Beginning from Jerusalem.

• Author: Marshall, I. Howard
• Position: Book review

Beginning from Jerusalem. By JAMES D. G. DUNN. Christianity in the Making, vol. 2. Grand Rapids, Michigan: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING Co., 2009. Pp. xv + 1347. $80.

This is the second of three volumes in a series intended to cover the history of earliest Christianity. The first volume. Jesus Remembered, presented the life of Jesus as it was remembered by his first followers, and was notable for its stress on the concept of memory with its idea of "a living tradition of Christian celebration which takes us with surprising immediacy to the heart of the first memories of Jesus"; that this "remembered Jesus" is very close to the "historical Jesus" is a clear implication of the detailed argument. A third volume will tackle the period after the fall of Jerusalem (70 C.E.), and the present one is devoted to a detailed history of the early church during the forty years following the death of Jesus (probably 30 C.E.).

Dunn adopts the role of the historian seeking for "the historical church" and dependent on sources that he carefully assesses. He is throughout critical, probing the historicity of what they describe or imply, and a marked feature of the book is the way in which time and again he examines the material in the book of Acts, which has so often been found to be late, tendentious, and imaginative, and finds that the arguments against the historicity of what is there recorded simply do not stand up. Frequently the historical skepticism of such scholars as E. Haenchen is found to be inappropriate. Even where Lukan interests and Tendenz can be identified, this does not diminish the value of Acts as a historical source. This is not to say that Dunn does not recognize a one-sidedness in some of the material and cases where the earlier testimony of Paul gives a different picture, but on the whole Acts survives the critical testing remarkably well, with the result that it can be used to provide the main framework for the story.

The popular reverse procedure that considers Acts to be of secondary value and importance to the primary material that can be gleaned from elsewhere is decisively rejected: Acts is dependent upon eye-witness testimony, whether directly from the author himself or indirectly, and is to be treated with appropriate respect. The various incidents need to be understood within the horizons of the different groups of first-century Christians rather than within the "omniscient" total knowledge of background of modern readers. As...