The Oral Gospel Tradition by James D. Dunn.

• Author: Mills, Edward J., III
• Position: Book review

Dunn, James D. G. The Oral Gospel Tradition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. x + 390 pages. Paperback, $45.00.

Having read most of theologian James Dunn's voluminous work and enjoyed and learned from it a great deal, I was a bit disappointed with his latest, The Oral Gospel Tradition. It is not that there are no great essays in it. It is just that there seems to be no common thread that ties all the essays together in spite of the book's common theme of the oral Gospel tradition.

In the last fifty years there has been a steady drumbeat in both Classical studies and New Testament studies to persuade scholars to escape the two fields' modern orientation towards texts and instead understand the ways in which the ancient world was also an oral/aural society. The push to understand ancient texts this way has largely been successful, and James Dunn is one of the prime movers of this shift in New Testament scholarship. These collected essays, which include a collection of his older published essays, were important in moving New Testament scholarship in this direction.

Dunn divides his work into three parts but does not indicate a thematic core for each division. Readers are thus left to determine for themselves his rationale. The first appears to cover the oral/aural nature of ancient societies, the second is comprised of essays written in response to critics of the first part of his three-part magnum opus, Jesus Remembered, and the third section is a set of essays that flesh out the consequences of seeing ancient texts as oral/aural documents and texts written in an oral/aural society. Of the three, the first and third parts are the most rewarding. In Part One there are seven essays, the most important of which appears in the book's second chapter, "Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisioning the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition." This essay, first published in 2003, was a real tour de force in the push to move to an oral/aural understanding of the New Testament texts. Other chapters in part one on the Q Source and John's Gospel are also quite good, although some knowledge of Greek is needed to read some of these essays. What I find most compelling in these essays is that although they engage in theoretical issues having to do with oral societies and memory, the overall analysis is much more basic and profound. Dunn simply lays out parallel texts from the Gospels and thereby fashions a more solid argument for the oral nature of these...