Christianity in the Making

Christianity in the Making January 15, 2016

James D.G. Dunn’s long awaited project Christianity in the Making has been completed.

Dunn’s meaty 3-volume series includes the following:

Vol. 1: Jesus Remembered

Vol. 2: Beginning from Jerusalem

Vol. 3: Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity 

Dunn

This trilogy will not appeal to popular readers. These are robust academic works. Dense and rich with source material. (If you’re allergic to footnotes, you’ll be sneezing and wheezing through each volume.)

I used Dunn’s Jesus Remembered for some of my research in Jesus: A Theography. And some of the material in the next two volumes will appear in the revised and expanded version of The Untold Story of the New Testament Church (due to release in the future).

Dunn weighs in on some of the controversies surrounding the Synoptic material and its impact.

Regarding Paul, Dunn argues that his mission was to take the gospel to Gentiles and this transformed the movement which became “Christianity.”

As a result, Jewish Christianity was left behind and the faith became affected by a growing anti-Judaism.

He also points out that very little is said about Peter in the post resurrection era, and yet some regard him to be the first “Pope.”

Around 30-40 years stood between the public ministry of Jesus and the written record of what He said and did. Before them, what He said and did was passed on orally. However, the ancients had an extraordinary capacity to retain information. Their memories were far superior to that of ours due to extended use and reuse.

Nevertheless, Dunn says that the oral period overlapped the written period. For three generations, the oral tradition was actually preferred over the written traditions about Jesus, says Dunn. He says that the written tradition was an example of the oral tradition process.

On the subject of oral/written traditions, here’s a quote that will give you the flavor of Dunn’s writing style and the books themselves:

“If Jesus proved to be an influential figure, as I assume, then the space was filled by people influenced by him. Their memories would be shared, they would be circulated, they would be interpreted, they would be elaborated, but initially almost entirely in oral forms. The first disciples, apostles and teachers, would tell stories about Jesus in the gatherings of the first believers in Jesus. They would introduce the stories in their own individual styles and from the stories draw conclusions of relevance to their own situations. They would recall and repeat his teachings, grouping them in different combinations, drawing out different lessons for different circumstances, for the benefit of followers whose only access to that tradition was through those responsible for maintaining and preserving the oral tradition. It was not like the rote-learning or memorization of sacred texts — that is not the character of the Synoptic tradition. Rather it was living tradition, narratives which made the disciples’ own life story meaningful, teachings by which they lived their own lives. Elsewhere in the New Testament there is little or no effort made to remember it as Jesus tradition as such. Rather in letters of Paul and James, for example, it has been absorbed into the life-blood of their own ethical teaching . . . But the more important factor is that the Synoptic Gospels provide a remarkably consistent portrayal of the one whose story they tell, and one almost certainly indicative of shared memories which attest the impact made by Jesus . . . On the contrary, there is much to be said for regarding Mark’s Gospel as a natural development of the oral phase. Almost certainly it was written not for an individual to read privately, but for an audience to hear being read aloud. It uses the same tricks and techniques of the oral performance of tradition. It was in effect a written version of an oral recitation of Jesus tradition . . . Even though Matthew and Luke evidently knew and used at least one written source (Mark), they did not merely copy what Mark had written, but gave their own version even of the traditions which Mark conveyed. In other words, the flexibility of the oral transmission period carried over into the written forms of the tradition.”

My favorite living scholar, Craig Keener, summarizes the trilogy saying,

“Here we have on full display the distilled fruits of decades of research and engagement by a mature scholar of the first rank. James Dunn engages a vast range of secondary and primary literature in a way that only a senior scholar can do, synthesizing the best insights, critically and meticulously evaluating all sources and hypotheses, and producing a masterpiece of erudition that will be foundational for future work on the subject. While respectfully interacting with a range of scholarship, this work also forges its own noteworthy conclusions, in the process sometimes challenging conventional assumptions from across the spectrum of scholarly opinion.”

See my interview with James D.G. Dunn here.

To order each volume on discount, click on the following:

Jesus Remembered

Beginning from Jerusalem

Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity


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