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In this book, James Dunn argues for the primacy of oral tradition in a revised form along the lines of Kenneth Bailey, as per chapter 4 of Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God. The recommendations are an interesting read, as is the publisher: You’ve got Gordon Fee and Darrell Bock plugging the book with the likes of Bruce Chilton and Dale Allison, and the book is published by Baker Academic (not the first place I would've pictured Dunn publishing). That combination intrigued me enough to buy the book, and it proved to be what I think is a brilliant little introduction on how to handle oral tradition properly in relation to the Gospels.
The book is only 125 pages of text (136 in total) and nearly 50 pages of that is an appendix, from which fairly large chunks were basically cut and pasted and placed in the main text, which is annoying. It’s a good size, but could possibly have been 10 or so pages shorter without losing anything.
It presents some (what were to me anyway) novel ideas on the oral tradition of the Gospels that provide some rather powerful arguments in favour of their reliability. He undercuts Kloppenborg and Co.’s take on Q (Dunn still waves the Q flag, but not as vigorously as most) by demonstrating that much of that material has been preserved reliably from an oral tradition started in a pre-Easter, pre-Passion Galilean setting, as opposed to postulating a post-Easter Galilean community that knew nothing of the passion. If the so-called ‘Q community’ (an idea he summarily destroys elsewhere in the book) didn’t know anything about Jesus’ death, it’s because it hadn’t happened yet! Whatever one’s take on Q, I find that rather amusing.
He says that this book is a condensation of the key methodological arguments he makes in his Jesus Remembered, which I haven’t read. If that’s the case though, I think that could be a good read too (except it’s apparently over 900 pages long! -- And he throws out the birth narratives, but he stakes for the resurrection). A New Perspective on Jesus sort of parallels Wright’s Who Was Jesus? without going over the exact same ground all the time, and I think they complement each other well.
This is not a direct attack on the way-out Jesuses of the Da Vinci Code variety (that sort probably wouldn’t know who Dunn was even if you whacked them with a copy of Jesus Remembered!), but it’s a strong indictment on mainstream historical Jesus research on ignoring the importance of oral tradition. It also serves as a great primer on oral tradition in the gospels.
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