Here’s Jimmy! 1

Ed McMahon used to introduce Johnny Carson with “Here’s Johnny!” I’m swiping that introduction to introduce my PhD supervisor’s newest book, and it is a book that truly does introduce readers to the big ideas in Jimmy Dunn’s many long books. The book is called Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels, and is made of nine chapters — Jesus, the transition from Jesus to Paul in the gospel, and then the “Bimillennial Paul.” If you are a student or a pastor, and you want to know how this Dunn fellow thinks, read this book first. One of the highlights of this book is that Jimmy wrote a brief academic history of his own ideas and development in the “Personal Introduction.”

Today we want to sketch the contours of his first chp: “Fact or Fiction? How Reliable are the Gospels?”

Which of Dunn’s books most influenced you?

But don’t be turned off into thinking this will be a skeptical approach to historical questions. In fact, the chp doesn’t get into proving what happened but instead, on the basis of his oral tradition hypothesis, sketches what Jesus was like. He is interested in the characteristic Jesus. The impression Jesus made upon his followers permits us to see the stamp that made the impression.

Here are the main features of the stamp:

Jesus began his ministry with an encounter with John the Baptist and it ended on a Roman cross.

Jesus was a Jew; a Jew whose ministry was in Galilee, and all of his ministry was shaped by that kind of Judaism.

Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God/the royal rule of God both as coming to full effect soon and as already active through his ministry.

Jesus regularly used ‘son of man’ as a way of speaking of his own mission and of the expectations of that ministry.

Jesus was a successful exorcist and knew it.

Jesus’ mode of teaching was parabolic and aphoristic. Jesus used ‘Amen’ to emphasize of the high importance of what he was saying.

Jesus reacted strongly against the tendency to dismiss fellow Jews too lightly as ‘sinners’.