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JAMES D. G. DUNN, Christianity in the Making: Volume 1, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003), Pp. xvii + 1,019. $55.
This is the first volume of a magnum opus by a senior scholar who has distilled many years of research into a very accessible-but long-text. The book is organized into nineteen chapters followed by a list of abbreviations, a bibliography, and indexes of authors, subjects, and reference to scriptures and other sacred writings.
This volume is the first installment of a "comprehensive overview of the beginnings of Christianity" (p. xii) in three volumes. Dunn explains on p. 5 that the scholarly reasons to reevaluate past scholarship are (a) postmodernism and its questioning of the historicalcritical method, (b) the contribution of sociological methods to the study of Christian origins, and (c) the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts.
In part 1, D. asserts that he is addressing three "great questions" first articulated by F. C. Baur and Adolf Harnack: (1) "What was it about Jesus which explains both the impact he made on his disciples and why he was crucified?" (2) How and why did the new Jesus movement not remain Jewish after his death? (3) What is the continuity between second-century, predominantly Gentile Christianity and the first-century version? (p. 5).
Dunn gives a scant discussion of the issues of faith, history, and hermeneutics and...