Foreword - Jesus according to the New Testament (Rowan Williams)

Jesus according to the New Testament

Jesus according to the New Testament

James D. G. Dunn

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2019 James D. G. Dunn All rights reserved Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ISBN 978-0-8028-7669-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dunn, James D. G., 1939- author.

Title: Jesus according to the New Testament / James D. G. Dunn.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018024862 | ISBN 9780802876690 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ.—Person and offices—Biblical teaching. | Bible. New Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BT203 .D859 2019 | DDC 232—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024862

For St. Paul’s Church, Chichester, and the Chichester Diocese

Contents

Foreword by Rowan Williams

ix

Preface

xii

1. Jesus according to Jesus

1

2. Jesus according to Mark, Matthew, and Luke

27

3. Jesus according to John

53

4. Jesus according to Acts

75

5. Jesus according to Paul: Part 1

99

6. Jesus according to Paul: Part 2

119

7. Jesus according to Hebrews

141

8. Jesus according to James, Peter, John, and Jude

157

9. Jesus according to Revelation

175

Postscript

187

Appendix 1. The Probable Date and Place of Origin for Documents of the New Testament

189

Appendix 2. The Life and Mission of Paul

190 vii

Contents

viii

Bibliography

191

Index of Subjects

193

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Texts

197

Foreword

R

eaders of the New Testament in Christian congregations (and among a wider public too) are quite likely these days to feel a certain amount of bewilderment at the variety and complexity of what is written on the subject. Those who venture a little into the scholarly literature, as well as those who pick up the latest sensational stories in the media about “lost” gospels and alternative histories, may feel like echoing Mary Magdalene: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” What do we—what can we—really know about Jesus? Is the New Testament just the deposit of a confused mass of unreliable traditions, put together under the iron hand of a narrow church authority?

Professor Dunn, one of the most respected and prolific biblical scholars of our time, with a long string of innovative, comprehensive studies of the New Testament text to his name, begins with a simple but all-important question in this book. It is really a commonsensical one: What must have been going on in the life, and indeed in the mind, of Jesus for any of the New Testament texts to have been possible? To ask such a question does not mean that everything we read in the New Testament is a straightforward record of events or that the ideas of the first believers are immediately accessible to us. But it does remind us that the movement whose writings we read in the canonical Gospels, Acts, and letters ix

Foreword began with the narrative of a specific historical figure whose words and actions were sufficiently different from the norm to attract attention.

Like some other scholars in recent years, Professor Dunn is skeptical about the skepticism that has prevailed in a fair amount of learned discussion. If certain things had not been true about Jesus, it is simply very hard to see how certain kinds of text and certain kinds of talk would ever have emerged. Many writers have stressed that there are aspects of the gospel stories that seem to be preserved even though the earliest churches did not fully understand them—like Jesus’s description of himself as “Son of Man” or the whole way he is remembered as speaking about God’s kingdom. If he never said a word about how he understood the death he knew he was risking, it would be hard to see why and how the quite dense and complicated language used to interpret baptism and the Lord’s Supper got started. And—most simply of all, a point well brought out by Professor Dunn—Jesus was remembered as a storyteller in a way that is not true of any other figure in the New Testament and that is rare among his Jewish contemporaries. The parables are among the most plainly distinctive things in the traditions about Jesus, and they tell us something of his understanding of the relation between the everyday and the holy which is still radical.

The New Testament is tantalizing for readers because its texts are both startlingly different from one another and startlingly convergent. Just this mixture of difference and convergence is exactly what should make us pause before accepting the fashionable idea that what we have in the New Testament is some sort of unrepresentative selection of writings which just happened to be acceptable to dictatorial prelates in the early centuries. With exemplary clarity and understated scholarly acumen, Professor Dunn traces both the continuities between these diverse texts and the communities that used them, and the discontinuities, the local emphases and sometimes controversial new twists to the story that developed in some quarters. Many readers will find it liberating to realize that to believe in the consistency of the New Testament is not the same as having to suppose that every writer says the same x

Foreword thing. From the very first, what happens in and around the figure of Jesus is experienced as too immense to be communicated in one telling, seen from one perspective; as the end of John’s Gospel already says so eloquently, the world could not contain all that would need to be said.

So this survey of what the story of Jesus meant in the first Christian generations becomes a powerful theological testimony to the scale of the mystery laid bare in those events. This is a book that will nurture a faith that is not uncritical but is also being directed constantly back toward the wonder of the first witnesses.

It is as we make that wonder our own that our faith grows and deepens; Professor Dunn helps us toward that enrichment of joy, trust, and gratitude.

Rowan Williams

xi