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\u00a0is entitled \u201cRemembering Jesus: How The Quest of the Historical Jesus Lost Its Way.\u201d Dunn begins by mentioning his book Jesus Remembered<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=jamefmcgrshom-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0802839312\")
<\/em> and then turning attention to three \u201cprotests\u201d and \u201cproposals\u201d which are made in that book, but which are in danger of being overlooked in the midst of its some 900 pages. Those provide the structure and content to his chapter in this volume.<\/p>\nThe first protest is against an exaggerated distinction between the \u201chistorical Jesus\u201d and the \u201cChrist of faith.\u201d Jesus was such a figure as to elicit what can deservedly be called \u201cfaith\u201d from early on, in the pre-Easter period. This leads to the first proposal, which is that Jesus was a figure who made an impact<\/em>, and thus even though we see clear signs of later development and overlaid tradition in the Gospels, we also see material that seems to have remained relatively unaffected by such later developments. Dunn offers the Q material as an example, since it\u00a0lacks knowledge of and\/or interest in the crucifixion\u00a0and subsequent theological developments. He suggests that it took shape already during the public activity of the historical figure of Jesus in Galilee. At that time, Jesus was already making an impact on those who followed him, and to look for a Jesus who makes no such impact and evokes no faith is, in Dunn\u2019s view, a misguided and futile undertaking (p.206).<\/p>\n Dunn\u2019s second protest is against understanding the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels\u00a0exclusively in literary terms. Cautions have occasionally been offered by scholars, yet the approach has remained predominantly literary. Dunn protests as well against\u00a0regarding oral tradition as though it were almost precisely the same as literary transmission of material. The resulting proposal suggests that we can and must envisage the early stage in which stories about Jesus took shape orally rather than in the first instance in writing. In this section, Dunn provides an overview of some key characteristics of oral tradition: hearing as an event that can never be recovered in the manner a written text can; the role of community as well as of key individuals in transmitting, shaping and preserving tradition; and the combination of fluidity (of wording) and fixity (of gist and some essential elements). Dunn also emphasizes that the notion of an \u201coriginal version\u201d\u00a0should be abandoned\u00a0when\u00a0dealing with\u00a0oral tradition, since material is thought of in the mind, spoken most likely on more than one occasion, and heard and remembered differently by different hearers, from the beginning, even before the process comes to involve still\u00a0larger numbers of hearers and their memory\u00a0(p.215).<\/p>\n Dunn\u2019s third protest is against the attempt to find a Jesus who is distinctive from his environment. In this context he discusses the early quest\u2019s tendency to speak of Jesus as having broken with Judaism, as well a of Sp\u00e4tjudentum (which, ironically, is what we tend to speak of a early<\/em> Judaism today). \u201cThe a priori that Jesus belonged within Judaism is a more secure starting point for any quester than the assumption that he must have differed from Judaism\u201d (p.220). Doing justice to both the continuity and discontinuity is a challenge. But in the variety that was early Christianity, we see common themes which are likely to stem from the powerful originating and shaping force that began and influenced that tradition, namely Jesus himself.\u00a0 A handful of such characteristics are listed: teaching in parables, idioms such as \u201cAmen\u201d (used to preface his own words rather than assent to those of others) and \u201cson of man\u201d (which we would otherwise have to imagine was created by a church which, outside of the Gospels, showed no interest in the term (p.221). The \u201ccharacteristic Jesus\u201d may come clearly into focus even if the authenticity of this or that saying is uncertain, since we are talking about the impression<\/em> Jesus made rather than precise words he spoke.<\/p>\n Dunn concludes by mentioning material such as the Lord\u2019s Prayer and the Lord\u2019s Supper, which would be rather odd to imagine Luke or Matthew simply copying from a written source as though they were hearing or reading it for the first time. Material of this kind was lived and used. And so Dunn closes by suggesting that faith communities may in fact have an advantage when it comes to pursuing the historical Jesus, since they can readily envisage the processes that would have been at work in the earliest Christian community, which shaped its life and activity around material from and about Jesus, which was repeated and practiced in a dynamic fashion\u00a0that has left its imprint on our earliest sources.<\/p>\n Robert Price\u2019s response makes some important points, emphasizing that an influential and famous teacher would not only have his teaching remembered, but would also have teaching invented and falsely attributed to him (p.226). Price mentions the possibility that none<\/em> of the hadith may authentically go back to Muhammad, although this perhaps is precisely Dunn\u2019s point: we may not be able to determine with certainty which sayings, if any, are authentic, but may nevertheless be able to get a sense of the histoical Muhammad or Jesus by the overall impression<\/em> they made as reflected in our earliest sources, even if uncertainty remains about specific sayings. At any rate, Price himself offers as parallels and illustrations scenarios which only seem to work on a non-mythicist scenario, and at one moment I wondered whether he had forgotten that he was advocating a mythicist stance. For instance, Price points out how Plato increasingly used Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own views, while at the same time\u00a0he most certainly would have objected to the idea that he was not faithfully passing on his teacher\u2019s instruction in the later works as much as in the earlier ones. It is hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which Paul, the canonical Gospels, the later Gospels and a range of other works suddenly begin attributing their teachings to Jesus in order to\u00a0lend them\u00a0his authority,\u00a0and yet\u00a0there was no Jesus whose impact led to these diverse attempts to claim his authority starting in this particular time period. It is a shame that Price insists on undermining his own valuable insights by linking them to his implausible mythicist framework.<\/p>\n
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<\/span> for Dunn, we can imagine scenarios in which a later author could have had a version of a certain story in a source open before him, and yet opted to ignore it and tell instead the story as he had always heard it independently of the text in front of him. To call that \u201credaction\u201d of the source seems inappropriate. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7622297540113836091-423085825834648744?l=exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com\")
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