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:
- Jesus Remembered (2003) - on the historical Jesus
- Beginning from Jerusalem (2008) - focus on the book of Acts
- Neither Jew nor Greek (2015) - the rest of the New Testament
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).
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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)
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