NJNG: The Options

Our decade is blessed with the completion and near completion of two scholars’ lifetime projects that take us from Jesus to the 2d Century. We are looking in this series at James D.G. Dunn’s completion of his series “Christianity in the Making” with the recent publication of Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity. I began the series with an interview with Jimmy. (Yes, when I arrived at Nottingham to study under Dunn, he came to our home the very next morning and asked us to call him “Jimmy.” A bit difficult for a student charmed by Dunn’s great books and reputation, but I soon learned that everyone called him that.)

But alongside Dunn’s work is the 4-volume series from NT Wright (The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God, and now Paul and the Faithfulness of God). Wright’s is more of a narrative arc while Dunn’s a more technical narrowing down on no less than fifty seminal topics in the rise of early Christianity. Dunn’s project then is how Jesus became Christianity.

To read Dunn’s 3 volumes is an education into NT studies by itself. I am willing to say that anyone who reads the whole three volumes, comprehending what is read and letting it register, will be comprehensively educated in NT scholarship.

Let this be an important reminder: no scholars today are any more “Protestant” in method than Dunn and Wright for each is attempting to get back to the NT “as it really was” and both also think the church needs to listen to the discoveries in order to be more faithful to the NT itself. And it maybe needs then to be said that their “Protestant critiques” are fearless in turning their gaze on the Reformers themselves: Yes, they respect Calvin and Luther and Wesley (Dunn’s always been a Methodist, Wright an Anglican) but they too must be held up to the fresh light we find in the NT in its context.

Dunn begins by sketching how we get from Jesus to the late 2d Century, say to 180, that is to Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses. There are, he suggests, four basic options, though he carves a distinctive and creative path:

1. The emergence of the Great Church: some think the story told by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History is what actually happened, a kind of divine providence leading to the Church at Rome with all the offices of the church. Thus, Dunn:

This has proved to be the dominant view of Christianity’s beginnings for most of Christianity’s history. The assumption has been: What is (now) has always been. In particular, following the lead given by Eusebius, it was assumed that there has always been the threefold ministry of deacon, priest and bishop. At the heart of Christian ministry has always been the concept and practice of priesthood. The eucharist has always been as it is (8).

In essence there has always been a canon and that canon has always been the Great Church’s unified core and that canon spoke with univocity. This restates — and it will be found in spades in NJNG — is that the earliest churches were diverse but over time their diversity was masked by later church decisions pretending to a uniformity and unity that was not to be found in the 1st Century. Thus,

All this despite the fact that an undeclared hermeneutical reading of these texts (a canonical perspective) ensured that they could be heard to speak with a common voice and in accord with the presuppositions and priorities of third- and fourth-century ecclesiastics. Still today, Orthodox Christianity lives in the world of the (Greek) Fathers and knows no other way to read the NT scriptures than through and in tune with the Fathers (9).

2. Another approach to tracing how we got from Jesus to Irenaeus is to map how Christianity gradually evolved or developed out of its Jewishness into Greekishness. Earliest Christianity was profoundly Jewish — it was Jewish in fact. Over time there were moments where Judaism’s grip lost hold of the churches but eventually what survived was at times anti-Jewish or at least minimally Jewish.

This obtains especially for the term “Christianity.” Here:

That is, the term ‘Christianity’ was first coined (so far as we can now tell), or at least first used in writing that has endured, by Ignatius in the 110s. More significant here is the fact that in its first usage ‘Christianity’ was understood as defined in contrast to ‘Judaism’. Ironically, the pattern set by the first formulation of the term ‘Judaism’ was followed in the earliest talk of ‘Christianity’. For as ‘Judaism’ was defined as other than and as opposed to ‘Hellenism’ so ‘Christianity’ was already being defined as other than ‘Judaism’ (12-13).

Jimmy is famous for his work on the “partings of the ways,” a book (The Partings of the Ways) that remains one of my favorites of his. But now he has slightly nuanced what he wrote back then:

In the first edition of Partings I made bold to draw the conclusion that a final ‘parting’ can be discerned in the second century — with the second Jewish revolt against Rome (132-135), and certainly by the end of the second century. The opinion is shared by several scholars. However, the imagery of two ways may itself be far too simple; it can too easily imply two embryonic religions as two homogeneous (or even monolithic) entities each pursuing a single path, with developments in each case marching forward uniformly across the diverse contexts of the Mediterranean and Middle East; whereas the sociological reality might be better depicted as ‘a criss-crossing of muddy tracks’. ‘The partings of the ways’ should certainly not be taken to imply that there were only two ways in view, as though both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity each travelled a single well-defined path which diverged into two similarly single and well-defined paths. To change the metaphor, there were various currents within the broader streams which became rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (15-16).

A few pages later Dunn puts it all into one golden set of lines:

‘Jewish Christianity’ has had a ‘bad press’ in both Christianity and Judaism, as a heresy unacceptable to both sides. That is unfortunate, since it could well be argued that Judaeo-Christianity is an appropriate fuller way of characterizing Christianity itself (22).

3. A third line can be mapped by examining the gradual Hellenization of Christianity.

This question quickly becomes the issue of Gnosticism and its dating and its influence or development out of the NT. Dunn’s summary conclusion:

It is no longer a question whether ‘the Gnostic Redeemer myth’, so prominent in Bultmann’s reconstruction of Christianity’s emergence, was in fact pre-Christian. The observation that Christian claims for Jesus seem to have provided the precedent for Gnostic redeemer figures, like Simon Magus and Menander, rather than the reverse, is much the more persuasive
 (34).

In sum, there is a contested identity.

… the history of Christianity (the actual sequel and succession of events) is much more complex than the history of Christianity (the account given by ecclesiastical historians) has usually allowed for. The historical reality was evidently much more of a tension and struggle between competing ideas/ faiths/practices than the disputed but apparently irresistible emergence of the great church with a clearly defined rule of faith and clearly defined structures (40).

Instead of these three approaches, not to ignore the nearly impossible to accomplish approach that focuses on various cities in their development toward Christianity, Dunn proposes that we examine the evidence on the basis of how the legacies of the Jesus tradition, Paul, Peter and John were developed in the late 1st Century and into late 2d Century thinkers and practices.

Hence, Dunn divides the volume into how Jesus traditions were reshaped, how Paul’s letters and theology were reshaped, and how Peter and John were treated as the church became Christianity. Instead of looking back from Nicea or Irenaeus, Dunn looks forward from the 1st Century into how that Century’s seminal figures were reappropriated.

e. I want to ask the unrealistic, but nevertheless fascinating question: would Peter, James and Paul have been as satisfied with what happened in the second century, and thereafter, as Eusebius was? Would they have affirmed that the emergence of the great church, the antithesis with Judaism, the disowning of Jewish-Christianity and denunciation of the Gnostic variation, was the best or most desirable outcome of the influences they experienced and the convictions they held dear?  And were there other formative influences which were operative during the first generation but which have so far been hidden from our sight (above all, the influence of John)? As these influences begin to come into view, how do they affect evaluation of the other formative figures of the first generation and of their influence? As embryonic Christianity comes to birth, are we actually confronted with a single child or twins or triplets, or … ? (41)