Switch to reading Dunn

Well, with my summer reading projects done, I'm on to reading what I want to read for myself, just a little every day.

Back to James Dunn's, Jesus Remembered.

Dunn Quote

Quote from Dunn's Jesus Remembered: When looking at figures across a historical gulf like Jesus, "the absence of some element of strangeness probably indicates that the depth of historical distance and the degree of historical difference have been underestimated" (49).

Reading (11-30-09): Dunn's Beginning

Finished chapter 28 on Dating Paul. First half of chapter here. Dunn's dating is fairly conventional and very close to mine, although interestingly I allow for a little more creativity in Acts' presentation than he does at points. He dates Galatians to Paul's stay at Corinth and the (undisputed) Prison Epistles to Rome. I place Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon at Ephesus. As always I am open to the evidence.

I always find "the majority of scholars think" statements interesting. Here are some in this chapter:
1. Majority think Jesus crucified in AD30.
2. Perhaps majority date Philippians to an Ephesian imprisonment.
3. Most do not think Paul released after imprisonment at Rome at the end of Acts.

I'm currently with these "majorities," although probably the majority of evangelical scholars disagree with #2 and 3.

One of the most helpful elements of this chapter is his relaying of Jewett's estimations of distances and walking time between places (p. 513). He also has some interesting material on the kinds of places Paul might have stayed along the way.

Tomorrow, d.v., back to Green.

What I'm Reading (11-29-30)

Only had a half hour to give to reading tonight and gave it to begin chapter 28 of James Dunn's Beginning from Jerusalem, "Dates, Destinations and Distances." I managed 11 pages on Pauline chronology. Standard fare, although well articulated as everything Dunn writes is.

This line in a footnote caught my eye: "As Murphy-O'Connor observes, the fourteen years [of Gal. 2:1 before Paul's second trip to Jerusalem] could not include the three years [Paul mentions in Gal. 1 between conversion and first trip to Jerusalem], since the clear implication is of fourteen years without contact with Jerusalem..."

If so, the early date for Galatians would pretty much die, the pre-Jerusalem council dating, and the majority position of evangelical biblical scholars.

I'll hope to finish the chapter tomorrow.

Dunn's Beginning from Jerusalem 18.2

Last week I started what will almost certainly be a long and yet incomplete read through James Dunn's Beginning from Jerusalem. For the full deal, Nijay Gupta's your person.

For what I've done so far:

1.1 Defining Terms

This week I skip almost to the end of his massive tome to Dunn's section on the book of James. I am teaching James this Fall and doing some explanatory notes on the side on it. And I find it so hard to read a book from beginning to end. Jumping around helps hold my attention and then I can force myself to endure the boring bits. And lets face it. No matter how good an author is, there will almost certainly be boring bits.

By the way, I think I am an above average author and teacher because I find so much of everyone else so utterly boring. I've never read a book I couldn't put down. I've come to read a lot, but almost every page is painful.

Reading Dunn and others on James makes me glad I've formed a lot of my opinions without having read them. I am on such a different page on many things. It makes me wonder how much of interpretive discussion is biased by reading the commentators. At the same time, certainly we gain much when ground has been plowed as much as Paul has. With James and Hebrews, less plowed, the commentators are less helpful, I think.

James
Dunn goes through a number of arguments against James as author and then, almost surprisingly, asserts that James in its current form is a collection of James' oral teaching made by someone else after his death.

Dunn finds these arguments against straightforward James authorship unconvincing:

1. The Greek is too good for James.
2. James would have introduced himself as the brother of Jesus.
3. The letter wouldn't have faced so much difficulty becoming canonical if James wrote it.
4. The polemic against the rich doesn't fit James' lifetime.
5. The letter seems more typical of Diaspora rather than Palestinian Judaism.
6. The attitude toward the law doesn't fit the Temple/Jerusalem context of James.

Dunn concludes, "the arguments usually marshalled against attributing the letter of James to James of Jerusalem, the brother of Jesus, are not strong enough to overturn the most obvious implication of the heading of the letter" (1127).

I might say that I still find 1, 5, and 6 significant. And so much scholarship (e.g., Bauckham, Luke Timothy Johnson) I find strangely confuses what is possible with what is probable. The truth question is not, is it possible that a Galilean, Aramaic speaking Jew could write a letter like James in Greek without any help. The question is, is this the most probable scenario, the statistical likelihood. As I said in my initial explanatory notes, I think James has had some help with the Greek if we are to see him as the author.

And ironically, Dunn himself sees James as a collection of James' teaching, which of course means that he does not think James put the letter in its current form even though it accurately reflects the things James taught. Dunn sees James as the legacy of James of Jerusalem (1129). This is an interesting suggestion that, whether true or not, I cannot find fault with from a standpoint of inerrancy.

Letter?
Dunn answers emphatically no. It is a collection of the wisdom sayings of James, a "commonplace book." I am a little more optimistic about finding an outline to the book than Dunn, as will become apparent as I move through James in my explanatory notes.

Oral Tradition
From Jesus Remembered and A New Perspective on Jesus, Dunn clearly thinks that his appropriation of recent studies on oral tradition to Jesus and now James are cutting edge, and I think they are. He eschews the so deeply ingrained orientation toward literary sources that in so many areas needs to die the death. Similarly, tradition is re-presented in the words of the person passing it on. In short, Dunn has no problem concluding that James contains "genuine recollections of teaching given by James and evidence of the influence he exercised and impact he made" (1136).

Further, he also believes we are hearing in James the same impact of Jesus' teaching on James, passed along in James' teaching perhaps even at times without conscious reflection that he was passing on Jesus tradition.

Emphases of James
Dunn highlights five themes:

1. maturity/perfection ("the teaching of James was not evangelistic, directed to non-believers" (1137).

2. wisdom (not just as a genre, but as a theme)

3. prayer

4. warnings to the rich

"... denunciations, of course, could fit many situations... But one of these is the period prior to the revolt of 66, when arguably the rapaciousness of many landlords was a factor in driving smallholders and tenant farmers into brigandage" (1141).

5. the law and works

Like Dunn, "I do not doubt that the passage evidences a reaction to Paul's teaching" (1142). He maps out parallels to Romans 4, although he does not argue for direct dependence. "And since James is the more polemical, the most obvious inference is that the James version is responding to the Paul version" (1143).

I'll confess that the only reason I can come up with why some scholars argue either that James is independent of Paul or that James was first (indeed, some like to think James is the first book of the NT written) is the old deeply ingrained harmonization tendency. I don't actually think James as it stands contradicts Paul in substance. It is more a parody of Paul that it addresses.

But again the only way I can explain this aversion on the part of some has nothing to do with the overwhelmingly probable best read of James. It has to do with subconscious hermeneutical tendencies that we must get over if we ever want to have a voice on the playing field of truth.

Is it Christian?
Yes. Indeed, Dunn finds in it great potential for information on "embryonic Christianity" (1146). He gives a list of several inferences, one of which is the idea that Jesus teaching formed an important part of the early Jerusalem church.

"The letter of James, then, is an invaluable testimony to a past age, to a time when in effect Christian and Jewish believers in Messiah Jesus were more or less synonymous" (1147).

Dunn's Beginning from Jerusalem 1

I'm not wanting to step on the feet of Nijay Gupta (who is of course a real scholar), but I had been planning for some time to dawdle through James Dunn's second volume, Beginning from Jerusalem, which covers the early church from after Jesus to AD70. I defer to him anyway, since he will read it 1) much more speedily and 2) he will actually finish it.

My first dawdle only made it to page 17. In these first few pages, Dunn tries to decide how to refer to the early Christians. I struggle with this question quite often too, like in this piece. He rightly rejects "Christians," since the earliest Christians didn't call themselves that. The "church" is misleading, since churches were local assemblies, not the church universal. Synagogue is fair enough, but it faces a similar debunking for Judaism that church does for Christianity.

Disciples--not widespread in the NT beyond Acts, so probably not a widespread self-description. Believers is a good candidate, one I use often. "Those who call on the name of the Lord"? Too cumbersome. "Brothers," "saints," "the elect," "the poor," nah.

How about "the way," the sect of the "Nazarenes," the "Galileans"? In the end Dunn concludes that the earliest Christians simply did not have a single term by which they referred to themselves or by which they were known to outsiders. They were a diverse group whose main point of continuity was continuity with the mission of Jesus. And they retained a distinctively Jewish character.

The New Perspective and the Wesleyan Tradition

If I were to write a chapter or essay on the question, "The New Perspective and the Wesleyan Tradition," it became clear to me this weekend how I think I would structure it. Here is the outline:

1. What is the "new" perspective?

• First, at this point of the game, calling the trends of this essay "the new perspective" is probably unhelpful. All that is meant by the term is 1) the re-appraisal of the nature of Judaism that took place in the late twentieth century in the light of new discoveries and, especially, some harsh political mirrors held up to the West, and 2) the re-appraisal of exactly what Paul was saying in this light.
• Hardly anyone--not even those high level scholars who resist these trends--has been unaffected. Even those who are more "old perspective" have changed. The only ones who have not changed are those who do not really read Paul with a view to what he original meant at all, but almost entirely read him through traditional glasses (e.g., John Piper, who for this reason does not completely count as a scholar of the original meaning).

2. Krister Stendahl, Paul, and Introspective Consciences

• Stendahl's (a Lutheran) main contribution was to show the falseness of the Lutheran model of Paul as so vexed with his guilty conscience that he finally turned to justification by faith alone, understood as having nothing to do with action at all. Rather, Paul had a "robust conscience" both before and after he believed on Christ. His turning to Christ was more of a call to the Gentiles than a conversion and in any case was not in his mind a conversion from one religion to another.
• Romans 7 thus was not Paul's current struggle with sin, an acknowledgement made now even by the most prominent original meaning scholars in the Calvinist tradition (e.g., Moo).
• The end result is that Paul had a much greater emphasis on a blameless life than the primary representatives of Protestantism had allowed.

3. E. P. Sanders, Judaism, and Staying In

• If Stendahl and others opened the door, Sanders gave critical mass to the recognition that Judaism almost always had acknowledged the primacy of God's grace over Jews being able to earn God's favor. The Jews did not understand keeping the Law to get them in but to be the appropriate response to God's grace and essential for staying in the covenant.
• This schema fits well with both Calvinist and Arminian understandings of post-justification righteousness. The Spirit empowers us to keep the righteous requirements of the Law after we have been justified by faith. However, it is the Arminian tradition that correctly understands the importance of blamelessness for staying in after justification by faith.

4. James D. G. Dunn, Paul, and Works of Law

• Dunn correctly has recognized that "works of Law" in Paul are not best understood as bald "works" in general. Most of the time, the phrase "works of Law" has overtones of the Jewish particulars of the Law rather than law-keeping in some general sense. This recognition significantly diminishes the Protestant polarization of faith and works.
• Dunn also has shown the lack of focus in readings of Paul that focus on some supposed absolute moral perfection being God's expectation. This is a reading of a verses like Galatians 3:10 or 5:3 that puts an artificial emphasis on "all" or "whole," as if Paul is painting a picture of God's character in which he must have justice for every last drop of sin. But God's justice is not the centerpiece or fountain of Paul's theology, or of the theology of any part of the New Testament. God's righteousness has more to do in Paul with God's proactive character in saving His people and the world, which fits very well with Wesleyan theology.

5. N. T. Wright and (Final) Justification

• Wright's primarily contribution, in terms of Wesleyan-Arminian theology, is his recognition of the importance of works in final justification, chiefly in passages like Romans 2:5-10; 14:10-12; and 2 Corinthians 5:10. Wright also correctly sees the Spirit as establishing in reality what God does on the basis of faith when one first believes on Christ. The missing piece for Wright is the importance of blamelessness for "staying in."
• Wright follows in the train of the majority who now see Romans 1:16 as a reference to God's righteousness rather than some righteousness from God, which again fits with a greater emphasis on love as the driving characteristic of God in salvation, not a drive to work around His justice.

6. Conclusion

• These developments thus support love (righteousness) as the central character of God in relation to salvation, not God's justice.
• They point out the importance of literal righteousness as a product of the Spirit, essential for final justification, that faith and works are not contradictory.
• They recognize that Romans 7 is in fact exactly the opposite of the situation of the believer. It is exactly the problem that the Spirit solves for the believer.

In House Quote from Dunn's Galatians Commentary

"In view of a continued emphasis within Christianity on the Spirit as a second experience, subsequent to conversion (so still in classic Pentecostalism), it is important to note that Paul saw reception of the Spirit as essentially the 'beginning' of Christian discipleship" (156, on Galatians 3:3).

Of course Wesleyans believe this as well... I just never really heard the Spirit preached in any way but in regard to entire sanctification until seminary. Despite my quarrels with Asbury and my enthusiasm for IWU's new kind of seminary, I would give Asbury the primary credit for lifting the maturity and depth of the Wesleyan Church into something recognizable by the broader church these last fifty years. For that I thank it.

Friday Review: Jesus Remembered 4

This now the fourth in a series of reviews of James Dunn's book on the historical Jesus, Jesus Remembered.

1. Flight from Dogma
2. Flight from History
3. Historical Hermeneutics

This week we begin Unit 2 with chapter 7: "Sources." It is much like the material that Meier covered things like the agrapha and Nag Hammadi, Tacitus and other Jewish sources, and) Josephus and the books of the canon. In fact, Dunn mentions Meier's work as basically a point of departure on some matters (like Josephus). He doesn't argue as extensively for some things because Meier has done the homework for us.

Josephus and Tacitus
Here Dunn basically defers to Meier's excellent analysis. We don't learn much from these references although they are part of Jesus' impact. But, as Dunn says, "about once every generation someone reruns the thesis that Jesus never existed and that the Jesus tradition is a wholesale invention" (142). Indeed, one is under way, the absolute loser of an endeavor, The Jesus Project. Anyone who seriously thinks Jesus' existence is a real question is so bad a scholar that everything they say should be immediately questioned. Any self-respecting atheist should distance themselves from this ignorance fest.

Probably the most important evidence for Jesus' existence are Paul's letters to the Galatians and Corinthians. Paul tells people that he met with Cephas and James (the Lord's brother--the interpretation that he's a cousin or half-brother are similarly devoid of serious consideration) within three years of coming to believe Jesus was the messiah. Everyone agrees this was less than 10 years after the crucifixion. So I pronounce winner of the "Grand Loser of a Thinker" award anyone who seriously thinks there is any likelihood at all to the suggestion that Jesus wasn't even a real person.

Mark and Q
As Dunn is addressing sources for addressing the question of the historical Jesus (Jesus as we might try to reconstruct him using historical sources), he next comes to Mark and Q. He gives a modest recap of standard evidence of Markan priority and Matthew's use of Mark...

Here's an example from a footnote I thought particularly interesting:

Mark 6:5
"And he could do no deed of power there, except
that he laid his hands on a few sick people and
cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief."

Matthew 13:58
"And he did not do many deeds of power there

because of their unbelief."

Dunn recognizes that the case for Q is less conclusive. Aside from our esteemed fellow biblioblogger Mark Goodacre, even someone like Martin Hengel has recently argued that Matthew used Mark and Luke and that a Q hypthesis is unnecessary. Nevertheless, Dunn believes with the majority that the existence of some sort of common source best explains the common material in Matthew and Luke that is not in Mark.

He does, however, spend some time qualifying what we can and cannot say about such a hypothetical source. For example, "we can hardly exclude the likelihood that Matthew drew on some material from this document which Luke ignored and vice-versa" (148). In other words, we cannot be certain that some of the material that has been designated M or L material is not actually Q material.

Dunn thus distinguishes between "q" material--the actual material that is common to Matthew and Luke but not in Mark--and the Q document, whose precise limits and contents we simply cannot reconstruct with any certainty. He also mentions something mentioned even as far back as Streeter, namely, that "a substantial amount of the common ('q') material was actually derived from oral tradition (not 'Q')" (149).

Some of the thinking out there regarding a Q community by top name scholars is also nothing short of embarrassing. Dunn mentions the "one document per community fallacy," as if a community that used Q would thereby have only used Q and not other sources (150). Dunn points out the lunacy (my wording) of suggesting that the absence of a theme from Q would then be taken to mean that the community that produced or used Q would not have believed in that theme. "On the same logic we could speak of 'wisdom villages' in the land of Israel which knew no prophetic books" (150).

Another potential problem with the way the Q community is often conceived is the assumption that such a community would have created the document for itself and its ideas might not be shared outside itself. Instead, "the evidence of our earliest sources is that communities maintained communication with one another; and it is more probable that tradition was written down in order to facilitate communication at a distance" (152).

Then we get into the so called "compositional history" of Q. Here Dunn says things like, "the attempt to classify and demarcate genre types has not proved very helpful in the discussion of Q" (155). And "The evidence is fully satisfied by the alternative hypothesis of a single compositional act, when the Q author/editor pulled together these different clusters, adapted them (the redactional interpolations), and knitted them into the larger single collection Q" (157).

Dunn agrees that the strongest case for Q's Sitz im Leben has been made for Galilee (159).

Matthew and Luke
Short section, "we need to be ... suspicious of the too simplistic rule of thumb that tradition only once attested is therefore necessarily of less value as a remembrance of Jesus" (161).

Gospel of Thomas
Dunn points out that scholarship is about evenly divided over whether Thomas knew the Synoptics or not. For the record, Dunn thinks Meier is a little too confident that it did. Dunn seems to favor the idea that the question of dependence is "insoluable" (162).

He discusses a little the question of whether Thomas might be Gnostic. As often, I find Dunn right on in his analysis. It is not helpful to use the word Gnostic prior to the second century, even in terms of "proto-Gnostic" or "pre-Gnostic." "We might as well describe Second Temple Judaism as pre- or proto-Christian, or mediaeval Christianity as pre- or proto-Protestant" (163-64 n.116). And Thomas seems to attest the developed, second century form of the Gnostic redeemer myth (GTh 28).

Thus, as I also believe, "it is perfectly comprehensible that a Gnostic redaction, for which a 'realized eschatology' was central, should have omitted and 'corrected' all tradition which attested a future eschatology and hope of a coming Son of Man" (164). Dunn's conclusion is apt: "while the question must always remain open that a particular Thomas saying has preserved an early/earlier version of the saying than the Synoptic tradition or that an unparalleled Thomas saying is as early as the earliest Synoptic tradition, it will always be the undoubtedly early Synoptic tradition which provides the measure by which judgment is made on the point" (165).

John
Dunn again gives a circumspect treatment of John as a source: "one can recognize both that the tradition has been heavily worked upon and that it is well rooted within earlier Jesus tradition" (167). John is mostly a secondary source to supplement or corroborate the testimony of the Synoptic tradition.

Dunn considers John the "Evangelist's meditations on the significant words and deeds of Jesus." But the style throughout John is the same whether we are hearing John the Baptist or Jesus or the woman at the well or 1 John--it would seem to be John's rather than Jesus' actual style. For example, Dunn posits, "Had the striking 'I am' self-assertions of John been remembered as spoken by Jesus, how could any Evangelist have ignored them so completely as the Synoptics do?" (166).

Other Gospels
Dunn closes the chapter with very brief consideration of the Dialogue Gospel, the Apocryphon of James, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Peter, Papyrus Egerton 2. He basically finds them to be witnesses to the various ways Jesus tradition developed. But he apparently does not find the evidence convincing to say they provide earlier witness to Jesus. Several times he reiterates that even if these sorts of sorts might provide independent witness to Jesus, that in no way means that they provide earlier witness.

Galatians 2:16 Mini-Bibliography

We spent nearly all of Greek Galatians class today translating Galatians 2:16. Surely it is the most debated verse in the New Testament. Am I wrong?

It occurred to me that I always throw out a core bibliography when I go through Galatians 2:16 for whatever reason. I thought I would post it. Certainly, the key articles reflects my interpretive leanings. Obviously, James D. G. Dunn features high on my list of resources. Since most of the relevant essays now appear in one volume, The New Perspective on Paul, I list the older articles as they are situated in this volume.

"We who are Jews by nature and not sinners from the Gentiles..."
James D. G. Dunn, "The Incident at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-18)," in Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians, 129-82 remains, in my opinion, an excellent introduction to the basic context of Galatians 2:15-21, which I agree is indeed the proposition of the letter.

Since we know that a person is not justified...
What does it mean to be justified? In general, John Piper is too thoroughly ensconched in the Calvinist tradition to be a reliable original meaning interpreter of Paul in general, although as we might expect, he is a good scholar when the right conclusion fits within Calvinist parameters.

N. T. Wright is good on justification two-thirds of the time--on the law court and eschatological parts of it. His covenantal spin, however, continues to be the best illustration of the fact that we often formulate our key ideas when we are young in a PhD program, then become associated with those immature ideas, then spend the rest of our career defending them. A must read is his forthcoming response to John Piper on the topic.

Basically, you can trust a Bible scholar when they are critiquing another Bible scholar. You just can't trust us when we are selling material from our dissertations :-)

by works of law...
Here Dunn's mature statement in the long introduction to The New Perspective, "The New Perspective--Whence, What and Wither" (1-97), is in my opinion the best understanding of this phrase.

Also significant is his earlier piece, "Works of the Law and the Curse of the Law (Gal. 3:10-14)" from 1985 (New Perspective, 121-40), not to mention the article that put the name "new perspective" on the new perspective, namely, "The New Perspective on Paul" (1983--in New Perspective, 99-120).

except...
Should we translate the two words here in their normal sense or as "but." Dunn's "Incident at Antioch" above argues for "except."

through faith of Jesus Christ...
The two key articles here are reprinted in Richard Hays' signature volume, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11. The two articles were originally presented in Kansas City at the 1991 SBL: Hays: "Pistis and Pauline Theology: What's at Stake" and Dunn: "Once More, Pistis Christou."

even we have placed our faith in Jesus Christ that we might be justified by Christ faith and not works of law...
All the key issues above are repeated here. Consult especially Dunn on works of law and Hays/Dunn on redundancy if one goes with an objective genitive throughout.

Since this is my blog, you'll forgive me if I sneak in my article here, "2 Corinthians and the Pistis Christou Debate, CBQ 70 (2008): 524-37," which suggests Paul may have a double entendre in mind in the final pistis Christou. Since that claim was not a part of my dissertation, you can trust it. :-)

for by works of law no flesh will be justified.
This quotation of Psalm 143 and Paul's modifications to it are well treated by Richard Hays in his book, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.

You could do a whole course on this verse, reading through this literature. It would actually be quite a good introduction to Paul's theology in the specific area of his interaction with the Jerusalem church. If twenty of you wanted to do an online graduate course on Acrobat in the Fall... :-)

Dunn's Historical Jesus summary of the day is a comin'.

Friday Dunn: Jesus Remembered 3

I'm not going to finish by Easter, sad to say. Looks like it's going to end up being a chapter a week from here on out. Today I'm on to chapter 6 of James Dunn's Jesus Remembered, the last chapter of his Prolegomena on faith and the historical Jesus. This chapter is titled, "History, Hermeneutics and Faith." My first two reviews were basically:

Flight from Dogma
Flight from History

If the preceding material has largely gone through the history of the discussion, Dunn now presents his hermeneutic. This is good reading. I think what has impressed me the most about this book so far is the breadth and depth of Dunn's reading. Usually I am impressed with his ability to conceptualize and organize complex bodies of thought--something I pride myself on and that has therefore always attracted me to him.

But this time I am less impressed by this talent of his and more by the breadth of literature he covers, particularly in his footnotes. His footnotes in this book are not mere references to other literature. They are smatterings of significant quotes in the history of interpretation and hermeneutics. We find everything from Schleiermacher to Lonergan to Husserl.

Let me go through the chapter using a list:

1. "... history and hermeneutics are close companions, Siamese twins perhaps. That will no doubt be part of the reason for the failure of history and faith to bed well together: hermeneutics is the too little acknowledged third partner -- a somewhat uncomfortable ménage à trois" (99).

Indeed, this is the fly in the ointment, the ghost in the machine, the elephant in the room. If the process of connecting reader and text is not clarified, then we have the chaos that is Christians reading the Bible.

2. "Christians cannot but want to know what Jesus was like" (101).
I think this is true. It ultimately is not the Jesus of the Gospels that is the object of historic Christian faith, at least in terms of traditional, orthodox Christianity. If it turned out that the Jesus of history was significantly different from Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, that would be of great interest and moment to everyone, including Christians.

Indeed, while Christianity can remain substantially true even if vast amounts of biblical narrative turned out not to be historical (in fact even if almost all of it was not historical), this is not true of Jesus. If Jesus was not a real person, indeed, was not God incarnate, if Jesus did not truly die and rise from the dead in history, then historic Christianity is to be rejected. Certainly there are forms of Christianity that can and have exist without a historically risen Jesus, but they are fundamentally different in character.

3. Dunn affirms Troeltsch's "probability rather than certainty" in historical inquiry. He is more careful about Troeltsch's "analogy" (things now are like things then) and "correlation" (the universe is a closed system of interrelationships). The first seems to make it hard to affirm the unique as historical, while the second was more appropriate to a Newtonian rather than a quantum world.

Dunn prefers to speak of a distinction between event, data, and fact (drawn from a book from his own education by Collingwood). The event belongs to the irretrievable past (check). Data is what is available to us, which has come down to us through history (check). Such data is of course extremely partial and somewhat arbitrary. Where I don't really like Dunn's definitions are in how he defines "fact." Facts for him are what the historian tries to reconstruct. They are interpretations of data.

I personally find this approach to "fact" confusing.

4. In his sections, "What Rights Does the Text Have?" and "The Priority of Plain Meaning" Dunn takes the expected position that "respecting the text and allowing the text so far as possible, using all the tools of historical criticism, to speak in its own terms is still valid. Any less a goal for exegesis would be self-condemned" (115). Certainly this is true for exegesis.

However, I ultimately disagree with Dunn's apparent implication that texts have inherent rights. People have rights. It is respectful to heed a text's intent when its author is aware we are reading it and is trying to communicate with us. I would even say it seems most natural to read a text for its original meaning. But ultimately, I agree with Robert Morgan, "Texts, like dead men and women, have no rights" (114).

I agree with Dunn's sense of the plain meaning of a text as rich and extending beyond grammar and syntax to the social and historical world behind it.

5. I thought this sentence was interesting as Dunn critiqued a certain tendency with regard to current thinking on pre-suppositions. The inductive Bible study book we use in the undergraduate program at IWU draws what I believe is an artificial distinction between "pre-understanding" and "presupposition." Dunn apparently collapses the two:

"The point is sometimes missed when more conservative biblical scholars deem it sufficient to declare their presuppositions before embarking on what most of their fellow scholars would regard as uncritical exegesis, as though the declaration of presuppositions somehow vindicated the exegesis itself (since 'Everyone has presuppositions'). But the point is not simply that any reading of a text is shaped by the pre-understanding brought to it. The point is rather that as the exegete moves round the hermeneutical circle between pre-understanding and text, the text reacts back upon the pre-understanding, both sharpening it and requiring of it revision..." (121).

6. "Hermeneutics is best conceived as a dialogue where both partners must be allowed to speak in their own terms, rather than as an interrogation of the text where the text is only allowed to answer the questions asked" (124). "It is not that the encounter is a 'picnic' to which the text brings the words and the reader the meaning, to pick of Northrop Frye's engaging metaphor."

This is one valid approach, although I can't see how we can deny the other as well.

7. "... the 'historical Jesus' is the Jesus constructed by historical research" (125, italics his), not the real Jesus or the Jesus of history.

8. With Kähler, "We do not have a 'neutral' (!) portrayal of Jesus. All we have in the NT Gospels is Jesus seen with the eye of faith" (127).

9. Form criticism missed its chance to connect to the initial reaction to Jesus in oral tradition. Instead, it got stuck in the literary forms themselves and the tradition in process.

10. "The Synoptic tradition provides evidence not so much for what Jesus did or said in itself, but for what Jesus was remembered as doing or saying by his first disciples" (130). Here we get to the title of the volume and, I believe, what Dunn wants to be known as his signature approach.

We cannot really get back to what Jesus did or said. What we might get back to is the impact that Jesus had on those who heard and saw him. The Gospels give us entry to Jesus remembered in distinction from some absolute, objective sense of who Jesus really was. This Jesus bears a relationship to the "historic" Jesus, but our reconstructions are a "historical" Jesus of our reconstruction.

11. Also signature is the connection between faith and that impact. The Jesus of history created faith in those around him. Dunn is not committing at this time what kind of faith that was, but there was faith created as part of his impact.

One of Dunn's signature ideas in this book is that we have here to do with pre-Easter faith. It is conventional at least since Bultmann to speak of Easter faith. But Dunn rightly argues that if the life and teachings of Jesus had not made a faith impact of some sort before Easter, then we cannot make sense of the Gospels.

"However great the shock of Good Friday and Easter for the first disciples, it would be unjustified to assume that these events marked a discontinuity with their initial disciple-response" (133).

12. Dunn ends the chapters with two broad corollaries (in the queen's English said, co-ROL-laries). The norms of the quest are a) the Greek text, b) the plain meaning, c) the Synoptic form. Dunn shows himself thoroughly Protestant here. "It is this readiness for self-criticism in the light of tradition... which marks out the western church -- its willingness to recognize and acknowledge when it has departed from its norm, whether in the condemnation of a Galileo or in its centuries-long tradition of anti-Semitism -- a dialogue of criticism which remains something of a barrier and bewilderment for the Christianity of East and South" (135-36).

Secondly, "the foundational documents of the Christian tradition should still be heard to speak meaningfully to the present day" (136), outside the church. If all we have of Jesus is the reading of a Christian community--rather than one anyone might access as appropriate to more normal historical understanding, then Jesus is unable to speak to the world.

Til next week...

Friday Review: Dunn's Jesus Remembered 2

Today I have made my way through Chapter 5 of James Dunn's Jesus Remembered. The chapter is entitled "The Flight from History." My review of the earlier chapters is here.

I enjoyed the beginning of this chapter. Dunn is so well read and has lots of delicious quotes here, there, and in the footnotes. One of the things I have struggled with in chapters 4 and 5 is exactly what Dunn himself struggled with in writing the chapters. History is sloppy. How do you take the ebbs and flows of history and conceptualize them in a way that does minimal damage to them.

This is the problem with so much of the ideological history we hear. This idea led to this idea led to this idea. The absurdity of shoving the infinitude of life onto such a narrow string!

So we must give great latitude to the attempt to capture the history of historical Jesus research under two headings: 1) The Flight from Dogma (chap. 4) and 2) The Flight from History (chap. 5). In chapter 4 Dunn discussed such research as it pursued reason moving away from the church. In this chapter he discussed those who, because of the desire for something greater, have minimalized the importance of history in the equation of Jesus.

Since history doesn't fall neatly into such categories, we will have to make do with the occasional oddity that results. It seems to me that each subsection is a gem, delightful. The overarching categorization has not gelled with me.

1. The first gem is a piece on the "Historical-Critical Method." Here I think Dunn aims to state the problem of the historical method as it has given rise to various flights from it. He mentions two key figures in the formulation of the historical-critical method: Lessing and Troeltsch.

Gotthold Lessing (1729-81) is the first key figure. Lessing is of course known for the idea of a "ugly, broad ditch" between historical uncertainty and the necessary truths of reason. "Accidental truths of history can never become the proofs of necessary truths of reason."

Ernst Troeltsch is the second (late 1800's). The historical method 1) is about the probable, not the certain, 2) is based on the notion that the past is analogous to the present, and 3) that events are interrelated with the surrounding causes and effects in which they are enmeshed.

2. Protecting Faith from History
Lessing protected faith by connecting it to innate reason, something seriously questioned in the days that followed him. Wilhelm Herrmann, one of Bultmann's teachers, suggested that the secure place for faith was in religious experience. Martin Kähler argued that we simply do not have any historical sources to show us the Jesus of history, we are stuck with the Christ of faith in the gospels. "The biblical Christ is the 'invulnerable area' from which faith can gain its certainty without relying on the heteronomous guarantees of external authorities."

3. Rudolph Bultmann
Barth and Bultmann followed Kähler's lead. So Barth in his Romans commentary, "In history as such there is nothing so far as the eye can see which can provide a basis for faith." Barth argued with the Liberal Adolf Harnack that historical criticism has its place, but it also has its limitations.

Bultmann of course reduced faith to an existentialist core that had no place at all for a historical element in faith. Indeed, he did not believe that Jesus had really risen from the dead in history. Wrede had argued that Mark was theological. K. L. Schmidt had argued that all the historical connectors in Mark were Markan rather than a part of his sources, so we were left with individual stories. Bultmann thus develops "form criticism" of the Gospels, where small stories are analyzed for their genre and Sitz im Leben, their "situation in life."

Bultmann concludes that we can know almost nothing of the life and personality of Jesus, although we can know the essence of his message.

4. Second Quest (the "new" quest)
Ernst Käsemann comes on the scene in 1953, suggesting too sharp a discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith in the thinking of Bultmann, his Doktor Vater. Perhaps the results of form criticism are not so bleak. Indeed, Joachim Jeremias finds considerable probable teaching that can be traced back to Jesus with probability, not least his reference to God as Abba. Ernst Fuchs suggests that Jesus' conduct, largely overlooked in the quest in deference to a focus on Jesus' sayings, tell us much of who Jesus was.

Norm Perrin comes up with criteria for determining with historical probability the sayings of Jesus, the "criterion of dissimilarity" becomes prominent. "Coherence" and "multiple attestation" backed up dissimilarity. Others have added other criteria, Aramaic quality, embarrassment, memorability...

Has the second quest ever ended? Since the whole "new quest" is a construct we have placed on historical data, the question seems hardly worth asking.

5. Third Quest
The distinguishing mark of the "third" quest is reintroducing the Jewishness of Jesus into the equation. Sanders and Wright are the main ones Dunn mentions here.

6. Postmodernism
The chapter ends with a brief foray into some of the hermeneutical developments that call into question the very possibility of any meaning in texts at all, let alone discovering historical realities behind texts. He mentions narrative criticism as the earlier new criticism of literary criticism meeting biblical studies. Narrative criticism brackets questions of the real author and real reader in deference to the implied author and reader.

Stanley Fish is mentioned with his idea of meaning to texts being established in interpretive communities. Then there is Gadamer's Wirkungsgeschichte, our meeting of texts in the flow of their impact on subsequent tradition.

Comment on Wesley by Contemporary

I forgot to mention in my review yesterday a quote I had either forgotten or never heard by Bishop Butler about John Wesley that Dunn gives in a footnote. Dunn has a number of little tidbits like this in his first few chapters, revealing the breadth of his knowledge:

"Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Spirit is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing."

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.

Friday Review HF: Dunn on pistis Christou

And now the promised review of Dunn's chapter in Richard Hays' Festscrift, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays. Dunn's chapter is titled, "ἐκ πίστεως: A Key to the Meaning of πίστεως Χριστοῦ."

This might be my last post on the Festscrift for a while, because I want to wander through John Meier's A Marginal Jew for the twelve days of Christmas. It's 17 years old, but I've only dipped into it here and there, not plowed from cover to cover, and the fourth volume is coming out next year. Then from Epiphany to Easter I thought I might work through Dunn's Jesus Remembered in time to work through his second volume, Beginning from Jerusalem during Eastertide and into Pentecost. So many things to read, review, and write, especially when your main job is to teach.

Dunn begins this relatively short piece with a Dear Richard letter, celebrating their infamous debate in Kansas City in 1991 (when apparently, Dunn had to pay $75 dollars to reschedule his plane flight--I had to leave the unfortunately scheduled Tuesday morning meeting to catch my plane too). Hays' watershed The Faith of Jesus Christ has been republished with the two papers from that meeting (originally published in Pauline Theology 4) and Hays added a new preface to the second edition. So Dunn considered this a good time for response himself.

First, Dunn reviews some key points Hays considers established in his preface. One is that narrative elements undergird Paul's thought. Dunn agrees. He just doesn't find an emphasis of Jesus' faithfulness in Paul's engagement with that story.

Another is that "participation in Christ" pervades Paul's theology far more completely than the imagery of justification. Dunn notes, however, that only one "faith of Christ" expression is connected to such participation (Gal. 2:20). Finally, he agrees with Hays' observation of the poetic character of Paul's language.

Now Dunn launches this rejoinder to Hays' "faithfulness of Jesus" interpretation based on "out of faith" expression.

For the record, I have argued that Paul's thought moves "out of Hays into Dunn" in a recent CBQ article, "2 Corinthians 4:13 and the πιστις Χριστου Debate," CBQ 70 (2008): 524-37. I agree with Hays that Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16 refer to Jesus' faithfulness but with Dunn that the bulk of Paul's references in Galatians 3 and Romans 4 are oriented around human faith that leads to justification.

So, on the one hand, I agree with much of Dunn's critique in this section: "the problem I have always had with your πιστις Χριστου interpretation is that it has to draw in so many of the other πιστις references in the contexts of Galatians and Romans in order to maintain its credibility" (357). If we outline Dunn's essay as an argument, his first claim is that it is impossible to distinguish between the early "faith of Jesus" parts of these arguments and the later "out of faith" parts. They either all must fall Hays' way or they must all fall Dunn's way. I disagree with Dunn here for reasons I'll mention below.

This piece works backward. With his usual exegetical cunning, Dunn shows what I agree is the "inescapable conclusion" that Paul primarily uses the ἐκ πίστεως expression in reference to human faith. If the first part of his argument is that the train of thought is consistent. The second is that the latter part of Paul's argument falls his way, "faith in."

So now he reaches his conclusion, therefore the earlier "faith of Jesus" expressions must refer to faith in Jesus too, since it is hard to point to a place where Paul switches what he's talking about. Here is where I disagree with Dunn and agree with Hays' rendering of this expression in Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16. My article argues from what I believe to be the most obvious train of thought in 2 Corinthians 4:16, movement from Jesus' faith to Paul's faith. Given evidence that Paul can think this way, it became justifiable to see him thinking in this way in these passages.

I might add my strong suspicion that this is our problem because of an unspoken assumption that we need to be able to see the transition without considering the fact that we are likely missing important context for Paul's argument here. If the Jerusalem church used something like the expression "the faithfulness of Jesus" as a shorthand reference to his atoning death, then the audience of Galatians and Romans would immediately know to take the expression Hays' way because of tradition. Paul would then build on the potential double entendre to take the expression in the way that Dunn has correctly argued he does, namely, in reference to human faith.

Dunn ends the piece confident of his conclusion. "Sorry Richard," he writes before wishing him many years and signing it "Jimmy."

Questions for a theology of Romans 1-11

I was a little disappointed when Dunn's Theology of Paul the Apostle came out, as I was with Stephen Westerholm's Preface to the Study of Paul, that they both focus primarily on Romans and Dunn's outline looks a lot like a systematic theology outline. I think a really sophisticated Pauline theology would need to have a chronological component that traced possible developments in Paul's theology (like the Pauline Theology series published by the Pauline Epistles section of SBL) and induce its categories from Paul more than from our Christian logic (God, humanity, sin, Christ...).

Some of the Pauline theologies of the last couple years are a little more appropriate in outline, even if probably not as good as Dunn in their content. I'm not saying I could do better than either.

But as I make final exams and such :-) , I thought I would try to lay out the key theological issues in a theology of Romans, which of course overlaps significantly with Galatians. What are the key exegetical decisions for this moment in Pauline theology?

1. What is the gospel?
This question relates particularly to Rom. 1:1-4 and also 1:16.

2. What is the ethnic make-up of the audience of Romans?
OK, this is not a theological decision, but it is one of the major interpretive decisions when interpreting Romans.

3. Why did Paul write Romans?
Again, not a theological issue, but something to test over Romans.

4. What does the phrase, "the righteousness of God" mean in Romans?
Here we start from 1:16, but must also strongly consider 9:30-10:4, both in the light of the Jewish background. 3:21 is also worth considering.

5. What is salvation for Paul?
The term occurs in 1:16. 5:9 is also significant.

6. What is faith for Paul? What is its content? Whom is it directed toward?
Here 10:9 is important, as is the fact that faith in Romans 4 is directed toward God and in Romans 9:30-10:4 it is directed toward Christ.

7. What does the expression εκ πιστεως mean for Paul?
It is an allusion to Paul's understanding of Habakkuk 2:4, quoted in 1:17. Does it refer more to Christ's faithfulness (Richard Hays) or to human faith (Dunn)?

8. What is the role of works in final justification?
Here we have to do with 2:4-10.

9. What is the role of repentance in justification?
Paul has little to say about repentance in an overall sense (that is, other than the repentance of a specific sinner in 2 Corinthians), but 2:4 perhaps implies its role in his theology.

10. What does Paul mean when he says that all have sinned?
What is sin for Paul? Is it different from transgression? Who does he primarily have in mind when he uses the word "all"--all individuals or all as in both Jew and Gentile?

11. What does it mean to lack the glory of God?
Does it mean to fall short of a glorious standard or not to have the glory that Paul holds as our hope in 5:2 and 8:18-30?

12. What does it mean to be justified for Paul?
We mentioned "final" justification in verses like 2:13. What is justification in passages like 3:24? Is it the same?

13. What does Paul mean by the "faith of Jesus Christ"?
Here we have principally 3:22 at issue, as well as 3:26.

14. What does Paul mean by "works of law"?
Does he primarily mean meritorious actions or does he primarily have performance of the Jewish particulars of the Law?

15. What is the nature of atonement in Romans?
What, for example, does the word ιλαστηριον mean in 3:25? How does Christ's death and blood function in atonement? What is redemption in 3:24? What is reconciliation in 5:11?

16. What is the nature of boasting in Romans?
Is it primarily about an individual boasting in his or her own righteousness or is it more about Israel boasting of special standing before God because of being God's chosen people?

17. What is the nature of grace in justification?
In Romans 4 and 11:6, Paul puts grace over and against justification by works and associates it with faith. How does that work?

18. What is the role of Adam in Paul's theology?
Here we have particularly to do with 5:12-21. Some, however, see Paul's Adamic thought continuing into chapter 7.

19. What is the role of sin in the life of a believer?
Here we have chapters 6-8.

20. What does flesh signify for Paul?
Again, a very big topic in Romans 6-8.

21. What is the Law in Paul's thinking and how does it function?
This topic peeks through in Paul's earlier chapters, but is hit especially in chapter 7.

22. What is the role of the Spirit in the life of the believer and the church?
Here we have principally Romans 8.

23. How does Paul understand resurrection in Romans, particularly in relation to how believers are joined with Christ?
Again, Romans 6 and 8.

24. How can God be considered just when he is passing over the sins of the Gentiles and grafting them into God's people apart from the Law?
This is the principle topic of Romans 9-11.

25. What is the nature of predestination and foreknowledge in Romans 9-11?

26. What does it mean to confess Jesus as Lord?
This springs from 10:9 but questions about the relationship between Jesus and YHWH are also raised by 10:13. What is the Christology of Romans?

27. What is the destiny of Israel?
What does Paul mean when he says that "all Israel will be saved" in 11:26?

28. What is the nature of the parousia in Romans?
Here 11:26 comes into play.

29. What is the nature of God?
Not in a philosophical sense, but what are the key attributes of God in Romans 1-11? The unit ends with a doxology to Him, but we might easily induce many other characteristics such as his justice from elsewhere in the letter.

What have I missed of major exegetical issues in the first 11 chapters? Certainly the ethics of 12-15 are important for his theology as well, and there is the question of where Romans 16 was originally sent to.

There are too many books on Paul already, and I have only one published piece on him so Paul is not my principal expertise. But it is very tempting to blog through my answers to these questions, to organize the answers, and then self-publish a small book of them. Doubt it will happen--too much else to do (sigh).

Romans 10

Same drill. At least 100 word response to something in the post, then 2 further comments in relation to something someone else has commented. Worth up to 10 points of a 30 point total.
__________
9:30-33 "What therefore will we say? [We say] 1) that Gentiles who were not pursuing righteousness took hold of righteousness, even a righteousness on the basis of faith (ἐκ πίστεως), and 2) Israel, who was pursuing a Law of righteousness did not attain to the Law?

Why? Because [they pursued it] not on the basis of faith but as on the basis of works. They stumbled on the stone of stumbling, as it has been written, "Behold, I am placing in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of tripping, and the one who has faith on him will not be ashamed.
In my opinion, this passage establishes that when Paul uses the phrase "on the basis of faith," he is thinking of human faith primarily (rather than Jesus' faith). Faith in the verses above even refers to faith on Christ, even though in chapter 4 faith is mostly directed toward the God who raises the dead (e.g., 4:17).

The faith that (most of) Israel has not had is thus faith oriented around Jesus. Dunn's hypothesis that "works" here primarily refers to works of Jewish Law that most distinguished Jew from Gentile could work, although Paul could also simply have works in the absence of Christ in view.

The mention of a "righteousness on the basis of faith" perhaps argues for a double entendre back in 3:21, where Paul speaks of a "righteousness of God apart from works of Law." In other words, this righteousness would refer both to God's saving righteousness and the righteousness accredited to a believer on the basis of faith.

10:2-3 For I witness to them that they have a zeal but not according to knowledge, for not knowing the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own [righteousness], they were not subjected to the righteousness of God.
These two verses seem proof positive (against N. T. Wright) that Paul can use the phrase "righteousness of God" in relation to human righteousness. These may very well be double entendres, also referring to God's saving righteousness, but a reference to the human righteousness accredited on the basis of faith seems necessary from the train of thought.

I wonder if Paul thought of himself in the past when he wrote 10:1. Certainly he had a zeal at that time (cf. Phil. 3:6). His zeal was not according to knowledge.

As a point of application, it seems all too easy to be zealous over the wrong causes or even to be too zealous for something that is not as important as we make it out to be. This has seemed especially true with regard to religion throughout history.

10:4 For Christ is the goal of the Law leading to righteousness to everyone who has faith.
This statement seems similar to Galatians 3:23-25: "For before faith came we were being gaurded under Law, being imprisoned for the faith about to be revealed, with the result that the Law has become our paedogogue unto Christ, in order that we might be justified on the basis of faith."

It is common among certain interpreters to read this verse to say that Christ fulfilled the Law for us, that Christ is the end of the Law. But this is not Paul's meaning. Paul is simply saying again what he has said before, that the Law was intended to point us toward Christ by showing us our inability to be righteous in our own power, by our own works.

10:9-11 ... if you confess with your mouth "Jesus is Lord" and have faith in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart it is faithed leading to righteousness and with the mouth it is confessed leading to salvation, for the Scripture says, Everyone "who has faith in him will not be ashamed."
Here Paul gives us the content of faith, what we believe. We believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, as in Romans 4:24. Sanders is wrong to think that this sort of content of faith is unusual for Paul. It is the default content of faith.

To confess Jesus as Lord is to recognize that God raised him from the dead and enthroned him at His right hand as cosmic king. To confess him as Lord is to confess our allegiance to him as Lord, not a mere confession of words.

Such faith in God's doings and in Christ as the one to whom God is doing it and through whom He is doing it, effects coming salvation, when believers will escape the wrath of God.

10:13 For "everyone whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
This quote is fascinating because the verse Paul is quoting, Joel 2:32, clearly refers to YHWH--whoever calls on the name of YHWH will be saved. Richard Bauckham and others have argued that it is very likely that Paul would have known that YHWH was the LORD that stood beyond this text. Is Paul therefore equating Jesus with YHWH? Bauckham would say so.

One more to come...

Dunn's Partings 11: "The Parting of the Ways"

Chapter 12 is the concluding chapter of the book. Much of it is spent exploring how Judaism and Christianity today might relate to each other, and it ends with Dunn's sense that "At its historic heart, Christianity is a protest against any and every attempt to claim that God is our God and not yours" (337). It's interesting to think of him saying this at the Vatican. I don't really agree with Dunn here, for good or ill. Jesus and Paul were inclusive--if a person was willing to become a part of the kingdom. I say that as an observation.

The part of the chapter that I'm interested in as far as research is, however, the question of when Judaism and Christianity "parted." Dunn rightly indicates the sloppiness of the question. Rabbinic Judaism was not the whole of Judaism. It did not have the Jewish realm in its grip until the 300's, even though Javneh was recognized as the center of Jewdom by the Romans soon after the Fall of Jerusalem.

Jewish Christianity in its older sense continued. The tradition that Jerusalem Christians fled to Pella coincides with the rise of the Ebionites in that region in the second century. Such Christian Jews believed that Jesus was the Messiah but did not believe him to be divine in the sense of the Gospel of John. This group, like the Gnostics of Egypt, would eventually peter out.

Other forms of Judaism apparently flourished for a time after the destruction of Jerusalem. The time from AD70-135, when the Romans put an end to the bar Kokbah revolt, was "the golden age of Jewish apocalyptic" (306). Merkabah mysticism started. 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch both presume that the temple would be rebuilt. The two powers "heresy" comes into play.

Meanwhile Jews and Christians remain in contact. The pattern of synagogue leadership becomes the pattern of Christian assembly leadership (overseer and elders). Jewish texts like the Psalms of Solomon, Sibylline Oracles, Testament of Moses, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch were preserved by Christians, not by rabbinic Judaism.

Christians added to this literature and made it its own. Christians added chapters at the beginning and end of the Jewish 4 Ezra to make it the Christian 2 Esdras. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are Christian, but draw on Jewish source material. The Jewish Martyrdom of Isaiah with some addition becomes the Christian Ascension of Isaiah.

Meanwhile, the rabbis begin to ostracize Christian Jews. In some places, they become included within the minim clause of the 18 Benedictions as heretics, unable to eat with other Jews or participate in synagogue liturgy. Copies of the Torah made by Christians are not considered sacred.

The LXX is rejected as an appropriate translation of the Hebrew Bible, and Aquila makes another that is not so susceptible to signature Christian interpretations (like Isaiah 7:14). Indeed, books from Sirach on are excluded from the rabbinic canon. Christians continue to use these books as Scripture.

Greco-Roman authors begin to recognize Christianity as distinct from Judaism. Tacitus may not completely see the distinction around 100, but Suetonius does just a little later. The fiscus Judaicus of Domitian, the "Jewish tax," included anyone who looked anything like a Jew in practice. But with Nerva in 96, a person could opt out simply by declaration. Dunn suggests, "there is something both sad and modern about the likely conclusion that government taxation policy played a significant part in the final parting of the ways" (317).

Dunn's conclusion about when the parting took place? Sloppiness to be sure. But "by the end of the second Jewish revolt, Christian and Jew were clearly distinct and separate" (318).

Dunn's Partings 10: "Is Christianity Monotheist?"

OK, I changed my mind. I feel like I need to do a little more of James D. G. Dunn's, The Partings of the Ways. Chapter 11 is entitled, "Is Christianity Monotheist? The First Great Debate."

Hebrews
Dunn begins with Hebrews. His interpretations of wisdom language and Adam imagery are largely the same for Hebrews as they were for Paul and thus do not indicate a parting with Judaism for Hebrews with regard to monotheism. Dunn leans toward a fairly strong Platonic bent to Hebrews and so aptly concludes, "If Philo remains within the spectrum of recognizable and acceptable first-century Judaism, would the same not be true for Hebrews also?" (276).

James
James is no sweat on this issue. It barely expresss any Christology to speak of!

1 Peter
1 Peter also has no new spin on Christology that might be in tension with monotheism, although Dunn does discuss 1 Peter 1:20: "Jesus was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake." Does this statement imply pre-existence? I wonder if Simon Gathercole would say yes, given his expose on "I have come"language in the New Testament.

But Dunn cites the Testament of Moses 1.14: "Moses says, 'He designed and devised me, and he prepared me before the foundation of the world that I should be the mediator of the covenant.' No one would suggest that this statement implied Moses literal pre-existence.

Matthew
Matthew has a wisdom Christology in which Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. Matthew seems to modify Q and allude to Sirach in ways that imply that Jesus is God's wisdom. Dunn nevertheless concludes "that the terms of Matthew's christology are thoroughly Jewish and would have been so perceived by Matthew's Jewish readers when they made their own assessment of the significance of that christology" (281).

Revelation
The worship of Jesus in Revelation is indeed striking. In my opinion, it is more striking than anywhere else in the NT. Dunn points out precedents and parallels in Ezekiel 1 and Daniel 7 that show how imagery both of the Son of Man and the Ancient of Days are applied to Jesus.

Dunn concludes that "the visions of Revelation ... seem to be stretching that pattern [of apocalyptic] and indeed beginning to break it" (286).

Yes, Revelation would be unacceptable to the rabbinic Judaism that was beginning to take shape after the destruction of Jerusalem. But, then again, there are non-Christian Jewish movements within post-70 Judaism that they would similarly condemn. Yahoel, the angel of the Lord in the Apocalypse of Abraham was surely far too similar to God for rabbinic Judaism to accept.

It is during this period that the "two powers" in heaven heresy was arising and being defined as heresy by some rabbis. We remember that other rabbis--Akiba and especially Elisha ben Abuyah--had visions of Metatron as a second divine power in heaven. Similarly, Merkabah mysticism is similarly beginning to bloom. This wild and wacky world of post-70 apocalyptic and mystical Judaism is hardly what we tend to think of as "orthodox" Judaism. Dunn by the way argues in this chapter that the Parables of Enoch post-date AD70 (292-93).

John
At the end of a lengthy discussion of John--the longest in the chapter--Dunn concludes wisely, "So far as the Jewish authorities were concerned, the claims made by the (Johannine) Christians had gone too far: the Jesus of John's Gospel had made himself God" (299). On the other hand, "as far as the Fourth Evangelist was concerned, and the Christian Jews for whom he spoke, however, this last was a false evaluation of their belief" (299)--that is, that they had "knocked away the final pillar of second Temple Judaism," monotheism. Dunn claims, "John saw himself still as a monotheist."

If I were to explore these issues on a scholarly level, something I have neither the time nor the opportunity to do, I think statements like these are somewhat simplistic. To my surprise, I have felt like Dunn was simplifying things in this book for a somewhat more popular audience. I know it hardly seems that way in my circles, but there is a large number of really smart lay Christians out there who used to read Dunn's stuff, just like they read Tom Wright's stuff now.

Anyway, that's the only way I can explain why Dunn oversimplifies things in the book. I doubt we can study Revelation or John on a scholarly level without concluding they both had a composition history. I further suspect that their namesakes may not have been involved in the final stages of composition. We thus have to consider seriously the possibility of Christological development even within each book.

John clearly teaches that Jesus was pre-existent. John further is clearly in a major conflict with its Palestinian Jewish environment. Since J. Louis Martyn it has been passe in Johannine scholarship to see in the blind man ousted from the synagogue a reflection of the Johannine situation. Dunn says, "There is ... no indication that such a confession [of Jesus as Messiah] became a make or break issue between Jewish Christians and leaders of Judaism prior to 70. The earlier disputes, as we have seen, were about the Temple and the Torah. But in Palestine, Jews were evidently able to believe that Jesus was Messiah and yet remain largely undisturbed before the Jewish revolt" (289).

John sees Jesus as the exclusive revealer of God. As we've implied, Dunn sees most of the Daniel 7 speculation as consequent on the fall of Jerusalem. (292-93). Emerging rabbinic Judaism began to clamp down with the 12th Benediction condemnation of the minim. This condemnation probably was not formulated with Christians specifically in mind, but some certainly did come to include Christians under its condemnation.

John, however, sees Jesus as the exclusive revealer of God. Dunn suggests that "No one has ascended to heaven" in John is a polemic against other forms of mystical Judaism at this time, hints of which we also find in Colossians and possibly Hebrews 1.

Daniel Boyarin's term is a better description of what we find in Revelation and John than "parting." We are surely witnessing in these NT books the partitioning of the ways between some forms of Christianity and some forms of Judaism.

Dunn's Partings 9: "One God, One Lord"

Chapter 10 of James D. G. Dunn's, The Partings of the Ways is "One God, One Lord," and it asks whether or not Paul's writings have yet departed from mainstream Judaism. Dunn's answer is "no." Throughout the chapter he concludes repeatedly that "nothing of what has been covered above seems to have caused any question or concern among Paul's Jewish contemporaries" in relation to the issue of monotheism (170). In a comment reminiscent of Hurtado--while ironically differing from him on the issue--Dunn suggests that "Had Paul's christology been equally, or more contentious [as his understanding of the Jewish Law] at this time for his fellow Jews, we would surely have heard of it from Paul's own letters."

1. Resurrection
The belief of Paul and the earliest Christians that Jesus rose from the dead, that he was exalted to heaven, did not threaten monotheism. A unique and remarkable belief about a person who had just been alive, yes. But squarely within Judaism.

2. Exaltation to divine functions
Here Dunn disagrees with what would become Bauckham's position. The fact that Jesus participates in the judgment is quite remarkable, but it does not threaten Jewish monotheism for Jesus judges as God's representative.

Jesus' resurrection, his ascension, his apotheosis/transformation, these are remarkable things to attribute that someone who was recently alive. But we find Jewish precendents for them. Peter facilitates the giving of the Spirit, and no one thinks he threatens monotheism.

So to extend Dunn, I don't find Bauckham's assumption that Jesus must be included within the divinity because Jesus is on a throne persuasive. I think he fails to demonstrate that this must be the case. He mostly assumes it must be. His valiant attempts to work around Ezekiel the Tragedian and the Parables of Enoch are unpersuasive to me.

3. Jesus as Lord
This sentence sums up Dunn on this issue, and I find it hard to disagree: "Paul in fact calls Jesus 'Lord' as much as a means of distinguishing Jesus from God as of identifying him with God" (250).

"The LORD said to my Lord," says Psalm 110:1. Hebrews 1:6: "Therefore God, his God anointed him." And the timing of the acquiring of the name LORD is at the point of resurrection/exaltation. Bauckham in my opinion largely ignores this dynamic.

4. Jesus as Last Adam
I hink most will agree that Paul's Adam Christology did not impinge on monotheism. However, Dunn tries to make it undo the pre-existence of Christ in the Philippian "hymn." Few will go with him here.

As I've said here before, the Philippian hymn is the one place in Paul's writings that is very difficult not to see an affirmation of Christ's pre-existence. Its uniqueness, in that regard, is suspicious. But Dunn's understanding of the hymn seems problematic--that the form of God is Christ's Adamic state in the image of God, but that unlike Adam Christ did not try to seize equality with God.

Dunn also notes the key passage in the Life of Adam and Eve where God commands the angels to "worship" Adam. Dunn would not see the worship of Jesus in Paul as any more of a departure from Jewish monotheism than this.

5. Jesus as wisdom
Dunn makes an excellent case, I think, in this section that a Jew reading passages like Colossians 1:15ff would hear an implicit comparison of Christ to God's wisdom. The strength of his argument is that he so much as asks us to picture how a Jew with no prior knowledge of Christ would understand such passages. I think he is absolutely right in his answer to this question. However, the retort asks, But these would be individuals who knew a little something about Christ beforehand?

6. Jesus and the Spirit
Dunn here shows the striking way in which Paul glides from virtually equating the Spirit with the risen Christ to distinguishing the two. "Jesus and the Spirit were seen to overlap in function, but not wholly to coincide" (266). This stretches mainstream Jewish categories, but Dunn thinks it still stands within Judaism.

7. Jesus as God
Since Dunn does not think Paul wrote Titus, the only place he really considers as a possible flat out reference to Jesus as God is Romans 9:5. But the punctuation is at issue and Dunn favors as more likely the reading that separates, "God be blessed forever" from Jesus. One's answer here will largely turn on one's assessment of Paul's broader categories.

Dunn also addresses Hurtado's argument that the cultic devotion to Jesus in Paul already marks a significant mutation of Jewish monotheism. Dunn does recognize its significance: "These are indeed remarkable and we should not allow our familiarity with them to dull the astonishing character of such language spoken of one who had so recently lived on earth" (269).

But Dunn considers such imagery "a development only begun." In other words, it would lead eventually to something beyond Jewish monotheism. Just not yet in Paul. The hymns Hurtado cites are about Christ rather than to Christ. And despite invocations of Jesus, prayer is more often in Paul to God through Christ.

I might close by saying that I think it is a mistake to assume that the Christian understanding of Christ's divinity stands or falls on the interpretation of Paul. I think people like Bauckham, Hurtado, Wright, Witherington, etc. find themselves strongly driven to see as much of a later Christology in Paul as they can make the evidence fit without soiling their academic conscience. They are good Protestants.

But Roman Catholic scholars often have exactly the same impulse, it seems to me. Can't we have as much faith that God was unfolding these things in the early church as much as we Christians have faith that the New Testament unfolds things not yet on the Old Testament page?

Just a thought...

With some regret I need to move on from Dunn's Partings. I may only do one or two more chapters in Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ as well for now. Too many things to write these next couple of months...