Review of The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Remembering Jesus by James D. G. Dunn

Last updated on: July 10, 2010 at 10:55 pm by James F. McGrath

Review of The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Remembering Jesus by James D. G. Dunn 2010-07-10T22:55:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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James D. G. Dunn’s chapter in The Historical Jesus: Five Views is entitled “Remembering Jesus: How The Quest of the Historical Jesus Lost Its Way.” Dunn begins by mentioning his book Jesus Remembered and then turning attention to three “protests” and “proposals” 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.

The first protest is against an exaggerated distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” Jesus was such a figure as to elicit what can deservedly be called “faith” 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, 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 lacks knowledge of and/or interest in the crucifixion and 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’s view, a misguided and futile undertaking (p.206).

Dunn’s second protest is against understanding the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels exclusively in literary terms. Cautions have occasionally been offered by scholars, yet the approach has remained predominantly literary. Dunn protests as well against regarding 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 “original version” should be abandoned when dealing with oral 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 larger numbers of hearers and their memory (p.215).

Dunn’s third protest is against the attempt to find a Jesus who is distinctive from his environment. In this context he discusses the early quest’s tendency to speak of Jesus as having broken with Judaism, as well a of Spätjudentum (which, ironically, is what we tend to speak of a early Judaism today). “The 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” (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. A handful of such characteristics are listed: teaching in parables, idioms such as “Amen” (used to preface his own words rather than assent to those of others) and “son of man” (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 “characteristic Jesus” may come clearly into focus even if the authenticity of this or that saying is uncertain, since we are talking about the impression Jesus made rather than precise words he spoke.

Dunn concludes by mentioning material such as the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s 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 that has left its imprint on our earliest sources.

Robert Price’s 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 of the hadith may authentically go back to Muhammad, although this perhaps is precisely Dunn’s 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 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 he most certainly would have objected to the idea that he was not faithfully passing on his teacher’s 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 lend them his authority, and yet there 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.

Price also objects to Dunn’s appeal to oral tradition to address divergences in the Gospels, a criticism which Crossan and Johnson will also offer. Both Price and Johnson are wary of what they fear may be a move in the direction of the old apologetics arguments, suggesting that the Gospels are like separate accounts of a car accident, or that Jesus taught the same material on two occasions in two different ways. To be fair, Dunn is not suggesting that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts, nor does he envisage a direct line from teaching given by Jesus, whether on one or more occasions, to a verbatim preservation of that teaching in the Gospels. On the contrary, his whole emphasis is on the fact that oral tradition does not preserve precise wording, but the gist, and thus we could probably never tell whether we were dealing with material delivered more than once by the same storyteller, or two versions by the original storyteller and someone who copied him or her, or two versions retold separately by others. Orality, as Bock notes in his response (p.246), is a sort of “Pandora’s box” and a “kind of wild card” which remove any certainty we might have had that we can completely trace cause-and-effect relationships between the Gospels. As I pointed out in a recent Festschrift 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 “redaction” of the source seems inappropriate.

Thus when Crossan emphasizes in his response that some instances of parallel material in the Gospels seem clearly to be deliberate alteration of a source for polemical purposes, his point is well taken, and yet should not be understood as falsely antithetical to Dunn’s point, which does not seem to advocate a rejection of the standard solution to the Synoptic problem, but merely a recognition of the greater complexity of the relationships when we take the oral context into account. Orality does not work as a better solution to the Synoptic problem than the standard two-document (or in some versions four-document) hypothesis. But it is a necessary supplement to that consensus solution, without which the scenario envisaged will be utterly anachronistic.

Several of the respondents expressed the wish that Dunn had offered more of the results of the application of his method, and had fleshed out more about the figure of Jesus as he envisages him.

One particularly colorful comment from Crossan is worth mentioning in closing. Dunn said at one point in his essay that we do not have the first-hand testimony of Caiaphas or Pilate and thus do not know what Jesus’ impact on them might have been. Crossan feels this is wrong and replies: “We have very clear evidence of his impact on Pilate. It is called crucifixion” (p.237).

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