Wednesday, July 15, 2020

200 Days of Schrödinger

Since high school, I return periodically to a life goal of understanding the basics of quantum physics. The gateway drug has always been Schrödinger's 1926 equation. I just have to understand this equation before I die. If I don't, I'm sure I'll get over it.

So I have bought book after book alleging to explain quantum physics in simple terms. I had high hopes for Leonard Susskind's book, but he just knows too much to realize how un-simple his book is. I found that book so angering. He thinks he is making things so clear--and I'm sure he is if you already know quantum mechanics. It's a complete fail as far as I'm concerned if you're someone like me.

I have a completely different reaction to Daniel Fleisch's A Student's Guide to the Schrödinger Equation. How seemingly effortless it is to understand Dirac's bra-ket notation after I spent weeks reading and re-reading Susskind. Now, mind you, I come to Fleisch having re-read the early chapters of Susskind over and over. Each pass I take at the beginning of the journey I grow stronger.

Words that have wandered through my mind without meaning begin to fill with content. I know what the Hamiltonian is. Soon I hope to know what an eigenvalue is. Fleisch promises to give flesh not only to Schrödinger's own wave formulation but to the annoying matrix version of Heisenberg and the mature form given by Dirac.

We will see! I'm now two weeks into the book at a page a day. I am astounded at Fleisch's clarity! So with some trepidation I announce what I have been calling these days--"200 Days of Schrödinger," give or take. On my current timeline, I should finish the book by the end of January.

Then perhaps I will be able to finish one of the many novels I have started, with the name itself, Schrödinger's Equation.

Monday, July 13, 2020

Book Bucket List

It's the weekend. I have been trying to finish on a 10,000 word writing project. Hopefully there will be some posts on Hebrews to help me get my head around stuff.

But I thought I'd jot down some writing projects old and new to get them out of my head and serve as goals.

Four Views...
I started this book back in 2004. Normally my goal is to get scholarly level books out of my head in ten years. I'm behind. :-)

Salvation...
I started this one in 2011. I could still make 10 years in theory. :-)

Greek for Ministers and Scholars
Most of this one is written. Had a contract to write this one over a decade ago, but didn't return it at the time. Now it would have to be self-published. Still hope to.

Hebrew for Ministers and Scholars
A similar one... to self-publish

How to Read the Bible
This is another failure. Over half written. Still want to finish whether it can be published or not.

A Biblical Theology
This one has been gnawing at me for about five years.

The Platonic Fallacy
I'd like to write one bona fide "scholarly" philosophy book.

Collection of Essays
I already have enough articles and chapters published to publish a collection of essays on Hebrews, but they are not evenly distributed. Hebrews 1, 3, 5, 8-10 and several book level. If no one is ever going to ask me to write a serious commentary, I'd at least like to publish a monograph collection of individual studies. This could start as a targeted program of article publication to fill in the gaps.

Novels
I've started over 50 novels since before England. Finished three (Gabriel's Diaries). Here are some others I'd like to finish:
  • At least two more in the Gabriel's Diaries series
  • Schrodinger's Equation
  • Raphael's Diaries

Wednesday, July 08, 2020

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!
______________________________
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)

Tuesday, July 07, 2020

The Worship of Jesus (11)

The eleventh book I want to mention by Jimmy Dunn is Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence. (2010)

Thus far in this series:
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)

1. Before getting to the book at hand, there are a few other books that Jimmy wrote in the early 2000s that should be mentioned. One that I especially want to highlight is the 2003 Eerdman's Commentary on the Bible of which Dunn was the main editor. In my opinion, if you can only buy one commentary, this is the one to buy.

Its authors include the leading scholars of that moment, and it extends beyond the Protestant canon into the Roman Catholic canon and even into 1 Enoch. It is a tremendous resource for those oriented around the original meanings of the biblical texts.

2. Somewhere also hiding in my library is his 1988 book The Living Word, which I have failed to mention thus far. A second edition came out in 2009 with added chapters on the gap between the academy and the church and preaching. This is a fascinating book, neither fully modern or postmodern. The book, like its thesis, embodies the fact that it is in the nature of traditions to get modified over time. The Bible itself embodies the modifications of past traditions.

So he suggests that concepts like inerrancy undermine the ongoing authority of the Bible because it does not allow the past to continue as a living word. I sense my earlier edition is in a box in the garage from my recent move and I have just ordered a copy of the new edition. I probably should give his 2009 edition a read.

By the way, Helen Bond wrote a memorial to Jimmy in which she mentions the shelves after shelves of books, library style, in his office on the front of Abbey House on the Palace Green in Durham. After he retired, Meta had to enact discipline about the acquisition and reception of books. I was delighted to see that he donated his library to St. John's College, although I have to wonder where they will put them all! Perhaps I vaguely remember an expansion?

While I am on the subject of tributes, I should point out the memorials of Scot McKnight, Loren Stuckenbruck, James McGrath, B J OropezaJohn Squires, Nijay Gupta. These all ring true on a deep level. It was not just the scholar that was so great but also the man. There are plenty of scholars who are brilliant but downright unpleasant or even worse. Jimmy was as spectacular as a person as he was a scholar.

3. Let me also mention that Dunn edited The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul in 2003. It is again a wonderful overview and introduction to Paul's letters with entries by some of the best Pauline scholars of that moment. I see that Bruce Longenecker has just come out with a new 2020 edition of the Cambridge Companion, with a new set of scholars to suit this moment.

Bruce is one of Dunn's heirs. I was glad to overlap with Bruce one year at Durham. He was teaching for Cranmer Hall at the time.

4. Although it is a magnificent volume, in the end the need to choose twelve books resulted in the omission of Beginning from Jerusalem, the second volume of Jimmy's summa series, Christianity in the Making. I mentioned volume 1 of this series in my post yesterday, Jesus Remembered. The series title, "Christianity in the Making" is reminiscent of his earlier book Christology in the Making.

Nevertheless, Beginning from Jerusalem is indeed a magisterial 1175 page volume, coming out in 2009. It understandably uses Acts as its basic template--what other choice do we really have? As we would also expect, it interweaves introductions to Paul's letters that are agreed to come from the hand of Paul. This is exactly the way that I teach New Testament Survey.

I might mention some of Dunn's decisions on dating. He dates Galatians neither to Paul's early days at Antioch (a favorite for many) or to Ephesus (as I do) but to Paul's time at Corinth. With regard to 2 Corinthians, Dunn sees it as one letter, however one written with new information coming in as he traveled and without taking the time to edit it into a tidy whole. He puts Philippians and Philemon at Rome, as they are traditionally located, with Colossians penned there also largely by Timothy, as we have mentioned.

The last chapter is on the legacy of first-generation leadership. He had already suggested a date for Paul's death as somewhere between 62-64. He does not think Paul was alive when Ephesians was written, but sees Ephesians as a celebration of Paul. I found his thesis on James intriguing, namely, that James is a collection of James' teaching in Greek rather than a letter composed by James in Greek. Dunn ultimately concludes that 1 Peter must surely be Petrine material, although is again quite open to the idea that someone else (Silas?) put it together.

4. And so finally I get to the book that was allegedly the focus of this eleventh post: Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? (2010).

I was privileged to see a first draft of this book in 2008, and Jimmy met with James McGrath and me to get feedback on the manuscript at SBL that year. I was impressed again with his ability to sift through detailed evidence and then zoom out to a bigger picture. I had long been wrestling with the same evidence that he seemed to sift through with much more ease.

By the way, Jimmy ribbed James McGrath and me a little about blogging in those days. Why not rather spend our time writing for publication? I think James has managed to balance the two better than I have. Although I cranked out a lot of books on the more popular side by blogging, I have no doubt but that blogging has resulted in me writing far fewer academic articles and books. Nevertheless, it has been good for my mental health.

It seems to me that Worship was a book out of time--at least that is the way it felt to me. Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham had won the day. "Early high Christology" was the prevailing wind. A book arguing for a slow development from reverence of Jesus to worship of him as God did not fit the Zeitgeist, at least not in the circles that read Dunn. True, Bart Ehrman would come out with a much less faith-friendly version of long and slow in 2014. But Ehrman was not really writing for individuals for whom Jesus was the Son of God.

5. This book was a little different in focus from Christology in the Making. That book was about Christology proper, the person of Jesus. Worship was related but about early Christian practice in relation to Jesus. When did the early church come to realize that Jesus was not just an exalted and anointed Messiah but in fact God incarnate? At least that's the way I would put the question.

One can believe that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity and still conclude it took the early church some time to fully understand this fact. Additionally, the canon itself is susceptible to a Trinitarian reading regardless of what might have been in the bubbles above its authors' heads. I do not wish to speculate exactly where Jimmy ended up on the ultimate truth claims.

Dunn at least believed that it took some time for the early Christians to get to that point. By contrast, Larry Hurtado had argued in 1988 that the practices of the early church--praying in the name of Jesus, singing hymns to Christ, etc--implied that they were already worshiping him. By the way, Dunn dedicated this book to Larry, who unfortunately also passed away last year of cancer--during SBL no less.

6. Like Hurtado, Dunn goes through these early practices of the church and language of worship in relation to Jesus. He eventually concludes that the reverence for Jesus in the early church was indeed unprecedented within Judaism, astounding in the light of Judaism. He also notes that God the Father was much more often the focus of prayer and worship. Jesus is more often the enabler of such prayer. As honored as Jesus the Son of God is in the New Testament, his honor is ultimately "to the glory of God the Father" (e.g., Phil. 2:11).

Dunn also travels the well-worn path through how Jews interacted with heavenly figures like angels and such. He concludes that the Jews did not worship them and thus that there was no precedent for Jewish worship of intermediary figures. I think there is possibly a little more nuance here. The key texts to be considered are Ezekiel the Tragedian, the Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch, Adam in the Life of Adam and Eve.

6. I will quote this in conclusion: "The results of this survey are astonishing. Here was the man Jesus of Nazareth, who had been executed within the lifetime of most of those who wrote the New Testament writings... They saw him as their Lord and did not hesitate to ascribe to him as Lord what various scriptures had only ascribed to the Lord God. They called upon his name in invocation and prayer... The seer of Revelation saw visions of universal worship being given to the Lamb. The title or status of God/god was used for him" (145). Yet Dunn also concluded that this reverence for Jesus was inextricably connected to the worship of God the Father.
______________________________
Other books or compilations by Dunn mentioned thus far:
Jesus and the Spirit (1975)
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)
A New Perspective on Jesus (2005)
Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011)

Monday, July 06, 2020

Jesus Remembered (10)

Dunn's summative work on Jesus appeared in the year of his retirement, 2003: Jesus Remembered. A couple years later a more concise version also appeared: A New Perspective on Jesus (2005)

Thus far in this series:
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)

1. It was completely fitting for Professor James D. G. Dunn to complete his writing career with a series of books proceeding through the history of earliest Christianity. Dunn did so, and two of those books will help us finish these "twelve days of Jimmy." The three volumes were:
I felt like Jesus Remembered had to be on the list, although in general I enjoy the smaller summations that senior scholars like Dunn, Wright, and Barclay often produce in the wake of their larger tomes. I will spend more time in a moment on A New Perspective on Jesus.

The book is 893 pages long, with five sections. The first recounts the quest for the historical Jesus up until the present, with its concomitant hermeneutical questions. The tail end of Dunn's career as a scholar saw the rise of postmodernism and a general turn away from the modernist, historical quest.

Dunn was sometimes criticized in his late career for not quite getting the postmodern critique. As you would guess, I am on the whole very sympathetic to his historical agenda even though I also accept the validity of alternative readings of texts. Although I suspect it loses me "friends" on both sides, I accept the validity both of a thoroughly historical approach to the biblical texts and a thoroughly canonical reading in the light of later orthodoxy. I would say that Dunn really only accepted the first while a lot of current scholarship pretends that the second is the same as the first, invoking Gadamer as an excuse (e.g., Stephen Fowl).

The second section then plots the well-trodden path from the Gospels back to Jesus. What are our sources? What are their relative values? What was the role of oral tradition? It is this component that I find most distinctive about Dunn's approach and that is the focus of his New Perspective on Jesus.

2. So in Part 3 we launch into the thick of the quest. This section deals with the mission of Jesus. Part 4 addresses Jesus' self-understanding, a theme that appeared throughout Dunn's work. Finally, Part 5 looks at the climax of Jesus' mission, extending into the resurrection.

I smile as Dunn includes the resurrection in his book on the historical Jesus. This is perfectly appropriate if you believe that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead in history! There have been plenty of scholars who have sharply divided the resurrection from the historical Jesus. The latter might be called the "Jesus of history" and the former the beginning of the "Christ of faith." Although he firmly believes in the historicity of the resurrection, even Tom Wright had one volume on the historical Jesus and a second on the Resurrection of the Son of God.

Yet it was completely in keeping with his historical orientation for Dunn to include the resurrection in his volume on the historical Jesus.

3. As magisterial as this treatment of Jesus is, I find more distinction in Dunn's smaller volume, A New Perspective on Jesus, particularly in its treatment of oral tradition. When you think of the form criticism stage of New Testament studies in the early nineteen hundreds it is hard for me not to shake my head at its failure to break free of a literary paradigm.

My sense is that Dunn had been significantly impacted by the thinking of Kenneth Bailey, who in 1991 wrote a piece on what he called "informal, controlled oral tradition." This concept derived extensively from Bailey's decades among oral cultures in more than one Middle Eastern society. The basic idea is that oral tradition in oral cultures tends to pass on faithfully core features of a story. However, the details tend to vary from telling to telling.

Like Bailey, Dunn found this concept deeply suggestive for analyzing the stories of the Gospels. One of the key insights, obvious though it is in retrospect, is that oral traditions about Jesus did not start after his resurrection. Oral traditions began before Jesus was crucified! Dunn relates this insight to what is often called "Q," the hypothetical sayings source on which Matthew and Luke are said to draw.

"The Q material first emerged in Galilee and was given its lasting shape there prior to Jesus' death in Jerusalem" (27). This is indeed a "new perspective" on the historical Jesus. Oral traditions about Jesus began immediately after Jesus said or did something. This seemingly obvious point seems notoriously absent from a century's worth of historical Jesus discussion.

So Dunn looks for the "characteristic Jesus." This approach is not as concerned with the question of tracing specific sayings of Jesus as with the features of Jesus' teaching and ministry that appear repeatedly in multiple layers of tradition. (It reminds me also of Dale Allison's 2010 approach in Constructing Jesus).

One of his final comments in regard to Q is appropriate: "If much of the shared Matthew and Luke material attests oral dependency rather than literary dependency, then the attempt to define the complete scope and limits of Q is doomed to failure" (122).
______________________________
Other books or compilations by Dunn mentioned thus far:
Jesus and the Spirit (1975)
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)
Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011)

Sunday, July 05, 2020

On the ninth day of Jimmy...


... we get his 1998 synthesis of Paul's theology: The Theology of Paul the Apostle

Thus far in this series:
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)

Some of the other books he wrote or edited are mentioned at the bottom.

1. When you are as prominent a scholar as Jimmy Dunn, you begin to write summative works and series as you approach retirement. The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998) was one such work, where Dunn tried to provide a synthesis of Paul's theology. It came out five years before his retirement in 2003.

Biblical theology was clearly a matter of great interest to Jimmy. While he wrote several commentaries and numerous micro-studies, he was always interested in the overarching themes and patterns. Baptism and Jesus and the Spirit were theologies of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Unity and Diversity was an early attempt to identify overarching New Testament theology.

By the way, this is probably as good a place as any to mention two collections of his essays that appeared in the late 90s. The two volumes were titled, Christ and the Spirit, with one volume on Christology (1998) and one on Pneumatology (1997).

2. Dunn had lectured on aspects of Paul's theology numerous times at Durham. He seems to indicate in his Preface that those notes were transformed into this marvelous tome from Easter to the end of summer 1996 (cf. p. xvi), which a draft for this 737 page masterpiece off to Eerdmans by the end of September. Unbelievable.

I never heard Jimmy lecture to undergraduate students. I picture him lecturing from a manuscript, much like those who preach from a manuscript. I welcome insight from others but at least that possibility alleviates my writing envy a little. He clearly had been thinking about this book for a long time and I suspect had a fair amount of notes to start with.

3. The question of how to approach such a complex subject as the theology of someone like Paul is somewhat daunting. You wouldn't want to proceed chronologically through his writings. That wouldn't give you a systematic overview. Ridderbos had tried in 1966, before new perspectives on Judaism had kicked in. Johann Christiaan Beker had also tried in 1980, trying to play the "coherent" elements of Paul's theology against its "contingent" elements. 

In the end, Dunn decided to use Romans as the focal point from which to look at his overall theology. In most respects, it is hard to complain about the results. As usual, this is a highly accessible and understandable book. It seems much more accessible than N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, which in the end is striving to be much more than a biblical theology. Wright seems to analyze Paul's "worldview" in the light of his complex context. Yet Dunn's headings are a lot more self-explanatory than something like Wright's, "A Cock for Asclepius" or "Athene and Her Owl."

Dunn's approach amazingly seems to work with the general outline of Romans. The topics are theological and proceed logically, yet they correspond roughly to the train of thought in Romans: God, humankind, sin, law, gospel, Christology, salvation, experience of salvation, Israel, the church, ethics.

If you had been following Jimmy's writings over the years, you would not be surprised by the content of these sections. You would indeed have systematic access to Jimmy's work. The Theology of Paul the Apostle thus becomes a kind of encyclopedia of Jimmy's interpretations of Paul. When you get to his treatment of Christ's pre-existence, you are not surprised to hear him conclude that Christ for Paul was the embodiment of God's pre-existent Wisdom (292). When you get to his sense of the Christian in relation to sin, you are not surprised to find that he disagrees with the majority and sees Romans 7 as the ongoing struggle of a believer (472).

Meanwhile, he engages Paul's other writings from the base camp of Romans. He does not consider the Pastorals to be the genuine voice of Paul, so he does not really engage them. He engages 1 Corinthians quite a bit when he gets to Paul's ethics.

5. It seems to me there is something lost by using Romans as a base camp. In a way it's too easy. Galatians and Romans reflect Paul when he is engaging his conservative Jewish opponents. Yet their concerns do not dominate 1 Thessalonians or 1 Corinthians. Certainly he manages to work in other themes, like participation in Christ. But it seems like there would be a more "indigenous" way of organizing Paul's world.

I say "world" because of course even to organize Paul around theology is to follow the ideological predilections of Western scholarship. In his own way Wright tries to supersede these tendencies with his own categories of story and praxis.

6. I wonder if the categories of Dunn's conclusion might have made a more interesting outline, even if not one that would have served as well as a resource. In the conclusion he suggests a kind of archaeology of Paul's theology. First, there is the ground layer of Paul's thinking, his fundamental Jewish understandings. Then there is the "center" of Paul's thinking, his basic understandings of Christ formed in keeping with his conversion to the Jesus sect. Finally, there was the part of his thinking that was in dialog with various situations that arose in the course of his ministry.

As for development, Dunn did not see a good deal of development in the roughly ten years of Paul's core writings. He sees rather some possible shifts in emphasis. Perhaps at Thessalonica Paul shifted his teaching on the parousia. Perhaps after Galatians he emphasized his role as apostle more. Perhaps after emphasis he talked more about suffering.

Nevertheless, I personally don't think any of the new glut of Pauline theologies have as much to offer us as Dunn's.
______________________________
Other books or compilations by Dunn mentioned thus far:
Jesus and the Spirit (1975)
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)
Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011).

Saturday, July 04, 2020

Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (8)

Inner leaf of my copy
of Colossians/Philemon
I have not focused much on Dunn's commentaries so far. I find his books and articles much more stimulating. However, today I do want to single out his 1996 commentary The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon.

Thus far in this series:
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)

I have also slipped in Jesus and the Spirit (1975), Romans 1 and 2 (1988), Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990), Jews and Christians (1992), Galatians (1993), Paul and the Mosaic Law (1996), and Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011).

1. When I was a doctoral student in Durham, we had a weekly New Testament Seminar on Monday afternoons at 4pm. It was a highlight of each week. What was particularly exciting about these seminars was the chance to walk through some writing project that Jimmy was working on. During my time at Durham, Dunn wrote commentaries on 1 Corinthians (1995), Colossians/Philemon (1996), and Acts (1996).

For the first two, the seminar enjoyed the treat of engaging these biblical texts not only with the collective knowledge and insight of Jimmy himself but the whole department and the cadre of doctoral students in residence. Indeed, I would take from that experience a wealth of insights that I tried to bring to bear on a commentary of 1 Corinthians of my own. My take-aways on Colossians also made their way into other of my books, such as this one.

2. The most striking aspect of Colossians was the question of whether the "philosophy" of Colossians 2 was syncretistic or mystical. The standard interpretation was that this group about which Paul warns was a Jewish group that worshiped angels. Such a notion seemed strange unless it was hyperbole.

Enter the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the newly published texts was "The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice." This text exposed a mystical aspect to the Qumran sect (presumably), who must have seen their worship on the Sabbath as a kind of participation in the worship of heaven. In his commentary, Dunn would take the position that this group thought they were worshiping with angels.

It was more of a treat than I realized then to be at Durham in the time just after the Dead Sea Scrolls were fully published. We spent a semester in the seminar going through Florentino Martinez's freshly published, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated. They were also a major focus of Loren Stuckenbruck's expertise.

3. When Dunn's commentary finally came out, I was struck with a couple aspects of the introduction. First, although he had clearly worked with Colossians since time immemoral, it seemed clear that he had really approached this commentary with an open mind. He did not write the introduction until after he had written the verse by verse commentary. This method has stuck with me--how can you really introduce something you haven't written yet? You don't yet know what your introducing!

Second, I was impressed with how he handled the question of pseudonymity, whether he was right or wrong. Colossians is one of those writings in the middle of the authorship question. In the scholarly world, there is a strong tendency to consider the Pastoral Epistles as "pseudonymous," written after Paul's death in order to bring his authority to bear on a later context. On the other end of the spectrum are the writings like Romans and 1 Corinthians that no one questions were written by Paul himself.

Colossians is somewhere in the middle. Raymond Brown once suggested that perhaps 40% of NT scholars think Colossians was pseudonymous. Dunn, after finishing his commentary, concludes that Colossians just doesn't quite feel like Paul directly. His suggestion is quite clever. He suggests that Timothy was the principal writer, with Paul's approval.

Very clever. On the one hand, Timothy's name is on the letter. In that sense should we even call Dunn's position "pseudonymity"? It is a way to place Colossians within the lifetime of Paul and Timothy, by Paul and Timothy, and yet explain the slight differences in style and approach. Again, I don't know if Dunn is correct, but it is an example of his ability to bring fresh perspectives on old problems.

Friday, July 03, 2020

On the seventh day of Jimmy...

James Dunn passed away a week ago today, We have been going through one of his key works each day. So far we have looked at...

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)

I have also slipped in Jesus and the Spirit (1975), Romans 1 and 2 (1988), Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990), Galatians (1993), and Paul and the Mosaic Law (1996).

1. The seventh book I want to mention is The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (1991).

The "new perspective" on Paul had at its core the surprisingly obvious realization that Paul was a Jew and, in his own mind, remained an Israelite his whole life. One of Dunn's final compilations was a 2011 book called Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels. Included in that volume is a great article from 1999 called, "Who Did Paul Think He Was?" It's just a perfect example of Dunn's lucidity, clarity, and evidence-based approach to questions.

So one side of the new perspective was a sense of the continuity between Paul and Judaism. The other side of the new perspective was a more balanced perspective on the nature of Judaism itself. Embarrassing stereotypes were called into question. For example, the writer of the Qumran hymns prays, "What is someone born of a woman among all your awesome works? ... His base is the guilt of sin... Only by your goodness is humanity acquitted" (1QH 5.20-21, 23). Sure doesn't sound like he thinks he can earn his salvation! [1]

2. This more accurate reassessment of Judaism was bound to prompt a similar reassessment of the historical Jesus. In the 1980s, Tom Wright coined the phrase, the "third quest" for the historical Jesus. It's core feature was, unsurprisingly, interpreting Jesus against a more accurate understanding of Judaism. For example, it has been all too easy over the years to function with a pretty cardboard sense of the Pharisees. Picture a cartoon villain with a long curly mustache. They just might have been a little more complex than that.

So the great trio of new perspectives--Sanders, Dunn, and Wright also made contributions to Jesus studies in the late twentieth century. Sanders' key work was Jesus and Judaism (1985). Wright's summative work on the historical Jesus was Jesus and the Victory of God (1997). I'll mention Dunn's work Jesus Remembered (2003) in three days.

3. The progression was all too predictable. Once Jesus, Paul, and Judaism were reassessed, the question arose--"If there was no immediate parting of Christianity from Judaism, when exactly was the 'parting of the ways'?" Dunn, once again, was right on top of the wave with our book d'jour, Partings of the Ways.

Even before Dunn gave his own answer to this question, there had been another Durham-Tübingen Symposium in 1989 on this topic. Dunn as usual sat in the driver's seat, about to assume the mantle in 1990 as Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham. This chair was beyond the role of Professor, named after the greatest British New Testament scholar of the late nineteenth century. The conference volume was published as Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways AD70-135. 

4. Notice the slight difference in title between the conference volume and Dunn's 1991 book. The conference spoke of a "parting" in the singular, and located this parting to a specific time period between the destruction of Jerusalem and the bar Kokhba revolt. One take-away from that meeting must have been a sense on Dunn's part that it was more complicated than one monolithic parting: thus "partings" plural in the title.

This sentiment would follow in a number of other works by other authors in the years that ensued. Take, for example, the 2007 book, The Ways That Never Parted, edited by Becker and Reed. Daniel Boyarin would write a 2006 book called Border Lines, in which he uses the word "partitioning" of the ways, suggesting a much more complicated and fuzzy border between Judaism and Christianity in the centuries following Jesus. [2] I recently finished writing up my own thoughts on Hebrews on this question, finally published last year, A New Perspective on Hebrews: Rethinking the Parting of the Ways. Whether I am right or not on Hebrews, I'm proud of the summaries I gave in this book of the new perspective, the partings discussion, and debates over development of the worship of Jesus.

5. One might wonder when I am going to get to Dunn's book! His book is organized around what he calls the "four pillars" of Judaism. Of course he is going to get flack for this. I seem to remember that Jacob Neusner had at him, for example, just as he did at Sanders. Judaism is more a religion of practice than ideology, not to mention that Dunn here was echoing the concept of the five pillars of Islam.

The four are monotheism, election, covenant/law, and land/temple. The concept of monotheism itself has been deconstructed in the meantime, not least at a conference I attended at St. Andrews in 1998. It's essays were published as The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism.

Despite its imprecision, I often use this framework when I am explaining Deuteronomistic theology to students. There was one God for Israel, and one people for Yahweh. If they would serve him exclusively, he would bless them in their land. I think this is a fair summary of Deuteronomy 28-29 as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.

6. Dunn proceeds to the temple. In chapter three he notes that "Jesus had a very positive attitude to the Temple" (49). On the other hand, it seems true that Jesus "did not share the concerns or degree of concern regarding purity" that Pharisees did (58). Perhaps in that regard he was regarded as a threat. Dunn thinks Jesus' action in the temple is what likely set in motion his arrest (69). Dunn believes Jesus anticipated his death (71). These positions all seem credible to me, as is Dunn's conclusion to this chapter: "Jesus appears on this subject to stand well within the diversity of second Temple Judaism" (74).

Chapter 4 looks at evidence from the early church in Acts. He sees evidence here in Stephen as "the beginning of a radical critique of the Temple on the part of the infant Christian movement" (90). He sees here "the beginning of a breach between Christianity and the predominant Temple-centered Judaism of the mid-first century." He also suggests Hellenists like Stephen represented a split within the Jesus movement itself (99). I'm a little hesitant about this wording, but he was writing in 1991 (second edition 2006).

Chapter 5 then finishes the series of temple-related chapters. Dunn concludes that, with Paul's theology of sacrifice, "there is no longer a need for the sacrificial cult" (105). He takes the traditional view that Hebrews "was written to warn against the danger of a relapse into traditional Judaism" (117). Accordingly, he concludes that "it is difficult to avoid talking of a parting of the ways in the case of Hebrews" (121). He concludes similarly with John: "the movement for which he speaks has parted company with mainstream Judaism precisely at the point of the cult" (123). In scholarship, "cult" refers to the sacrificial system.

Well, I ended up parting with Jimmy on this chapter. If Hebrews and John were written after the destruction of the temple, it makes a difference. Rabbinic Judaism has not parted with Judaism because it doesn't need a physical temple! So if these books were written after the destruction of the temple, which I think they were, then they cannot be said to depart from Judaism on this score, in my opinion. Hebrews can then be seen as much as a consolation in the wake of the temple's destruction as a polemic against it.

As a side note, Dunn first delivered this book at a series of lectures at the Pontifical Institute in Rome (see p.119n.61). Let's just say that his teaching on Hebrews as precluding the need for any priest or human intermediary sparked some discussion! He was never in your face or had an animus to these things, but he was definitely a "T" personality who didn't shy away from saying what he thought, even if it was very controversial for the context. I remember the Q & A session at Asbury having a similar dynamic.

7. Chapters 6-8 deal with the question of covenant and land. Here Dunn brought his new perspective understandings to bear on the question of continuity and discontinuity. With regard to the Law, Dunn concludes that Jesus was not calling the Law itself into question but "the law understood in a factional or sectarian way" (149). With regard to Paul, Dunn saw the incident at Antioch in Galatians 2 as the beginning of a fissure that would eventually undermine the covenant pillar of Judaism (178). He concludes, "It was Paul who effectively undermined this third pillar of second Temple Judaism (183).

I might clarify that Paul himself did not see himself as undermining the Law (cf. Rom. 3:31), even if he started a trajectory that later Gentile Christianity would widen. As Dunn himself says, "Paul was attacking neither the law, nor the covenant... but the law as a boundary round Israel, marking off Jew from Gentile" (182).

Chapter 8 then looks at the New Testament in relation to Israel. He concludes, "they still wrote for those for whom the issue was not closed" (212). For example, "John was still fighting a factional battle within Judaism" (209). I have thus often said, along with others, that it is more accurate to speak of "Christian Jews" in the New Testament rather than "Jewish Christians." Indeed, I have even used the expression "Gentile Jews" for early Gentile Christians.

8. The next three chapters end the sequence with monotheism. He covers much of the same ground as Christology. He concludes chapter 9 on Jesus with a sense that "Jesus himself still stood well within the boundaries of second Temple Judaism at the point of Jewish monotheism" (240). Dunn ends chapter 10 with what I believe is a very important observation about Paul: "Had Paul's christology been equally, or more contentious [than his position on the Law] at this time for his fellow Jews, we would surely have heard of it from Paul's own letters" (270).

For John, Dunn draws a mixed inference. "John saw himself still as a monotheist" (299). But from the standpoint of emerging rabbinic Judaism, "Christian claims for Jesus had taken a step too far. From their perspective the parting of the ways had already happened" (300).

9. Dunn concludes the book with a sense that Judaism before AD70 was quite diverse and thus that something like a normative Judaism did not emerge until the rabbinic Judaism following the destruction of Jerusalem (312). Even this claim can be questioned, however. He would thus say that "the period between the two Jewish revolts (66-70 and 132-135) was decisive for the parting of the ways."

More significant, he would argue, was a parting of the ways "between mainstream Christianity and Jewish Christianity" (313). He would argue that what was more in continuity with earliest Christianity would become heretical Jewish Christianity in the second century (e.g., the Ebionites). He concludes, "By the end of the second Jewish revolt, Christian and Jew were clearly distinct and separate" (318). Again, the book mentioned above by Becker and Reed would dispute even this conclusion, as would Boyarin.

[1] If I might wend my wares a little, I suspect that some of the inaccurate assessment came from the fact that Lutheran and Reformed thinkers were doing it. These branches accuse Methodism of the same sort of works righteousness that they saw in Judaism. The irony is that this "works righteousness" is none other than what the New Testament teaches!

N. T. Wright has done a good job of showing the role of works even in justification in Paul's writings. See, for example, Justification. As a small sample, see 2 Corinthians 5:10: "It is necessary for us all to appear before the judgment seat of Christ for each to give an account for the things s/he did in the body, whether good or evil."

The two volume "the Reformation strikes back" was Justification and Variegated Nomism.

[2] I listened to the conclusion yesterday of the Enoch Seminar conference on the Origins of Evil. Boyarin was critiquing the too facile use of terms like Judaism, Gnosticism, monotheism, etc. He reminded me of Heikki Räisänen--so detailed oriented that he finds it difficult to label these entities. He sees only the differences. In his mind they all fall apart.

Thursday, July 02, 2020

The New Perspective on Paul (6)

I've been posting reflections on the work of Jimmy Dunn, that great giant of biblical studies, my Doctorvater, who passed away this last Friday. Thus far we've looked at

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)

Yes, I have also cheated a little. We have also briefly mentioned Jesus and the Spirit (1975), Romans 1 and 2 (1988), and Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990).

1. I want to go a little out of order now. Although Jimmy is known for many things, probably the biggest thing he is known for is the "new perspective on Paul," a phrase that he popularized. [1] This was again part of his genius, his ability to sense the Zeitgeist, name it, channel it, and amplify it.

Yesterday, I mentioned this contribution in his book, Jesus, Paul, and the Law, which was a 1990 collection of presentations and articles. Because the new perspective on Paul was a key focus of his writing in the 80s and 90s, I want to jump now to a fuller compilation of articles and presentations from 2005 which included some of the same pieces. This volume is the full, mature collection of his writings on the new perspective and Paul and so is the best place to approach his contributions on this subject:

The New Perspective on Paul

2. In 1946, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. In a story that is interesting in its own right, they didn't fully get published until 1991. However, the main texts did get published fairly quickly and they prompted a re-examination of previous assumptions about Judaism among Christian scholars. The Holocaust also prompted self-examination among Christian scholars--to what extent had a pretty cardboard, straw man view of Judaism played a role in anti-Semitism?

In 1977, Ed Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders went through pretty much all of second Temple Jewish literature and showed that Judaism was not this sinister "works-righteousness" religion from which that "pure," grace-oriented Christianity broke away. The Jews did not have to do works to "get in." They were born in. Keeping the Law was more about "staying in" the covenant. (I always wondered if Sanders had this breakthrough in part because he grew up Methodist. :-)

Sanders coined the phrase "covenantal nomism" to express the idea that Jews kept the Law (nomism) because they were part of a covenant. Further, he argued that the logic behind Paul's soteriology (his sense of salvation) was not "I couldn't keep the Law so Christ did it for me." Paul's train of thought was rather "Christ is the solution so Law-keeping must not have been." Christ represents a change in the "system of righteousness."

2. In 1982, Dunn presented a seminal lecture titled, "The New Perspective on Paul" in which he began to think through the possible implications of a "new perspective" where Jews kept the Law because they were "in" the people of God rather than to get in. He did not find Sanders' account above entirely satisfying.

First, he suggests that language of justification in Paul was not about an initiatory experience but a confirmatory one. "God's justification is rather God's acknowledgement that someone is in the covenant" (107). Second, "Paul is fully at one with his fellow Jews in asserting that justification is by faith" (108). Therefore, "justification by faith is not a distinctly Christian teaching."

I'll confess that the first point has never fully gelled with me because Galatians is, after all, about the inclusion of the Gentiles. That is to say, the Gentiles were not already in before justification. Similarly, since I have taken the "faithfulness of Jesus Christ" interpretation for the first pistis Iesou Christou expression in Galatians 2:16, I would agree that Paul's Christian opponents agreed with Paul here. However, it sure seems like Paul's claim of justification by faith is at least perceived as a different position than his opponents in Romans 4.

I have thus found a couple of Dunn's comments here suggestive, although not exactly in the way he took them. For example, I agree that in the expression, "through faith of Jesus Christ," "Paul appeals to what was obviously the common foundation belief of the new movement" (112). I just take that foundation to be "the faithfulness of Jesus Christ" to death, common ground between Paul and Peter.

I also agree that in Galatians 2:16 we are getting the distinction between James and Peter's understanding and that of Paul. They see faith and works as supplementary in justification--a person is not justified by works of Law except through the faith of Jesus Christ, the "most obvious grammatical sense" of ei me in Greek. Paul's insight is that these are "now posed as straight alternatives" (113). The alternatives for me, however, are Sanders' two "righteousing" systems.

3. Where I believe Dunn's real contribution in this discussion lies is his realization that the expression, "works of Law," is not primarily focused on "works" in the abstract. In Galatians especially, this expression refers to those marks of Jewish identity like circumcision, food laws, Sabbath observance. As N. T. Wright put it in his Oxford dissertation, these became emblems of "national righteousness" (114). [2]

Although Dunn received a lot of push-back on this position, it seems clear to me that circumcision is clearly the "work" that is under principal discussion in Galatians, and festival observance is also mentioned. Romans is slightly more abstract in its discussion of works, but even there Paul is dealing with the inclusion of the Gentiles. Accordingly, the works that primarily distinguished justification by works and by faith would still be these Jewish identity markers. [3]

In a 1984 presentation, Dunn expanded more on his position: "Works of the Law and the Curse of the Law (Gal. 3:10-14)." Dunn of course received a lot of push-back from Reformed and Lutheran circles. Several chapters in New Perspective are reiterations of Dunn's defense of this position: "Yet Once More--the Works of the Law" (1992), "Whatever Happened to 'Works of the Law'" (1998), and "Noch einmal 'Works of the Law': The Dialog Continues" (2002). In the new, quite long prefatory chapter in New Perspective, Dunn was still defending his interpretation of the phrase, although arguably softening his approach a little.

4. I was privileged in the spring of 1994 to be present for a "Paul and the Mosaic Law" conference in Durham, done jointly with the New Testament faculty from Tübingen. It was quite an event, with virtually all the key players there except Ed Sanders. Sanders had seriously offended the German scholars by assassinating the character of Joachim Jeremias in a scathing piece in JBL, I believe.

The Table of Contents says it all: Martin Hengel, N. T. Wright, Richard Hays, John Barclay, Hans Hübner, Otfried Hofius, Heikki Räisänen, Hermann Lichtenberger, Bruce Longenecker, Stephen Westerholm, Steven Barton.

Dunn was too optimistic about the possibility of consensus. Who is to say that any of these scholars really changed their perspective much because of the interaction. But the conference volume is the best snapshot of the state of the question in the mid-nineties, with the exception of Sanders.

5. There is one more article in New Perspective that I think should be mentioned. "4QMMT and Galatians" (1997). 4QMMT was a smaller document among the Dead Sea Scrolls that, unfortunately, was not officially published until 1994. The title of this document, "Some of the Works of the Law," was surely too close to Paul's phraseology to be coincidental. Surely when Paul uses the phrase, "works of Law," he was referring to a known quantity.

Dunn concludes that the expression, "works of the Law," was "a summary reference to a series of legal/halakhic rulings/practices." In MMT, Dunn finds that "righteousness is reckoned to those who are faithful in observing the ruings and following the practices (works) outlined" (344). If the contextual arguments from Galatians were not enough, here we have historical evidence that "works of Law" was a phrase with a background in Jewish disputes over how to keep the particulars of the Jewish Law faithfully.

6. I will not be featuring Dunn's Galatians commentary as one of my twelve books, but let me end this post by noting that the interpretations that Dunn worked out in more detail in these articles found their way into his 1993 commentary on Galatians. I personally think the articles are more helpful. He also wrote, The Theology of Paul's Letter to the Galatians in the New Testament Theology series.

[1] The phrase was actually first used by Tom Wright in a 1978 lecture, but Dunn's megaphone made it a thing.

[2] The word "national" probably doesn't work as well right now, given that one might think of nationalism. Nationalism would be an anachronistic framework and thus is potentially confusing language.

[3] Even Ephesians, where this discussion is the most abstracted of all into faith and works in general (Ephesians does not use the central Pauline expression, "works of Law"), the boundary wall between Jew and Gentile is in view.