Christianity in the Making, vol. 3: Neither Jew nor Greek
Overview
The third and final installment of James Dunn’s magisterial history of Christian origins through 190 AD, Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity covers the period after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD through the second century, when the still-new Jesus movement firmed up its distinctive identity markers and the structures on which it would establish its growing appeal in the following decades and centuries. Dunn examines in depth the major factors that shaped first-generation Christianity and beyond, exploring the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism, the Hellenization of Christianity, and responses to Gnosticism. He mines all the first- and second-century sources, including the New Testament Gospels, New Testament apocrypha, and such church fathers as Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus, showing how the Jesus tradition and the figures of James, Paul, Peter, and John were still esteemed influences but were also the subject of intense controversy as the early church wrestled with its evolving identity. Comprehensively covering an important, complex era in Christianity that is often overlooked, this volume is a landmark contribution to the field.
Top Highlights
“Those so referred to would not be ‘Christians’ as distinct from Jews. Rather” (Page 607)
“Similarly, the minority who question the existence of Q and the need to hypothesize a Q source usually assume that Luke derived the non-Mark material shared with Matthew (the Q material) from Matthew.54 In fact, however, if it was simply a choice between Luke deriving the Q material from Matthew, or Matthew deriving the Q material from Luke, the latter would be the more probable,55 since Luke’s omissions and reordering of the Q material from the settings provided by Matthew are harder to explain than the opposite.” (Page 57)
“For John the truth of Jesus was much fuller and richer than the historical facticity of what he said and did during the three years of his mission.176 To miss this probable conclusion and to insist that John has to be read on the same terms and level as the Synoptics is most likely to miss what John saw himself as doing.” (Page 356)
“With Thomas, in contrast, the Synoptic-like tradition is mostly drawn in more or less as such, and Thomas’s good news is not so much drawn from the earlier tradition but attached to or set alongside the earlier Jesus tradition. This is particularly clear in a number of instances.” (Page 397)
“A rule of faith which held together Jewish believers in Jesus and Gentile Christians was never achieved. And the loss of regard for Christianity’s Jewishness remains a feature of Christianity to this day.” (Page 823)
- Title: Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity
- Author: James D. G. Dunn
- Series: Christianity in the Making
- Volume: 3
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2015
- Logos Release Date: 2016
- Pages: 960
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Church history › Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Identification (Religion); Judaism › Relations--Christianity; Christianity and other religions › Judaism; Judaism (Christian theology)
- ISBNs: 9780802839336, 0802839339
- Resource ID: LLS:NTHRJWNRGRK
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T01:55:55Z
Reviews
1 rating
Marco Ceccarelli
9/4/2020
Actually ... There are always a lot of good things and useful insights in Dunn's writings. Nevertheless it's not exactly what I had imagined, supposing this third volume of Christianity in the Making would continue the story from where it left off at the end of the second volume. Instead, almost half of the book is spent to repeat many things present in the previous books of the trilogy, and the rest doesn't look exactly as a "story". However ... The attempt to prove the birth of church's priesthood out of thin air in the end of the first or early second century is almost pathetic and supported by a set of contradictions difficult to find elsewhere. But of course, if the thesis of the work is summarised by Kasemann's quotation mentioned at page 816, one cannot expect anything else. For the extent of the subject the volume is not so big, considering also it uses a font size larger than in the previous two books of the series. Moreover ... It makes me smile the fact that the autor ignores completely! (and, of course, purposely) the magnum opus of J. P. Meier "A marginal Jew", and this, may be, because on the other side Meier had dealt unpleasantly, in p. 23 of his 4° volume, with the first Dunn's volume, mixing up (I suppose purposely) "Christianity in the making" with the previous "Christology in the making". :) :) :)
