Book Review: Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity

Abstract

Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity. By James D. G. Dunn. Christianity in the Making, Volume 3. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015. xiv + 946 pp. $60.00 (cloth).This book completes Dunns Christianity in the Making series by sketching the development of Christianity from the destruction of the Second Temple to Irenaeus (roughly ad 70-180). Within this large series, the final volume is the most ambitious due to its attempt to cover such a broad time period. Dunn's clear presentation is commendable and mitigates the length of this sizable contribution to early Christian history.The opening chapter outlines the emergence of the great church tradition and argues that Christian identity was forged through various struggles in the first and second centuries. Many of these struggles were intraChristian debates. Dunn focuses his attention on the impact that major players from the first generation of Jesus' followers had on generations that followed. This interest frames much of the book's structure.After introducing the sources on which he bases his study, Dunn looks at Jesus' impact on early Christianity. He outlines how gospel came to be associated with a particular type of writing, the way in which the canonical Gospels and Thomas remember Jesus, and the references to Jesus in the diverse writings of the second century. The presence of orality even in written documents forms an underlying theme in these chapters. Dunn presses beyond form-critical questions regarding the oral forms of particular stories before they were written. Instead, he argues that the Jesus tradition was known in oral form well into the second century. He suggests that allusions in early second-century literature may be part of catechetical, liturgical, and apologetic traditions. As the century progressed, texts were increasingly known in written forms. Although some of Dunn's specific examples may be disputed, this presentation is a helpful reminder that the oral telling of the Jesus story likely continued to influence other early Christian writers after the written Gospels appeared.The next two chapters consider the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. Identifying these two entities clearly during the first two centuries is far from simple. Dunn shows that Israel's scriptures undergird early Christian writings, that Jewish Christians continued to form part of Jewish communities in Syria and Palestine, and that the process by which Judaism and Christianity came to be separately identifiable entities cannot be mapped as a single parting at one point in history. Rather, he proposes multiple partings and crisscrossed tracks. …