The more I read of James Dunn’s scholarship the more helpful I’m finding it and this look at What the quest for the historical Jesus missed is top notch scholarship in largely accessible form.

The book is essentially lectures Dunn delivered as part of his much larger work Jesus Remembered (which I have but haven’t quite been brave enough to start. It’s 893 pages before the bibliography and index!). Dunn is convinced that the Quest is fundamentally flawed and so gives preachers and apologists good arguments to show why.

His new perspective might come as a bit of a surprise to the ordinary believer in Jesus and make you wonder how academics make a living but in context of the scholarship surrounding the ‘historical Jesus’ is actually quite profound.

Dunn says (p.12), “…a perspective that takes as a…starting point that Jesus must have made a considerable impact on his disciples…”

Yes, really but it does get better. Here is how Dunn characterizes the quest:

In all this a striking feature is readily apparent: that in the quest for the historical Jesus, faith is a hindrance, faith leads the searcher down the wrong road, faith prevents the searcher from recognizing the real Jesus. Faith is bad, history is good.

It is this that Dunn questions,

First, we must recognize that the first faith of the disciples is what makes it possible for us to gain any information about or insight into the Jesus of Galilee; and second, we must also recognize the fallacy of thinking that the real Jesus must be a non-faith Jesus, different from the Jesus of the Gospels.

So Dunn makes three main points in critiquing the quest, each of which takes a chapter in this short book (125 pages).

1. Jesus made an impact on those who became his first disciples, well before his death and resurrection. That impact was then talked about and spread and became part of an oral tradition.
2. This oral transmission of stories about Jesus was not static as we have it in written form, but performed. Living in quality and effect.
3. The quest looks for the distinctive Jesus and should rather be looking for the characteristic Jesus that runs through the Jesus tradition both literary and oral.

As Dunn says to conclude (p78),

There is no credible ‘historical Jesus’ behind the Gospel portrayal different from the characteristic Jesus of the Synoptic tradition. There is no Galilean Jesus available to us other than the one who left such a strong impression in and through the Jesus tradition. But this assuredly is the historical Jesus that the Christian wants to encounter. And should the scholar and historian be content with anything less?

On the whole this is really helpful defence against the continued churning out of books claiming to have discovered the historical Jesus that ends up looking nothing like the Jesus in the Gospels and everything like the way a liberal 21st century scholar would like Jesus to be like.

I think Dunn’s emphasis on the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition is likely correct but it raises questions (for which I have no answers) about how that ties in with the inerrancy of scripture, although more easily tied in with the more broad term of the inspiration of scripture.

So if near 900 pages of work on the earliest stories of Jesus sounds a bit much for you then this 125 page gem should do the trick very nicely.