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

In this accessible publication, James Dunn highlights the distinctive components of his lengthy academic work, Jesus Remembered. Dunn’s ‘new perspective’ contributes to historical Jesus studies in two ways. First, it makes a strong case for the ‘characteristic Jesus’, the Jesus whose characteristic features were illustrated in stories retold and who reflects the faith-forming impact his mission made. Second, it challenges the literary paradigm, which has served as a ‘default setting’ for the vast majority of scholarly investigations, and argues convincingly for taking the oral tradition more seriously. In Chapter 1, Dunn dismantles the notion that faith began only after Easter and the like assumption that a different ‘historical Jesus’ is buried behind the ‘Christ of faith’. Dunn argues that faith is a help, not a hindrance, to discovering the real Jesus. He explains that ‘the first forms of the Jesus tradition were indeed the expression of faith’ (p. 25). This pre-Easter faith was expressed in disciples who abandoned families and jobs for Jesus’ mission. During this mission, his disciples shared impressions Jesus had made on them and retold stories of his doings. Such retellings gave shape and direction to the tradition, namely, to how Jesus was remembered. Pre-Easter memories, therefore, shaped the post-Easter perspective. In Chapter 2, Dunn shows the inadequacy of the literary paradigm to operate alone. Transmission of the written tradition, known through its multiple oral performances, followed the standards of oral transmission. The collective memory was expressed in performances made stable by repetition of a nucleus of meaning and controlled by eyewitnesses’ corrections to divergent material. While retellings allowed for flexibility and stylistic variation, the nucleus required stability in order to pass on the meaning of an episode. To illustrate, Dunn imagines the community’s request to hear again an episode about Jesus, ‘to which a senior disciple would tell again the appropriate story or teaching in whatever variant words or detail he or she judged appropriate for the occasion, with significant corporate memory ready to protest if one of the key elements was missed or varied too much’ (p. 55). In Chapter 3, Dunn addresses the problem associated with any research strategy that emphasizes only the unique and verifiable aspects of the Jesus tradition. Such a strategy can only authenticate a