Adam

Far be it from me to claim that James D. G. Dunn supports my view that the Passion Narrative goes back to a diary kept at the time by John Mark (See my Early Aramaic Gospels back in BC&H, my second go at gJohn after John 17 Discourses), because he himself assumes oral tradition even though denouncing Form Criticism. However, he cites current agreement that the Passion Narrative starts earlier than the conventional Gethsemane as in Peter Kirby’s study of the scholarship. See note 2, p. 766 in Faith and the Historical Jesus, 2005. He opts for the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, present in all four gospels. (I take it back to the anointing in Bethany, John 12:2-8-- even though absent at that location and time in Luke.) This would make it a more complete set of diary entries made by one person in Jerusalem who was taking note of everything he knew about Jesus in the only week he saw Jesus in the flesh.

Dunn even makes fun of the one scholar he sees as tracing the gospels to strictly literary origins. In note 105, p. 192 he finds “W. Schmithals is a lone voice in his highly improbable view, recently repeated, that the Synoptic tradition was literary from the first.” Vom Urspung der synoptishen Tradition”, ZTK9A 1997, 288-316. This would indicate that no scholar can be cited to support my Passion Diary thesis. So you’ve got to read me, folks, you won’t get such great insights anywhere else.
Or maybe you’d rather read Dunn. Here’s a Scribd thousand pages I’m talking about above available even though it’s current:

Faith and the Historical Jesus
Not only that, you can consider it to have about 10,000 footnotes, allowing that lots of single footnotes refer to ten or more sources. Maybe it’s free because it can give a taste for paying for later volumes in the series by Dunn?
So many pages, yes, but no need to read them all at a sitting. Every time I came back in to the site after closing my computer, I was brought back to the page I had left.

Among what Dunn wrote here: he likes Helmut Koester’s methodology to replace the old quest that failed with Form Criticism (p. 60). Dale Allison puts his apocalyptic Q1 in the 30’s (159). Dunn rejects Dialogue of the Savior as Gnostic (168) and Crossan’s Cross Gospel (170). Words attributed to Jesus sound too little like early Christianity for Bultmann to be right that early prophetic traditions were said to be from Jesus (186-87). Moule and Terence Mournet have undermined the literalism used by Farmer and Goulder to support their off-beat Synoptic theories (195).

Dunn points to particular Aramaic tracing to one person, Jesus (225). Bauckham agreed with Byrskog that the individual Synoptics show the pre-Easter Jesus, and Stuhlmacher holds that some was written during Jesus’s ministry (247). On the other hand, Stanley Porter points to certain speeches of Jesus in Greek: Mt. 8:5-13, Jn 4:4-26, Mk 2:13-14, 7:25-30, 12:13-17, 8:27-30, 15:2-5 (315, note 289).

Adam

I also noticed that Dunn tends to cite only recent works in his notes. He our his students must read everything new that comes out.

I havn't learned my way around Scribd yet. How do I search for titles or authors? Once I've started on a book, is there a way to go to some other page hundreds away?

Adam

Dunn works within Consensus scholarship, but he does a good job of it and lets us see the state of the literature. But though Dunn gives explanations of some particular views of his own, he does not provide conclusive support for the Consensus. At best we must assume he has done this somewhere else and did not choose to do it again in this book.

In spite of Dunn’s liking for Koester, Dunn critiques the latter’s case for the Gospel of Thomas being earlier than the Synoptic. It’s just different. Dunn does not commit to Thomas being a variant of Q nor to it being an independent tradition—Consensus scholars have not settled on one or the other, so Dunn does not.

Dunn readily attacks Form Criticism, no longer in favor with Consensus scholars. Yet he retains the underlying preconception that there was an interval before the writing. He does not seem to have a reason for this except Consensus doctrine.
Dunn does not say a lot about source criticism even in this big book. He hardly mentions the Signs Source within John except to cite Robert Fortna as its supporter. This is typical for this book; it cites authority rather than argumentation. Dunn supports Markan priority by referring to the main opponent, Farmer, and that he has been refuted by Tuckett and Kloppenborg. Even though he retains Ur-Marcus and editions of Mark as possible, he winds up seeming to assume the shoddy Consensus case for the writing of Luke being later than the conclusion of Acts because Luke must be later than Mark (143-146). He also cites Moule and Terence Mournet as refuting both Farmer and Goulder (195).

As for Q he accepts it as well established, questioning instead the attempts to stratify it. The verbal agreements range from 100% to 8% between Matthew and Luke, but he somehow does not regard this as disproving his oral tradition view (146-149). Certainly the 100% cases cannot result from the two gospels tapping into the oral tradition. What Dunn must mean is that such instances got into Greek Q from oral tradition and then Q got copied into the two gospels. There are several such instances, so there must have been that much of written text(s). As for the 8% cases, why assume oral tradition? The pericope could have been cases in which M and L happened to overlap. Just as likely the same type incident or teaching could have occurred more than once, with the strong differences being real differences from the start. More likely would be that most of Q, the stuff in the 50% range, was written (explaining the similarities) in Aramaic and then translated (explaining the differences). (Dunn perhaps wants to slant things toward his view that there are indications that the underlying Aramaic traces back to the particular man Jesus --225).

Never mentioned by Dunn is that Mark and Luke show similar closeness and dissimilarity of texts. He does not explore whether the Ur-Marcus he acknowledges possible may actually be more than one text, such as the Twelve-Source I favor. With the Twelve-Source portion being the less similar part, could it be (as I argue) that the Twelve-source part of the Triple Tradition may derive from a portion of a Q1 text that is not recognizable as Q because it was NOT omitted by Mark? These kinds of questions are not answered or even explored in this book.

One would think that even Dunn’s Consensus-based authority rules would still allow him to keep a box-score on which scholars have diverged from the standard on these matters. My suspicion now is that peer review is so pervasive that certain ideas are forbidden. These include not just new ideas, but old ideas that fell out of fashion and ideas that were not well received but never refuted. Yes, there is always the sparring between competing factions, but basically only those factions that have some built-in bias attached of church or anti-church, apologetic or anti-apologetic, and these with gradations of extremism or moderation depending upon temperament or “fundamentalism” (whether Left or Right).

These blinders imposed by Consensus turned me into a Contrarian in the 1960’s, and the situation seems unlikely to improve. I always thought I would have to find truth outside the Consensus, but always thought that the Consensus was amenable to challenges from the outside. No, it is closed. I’m not necessarily right about all my challenges, but it seems that only from me will you even hear the questions and challenges. You can’t depend upon the closed-within-itself Consensus to refute me; you have to do for yourself what they won’t consider. Where else will you hear that John Mark wrote the Passion Diary right after the events? That Nicodemus wrote the Johannine Discourses while Jesus was alive, and we know this because his attitude changed at least twice? That skeptics cannot know that there is no eye-witness testimony in Matthew, because we cannot know that weakly-verbally-paralleled pericopes in Mark are not from a larger “Q” (and we know it’s larger ever since the Coptic Thomas was found) that includes the Call of the Apostle Matthew in the Triple Tradition? That Andrew wrote the Signs Gospel? That the frequency of the name “Peter” does indicate that a large part (but not all) of Mark goes back to him? That there are indications from the name Simon in L that Luke was finished and dedicated from him to Theophilus from the present or future Bishop of Jerusalem? That critical fragmentation of the Gospel of John increases the chances that part of it was written by him (the Beloved Disciple), but he was not the “other disciple” of John 18 and 20?