Resumen de Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity by James D. G. Dunn (review)
In the first volume of his account of the beginnings of Christianity through its literature (Jesus Remembered, 2003), James Dunn proposed a way of reading the Gospels that re-envisioned the conventional analyses of source, literary form, and redaction criticism through the lens of understanding the oral handing-down of tradition as an act of faithful remembering and re-remembering in new settings and to answer new questions. Dunn begins by setting out the sources, and here already some may feel at work the principles that will be more fully expressed in the shape and direction of the whole: the canonical Gospels and “the rest of the New Testament” represent the first century, while the Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, Eusebius and Heresiologists, followed by “Other” Gospels, Letters, Acts and Apocalypses cover the second century. [...]priority is given to those writings that represent what other accounts call “the great church” or “proto-orthodoxy,” and the story finishes before Irenaeus, although he and several later church fathers necessarily on occasion occupy the footnotes. Dunn’s approach follows that of the earlier section, beginning from the Paul-James tension he had identified in the second volume, and working through the traditions and texts item by item to explore the figure of James in New Testament, patristic, Jewish-Christian and gnostic sources, and to attempt to reconstruct the history of the Jerusalem Church into the second century. Persecution and the emerging ideology of martyrdom, apologetics and the engagement with contemporary philosophy, the social dynamics of group formation or of ritual, asceticism and understandings of gender and the body, the development of heresiology as a genre and as an ideology—all topics that have dominated recent discussion of the period in creative ways—are almost entirely absent, or are mentioned in passing only in so far as they serve the structure to which Dunn has committed himself.
