A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed.

A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed. By James D. G. Dunn. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005. Pp. 136. Paper, $12.99.

In his book, Dunn seeks to redress a paradigmatic flaw in quests for the historical Jesus. In chapter one, Dunn faults the various quests for having "started from the wrong place, from wrong assumptions, and viewed the relevant data from the wrong perspective" (15). He avers that questers, fixated on removing the faith-factor (i.e., the "Christ of faith") from historical Jesus reconstructions, neglect to recognize the original, lasting "faith-creating impact" Jesus had on his disciples. That faith-impact, a pre-Easter faith, was the sine qua non of how the disciples remembered Jesus from the outset (22-23, 29-31). Q teachings of Jesus, already orally formalized in patterned groupings in the late 20's/early 30's, are demonstrated examples of that fact (25-28, 50).

In chapter two, Dunn faults questers for being bound to a literary paradigm and not taking seriously the oral tradition as reliable witness to Jesus. Dunn finds social/cultural memory theories helpful in redressing this methodological error by highlighting memory's creative character. But he insists memory theorists fail to appreciate how oral culture faithfully preserves, via memory skills, oral tradition as "foundational and formative of group identity" (44). Preferring the "more relevant" research on oral societies, Dunn finds Kenneth Bailey's thirty-year observation of how evening gatherings in Middle Eastern oral societies faithfully preserve oral traditions to provide a model for how disciple-groups authentically maintained their Jesus tradition (4346, and see 92f.).

After describing features inherent to oral tradition (46-53), Dunn, apparently following Bailey as his guide (cf. Bailey's article, Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels, American Journal of Theology 5 [1991], 40, 43f.), envisions that the Jesus tradition was orally retained in its originating essence by means of four controlling factors. (1) The faith-impacting Jesus sayings/acts were shared in disciple gatherings. (2) "[T]he structure, the identifying elements, and the key words (core or climax)" inherent to a saying/act became "the constants, the stable themes successive retellings could elaborate," as appropriate. (3) In disciple gatherings, a senior disciple responded to requests for Jesus stories/teachings with recitations which could include some variant words/details. (4) Should the senior disciple depart from the gathering's corporate memory of teachings/stories by neglecting or varying key elements, it corrected him/her (55).

In chapter three, Dunn presents his profile of his "characteristic Jesus." Faulting quests for methodologically beginning by identifying discrete Jesus sayings or acts as historically authentic and from those particulars constructing a profile of Jesus, Dunn argues, instead, for utilizing a methodology that first establishes an "overall impression" of Jesus from oral tradition via "a viable broad-brush criterion." Thus: "any feature that is characteristic within the Jesus tradition, even if only relatively distinctive of the Jesus tradition, is most likely to go back to Jesus" (69; emphasis: Dunn). Applying this methodology, Dunn concludes that oral tradition posits that Jesus (1) launched his mission following his baptism, (2) dealt with Jewish concerns, (3) itinerated in Galilee, (4) preached the reign of God, present and imminent, (5) spoke in aphorisms and parables, (6) titularly adopted "Son of Man," (7) employed "Amen" distinctively, (8) preached judgment upon 'this generation," and (9) was an exorcist (70-77). In an appendix, Dunn provides Synoptic passages whose textual variations he thinks may be better explained via different oral versions (101-20).

From my perspective, Dunn correctly advocates for our overcoming fixation with a literary default and fully appreciating the role the oral paradigm plays in historical Jesus quests. But Dunn's criterion of "overall impression" is itself problematic. Contrary to Dunn's disavowal of the literary paradigm, his criterion is, in effect, a textually applied criterion, as we are not privy to the oral tradition apart from its textualization. Since scribal mediation of oral tradition often functions according to the needs of the author for deviation, even breaking from tradition, Dunn's criterion may provide overall impressions of Jesus from our evangelists' perspectives, but it cannot access the overall impression of the Jesus tradition prior to scribal mediation.

Furthermore, despite Dunn's misgiving about memory theorists providing understanding of how oral tradition originates and is transmitted, I think they have the better argument (see Kelber, "The Works of Memory," in Memory, Tradition and Text, 221-48). Notably, Jan Vansina, whose authority on oral societies Dunn regards (49, 92 n. 43), argues that, because oral culture invariably makes oral tradition congruent with present reality, a historian must not assume oral tradition is historically reliable, unless analytically demonstrated (Oral Tradition as History, 129f., 190-97; cf.107f.; 122f.).

Finally, Bailey, Dunn's paradigmatic guide, fails him. In making the case for the early Jesus movement accurately preserving Jesus tradition, Bailey cites as evidentiary centerpiece his experience of how southern Egyptian Christian communities founded by John Hogg from 1865-1885 faithfully preserved their Hogg oral tradition from its inception. Bailey claims the Hogg tradition he heard recited in the 1950's-60's was the same, uncorrupted tradition Hogg's daughter, Rena, reports hearing in those communities in 1910, as she records in her 1914 biography of her father (A Master Builder on the Nile). However, I have found that such uncorrupted transmission of the Hogg tradition was not the case. In Rena Hogg's prologue (13f.), which Bailey fails to cite, she despairs that 28 years after her father's death, the Hogg tradition had become so corrupted that "the message of his life may be lost under a tangled mass of fact and fiction."

Theodore J. Weeden, Sr.

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