a student after one session of a class on Paul's earlier letters that I needed to force myself through Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God. The response was as telling as it was sincere, "Why?" I could have been talking about N. T. Wright for all the student knew. I doubt this person could have named a single biblical scholar in the world.

"Well, I'm supposed to be an expert on the Bible. I'm supposed to know what other experts are saying about the Bible."

6. The final volume of Christianity in the Making looks at the Christian church beyond the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 and through the second century. That means we move beyond the New Testament canon and explore the afterlife of the apostolic tradition all the way to Irenaeus. Yes, we get the Gospels, all written after the destruction of Jerusalem, with the possible exception of Mark. Hebrews and the New Testament writings often considered to be pseudonymous are treated.

However, Dunn also looks at the way in which apostolic precedents reach into the second century. We not only get John but we get John in dialog with the Gospel of Thomas and the Jesus tradition that made its way into the Gnostic Gospels. The Apostolic Fathers are engaged. We finally can talk about the parting of the ways because we have reached the bar Kochba revolt of 132-35.

The final sections deal with the afterlife of Paul and Peter into the second century, as well as John. There is some engagement with Marcion and the Montanists. The book ends where Dunn's writings began, way back in Unity and Diversity. The unifying center of all these varied writings is Jesus.

"The identity of Christianity was defined by the Christ who was at its centre, the Jesus who had missioned in Galilee and Judaea, and who had been crucified and (it was believed as a fundamental conviction) raised again in Jerusalem. Christianity was the living expression and continuity of the impact made by Jesus" (812).

Here endeth the reading. May the memory of Jimmy Dunn be eternal!
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Other books or compilations by Dunn mentioned in this series:
Jesus and the Spirit (1975)
The Living Word (1988)
Romans 1 and 2 (1988)
Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990)
Jews and Christians (1992)
Galatians (1993)
The Theology of Paul's Letter to the Galatians (1993)
1 Corinthians (1995)
Paul and the Mosaic Law (1996)
Colossians/Philemon (1996)
Acts (1996)
Christ and the Spirit: Pneumatology (1997)
Christ and the Spirit: Christology (1998)
Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible (2003)
The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul (2003)
A New Perspective on Jesus (2005)
Beginning from Jerusalem (2009)
Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011)
The Oral Gospel Tradition (2013)
Jesus according to the New Testament (2019)