Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (1980 Dunn), book

Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (1980) is a book by James D.G. Dunn.

Abstract

In this volume Dunn seeks to trace the historical origins of the doctrine of the incarnation. Instead of seeing the doctrine's origins in some parts of the broader religious milieu of Second Temple Period Judaism (such as Enoch's Son of Man, Jewish Angelogy, or Divine Intermediaries) or Greco-Roman mythology (such as the legendary figures Dionysus and Heracles or the Gnostic redeemer myth), Dunn argues that the doctrine originates from the intersection of the Wisdom imagery of pre-Christian Judaism and NT itself. Accordingly, instead of anachronistically assuming, like his predecessors, that incarnational theology is present within the entire corpus of the New Testament, Dunn argues that the doctrine of the incarnation develops within the corpus of the New Testament from mere intimations the Wisdom passages in Paul's letters (while Paul's primary preoccupation is Adam Christology) to the latter clearly articulated incarnational language found in John 1.14. Yet despite Dunn's erudite presentation, clear command of the secondary literature, and close exegetical readings of the New Testament, his work has been and can be critiqued from two antithetical angles. First, after the initial publication of this work in 1980, Dunn, not surprisingly, ignited a fierce backlash among the vast majority of NT scholars at precisely the point where his work is the most revolutionary. In particular these scholars, who held a more traditional viewpoint, contested his exegetical treatments of several key passages such as Phil 2.6-11, Col. 1.15-20, 1 Cor. 15.44-49, Gal. 4.4, and Rom 8.3, since they assumed that these texts supported later theological understandings of a divine, pre-existent Jesus who had become incarnated in human flesh. Although this is still a contentious issue in some scholarly circles, Dunn's presentation of the material at this point is compelling and difficult to refute. Second, specialists in Second Temple Period Judaism have critiqued Dunn in relation to the dating of key texts from the Pseudepigrapha in general and the Enochic literature in particular. For instance, Dunn's insistence on the primacy of the NT text for the doctrine of the Incarnation forces him to date the Similitudes of Enoch to the end of the 1st century CE and clouds his ability to see antecedents of incarnational theology within this form of Judaism. Yet despite these criticisms, for its time Dunn's groundbreaking argument that incarnational theology developed within the NT, and was not merely monolithic throughout, marked a significant breakthrough in the field and radically reshaped the traditional understanding of the historical development of the Incarnation. ~Deborah Forger

Editions and translations

Published in London [England]: SCM Press; and Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1980 / 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1996.

External links

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