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1. Knowing that I was going to Durham, I began to dive more into James Dunn's writing. I will have a hard time remembering when I learned which aspects of his thinking. When he passed in 2020, I did a series walking through his writings in twelve posts. That was when I still had an office at work and at home, and all my books were readily accessible. I have been living in book purgatory since 2021.
Sadly, my copy of Unity and Diversity in the New Testament seems to be in storage, along with Christology in the Making. I started working through the first in anticipation of Durham. I must have worked through the second at least by my first year there.
Unity and Diversity was eye-opening. For obvious reasons, Asbury focused extensively on the literary text of the Bible. Inductive Bible Study at Asbury excelled at the skill of observation of the text. I would tell my students for decades that these skills could enable them to critique world class scholars because of the attention to the text it cultivated.
Scholars sometimes fall into the trap of "parallelomania." You know a parallel from some obscure piece of ancient literature and you connect it to the biblical text. But of course it doesn't matter whether you know some obscure bit of text from the Talmud if it isn't likely to have had any connection with the biblical text.
Perhaps there has been an occasion or two in the past where a scholar has known too much. For example, Philo says in Embassy to Gaius that the emperor Caligula was mistaken to think that the "form of God" could so easily be counterfeited (110). Could Paul have known this when he said that Jesus emptied himself of the "form of God" (Phil. 2:6)? [1]
Probably not. But knowing these sorts of parallels has sparked many a creative theory.
Of course, with the internet, it has become more and more possible for individuals with no real sense of the relationships between documents to imagine completely impossible connections. The 1978 book, When God Was a Woman, is a good example of someone who knew a lot of parallels, but wasn't trained to be able to tell the difference between similarity and dependence.
2. So, while Asbury had done a spectacular job of teaching me how to observe the "world within the text," as Ricoeur put it, there was a tendency to flatten it. In other words, my background had been heavy on the unity of the text but not so strong on its diversity.
Dunn's book was quite the opposite. By the time he was "done," it felt like the unity he saw was fairly slim. But it was good to balance out the extremes of my own background. The biggest unity was the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
To be frank, there is something suspicious about the fact that various groups have electric fences that forbid you from drawing certain conclusions. If we are really interested in the truth, if the truth is what God thinks, then we would want to follow the evidence to its most likely conclusion most of the time.
England was a breath of fresh air in that regard. All opinions were treated with respect (sometimes I thought outlandish ones). The point was whether you could argue cogently for your positions, not what your positions were.
3. I'll talk more about christology in a moment. What struck me was the concept of different social groups within the early church. Jewish Christianity. Hellenistic Christianity. Apocalyptic Christianity. Early Catholicism. I find these far too blunt of instruments now, but it was a fairly new concept to me then. [2]
I had never thought of there being creeds, hymns, and other traditions lurking in the New Testament. I had little sense of the tensions between the theologies of the Gospels or the other parts of the New Testament. And the sense that there were different ecclesiologies among different early Christian communities was a completely new thought.
4. Christology in the Making was even more impactful. Basic understandings that I have of key Christological titles like "Son of God" and "Lord" flowed naturally from his thorough and "scientific" investigations of the text. Principally, he made it very clear that these titled found their locus in the resurrection of Jesus and were royal titles.
Dunn was not unusual for the 60s and 70s to see the development of early Christology as a movement from resurrection to incarnation, from Paul to John. In 1988, Larry Hurtado would start a trend that continues to this day among many if not most scholars. Hurtado argued that a "high" Christology was present before any of the New Testament writings were written, present there in Paul.
Perhaps Dunn's most controversial claim in Christology is that the Philippian hymn did not refer to the pre-existence of Jesus. On this interpretation, Dunn has definitely proved to be in the minority, although less so when he first proposed it. He argued that the Philippian hymn of 2:6-11 was an Adamic Christology. Like Adam, Dunn argued, Jesus was in the image of God. But unlike Adam, who grasped at equality with God, Christ did not grasp. [3]
Few have gone with Dunn for this interpretation. I remember a brief conversation with Bruce Longenecker about Dunn's Christology (Bruce also studied with Dunn). He said he didn't feel the need to follow Dunn on that score anymore.
But I found most of the book persuasive. And, indeed, I suspect there is much less pre-esistence in Paul than many think. I always have found it refreshing when someone has been able to show me where I was unaware of the glasses I was wearing. Dunn opened my eyes to a third dimension to the Bible.
What I'm talking about is the transition from reading the Bible from the standpoint of the story in the Bible to reading the books of the Bible in the story of history. This is basically what Hans Frei talked about in the first chapter of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. The pre-modern reader reads inside the text. The "modernist" reader sees the biblical texts as moments in history.
It's the difference between thinking the Gospels must be first because they are about Jesus (who came first), to realizing that the Gospels were written after Paul's writings, probably in the order Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. It's realizing that, as far as its dating is concerned, it doesn't matter if Job pictures the patriarchal period. When a book is written has almost nothing to do with what it's written about.
This is more of learning how to read the Bible in context.
[1] Larry Hurtado explored this on his blog in 2017 before he passed.
[2] I later found John Meier and Raymond Brown's, Jerusalem and Antioch much more helpful (Paulist, 1983). They suggest four groups as I recall: Jerusalem Christianity, Pauline Christianity, Judaizers, and Libertines.
[3] N. T. Wright had what was to be a very confusing examination of the possibilities in a chapter of his The Climax of the Covenant. I was enamored with Wright in those days for a couple years. In retrospect, I would love to rewrite that chapter for him to make it clearer.
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