On June 21, King’s College, London hosted a
day conference featuring presentations by James D. G. Dunn. Readers of this blog will recognize Professor
Emeritus Dunn as one of the preeminent New Testament scholars of our day. He has made invaluable contributions to
Pauline and Jesus studies. He is often
also included in the “memory” trend because of his huge and hugely-important Jesus Remembered (though he never really
engages memory theory in that book). Our
own Dr. Le Donne has the honor of being Prof. Dunn’s final PhD student at
Durham University.
I appreciated the kind invitation of the
New Testament folks at King’s College to come along and it was well worth the
time. Prof. Dunn gave two papers: “The Earliest Interpreters of Jesus
Tradition: John and Thomas”; “A New Perspective on the New Perspective on
Paul.” In the first lecture, he argues
that the Gospels of John and Thomas represent different types of developments
upon Synoptic (oral) Jesus tradition; John represents a development from within
while Thomas represents a development from without. In other words, John expands upon what is
already present in Synoptic (oral) tradition while Thomas simply adds stuff on
top of it that he got elsewhere. He
noted interestingly what he called “the paradox of John and Thomas”; namely,
that John is in the canon, Thomas is not, but that Thomas is often much closer
with the Synoptics than John.
The second paper argued that the New
Perspective is not really all that new at all and is, essentially, precisely
how Paul understood matters.
I hope that when my retirement comes, I can
be half as productive and insightful and Prof. Dunn. He’s currently a visiting Professor at King’s
College, London, so I hope the NT PhD students there are taking advantage of
his presence. If not, my goodness, buy
the man a cup of coffee!
