Convention (1948), the question arises as to whether some similar law or conventionin the pursuit of war existed in the ancient Near East. Not for the Assyrians. Tiglath-pileser I (ca. 1100) is praised because ‘he hacked to pieces the women with child andpierced the bodies of the weak’. In an appendix B. treats of international law in theAncient Near East. In his conclusion B. gives an expose of Otto’s work TheologicheEthik des Alten Testaments, which he believes will surely become a classic work in ourgeneration. This is followed by detailed comments on it, and treatment of GordonWenham’s work on Law and Ethic in the Bible. Otto, dependent on J. Hempel (1938)has the theme that ethics is an imitation of God. Hempel stressed that God did notissue demands out of blanke Willkur (mere arbitrary will) but bound himself toessentially the same ethical commitments that he laid on his human subjects.The book ends with a nine-page bibliography, an index of biblical passages and an

index of modern authors.Barton’s work will be fundamental in its field for many years to come. It is timely in

the present-day discussions of religion and reason, natural law, ‘revealed’ law and anarbitrary will of God, and others besides. It bears information on many questions,and invites exploration of others, such as ‘divine will’ (imitatio Dei) and the commandto destroy enemies (herem).

Milltown Institute, Dublin Martin McNamara

A New Perspective on Jesus. By J. D. G. Dunn. Pp. 136, SPCK, London, 2005, $13.00.The Historical Jesus through Catholic and Jewish Eyes. Edited by Leonard Greenspoon,

Dennis Hamm, and Bryan F. Le Beau. Pp. xviii, 171, Trinity Press International,Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 2000, d18.00.

Pondering the Passion: What’s at Stake for Christians and Jews? Edited by Philip A.Cunningham. Pp. xvi, 214, Sheed & Ward/Rowman and Littlefield PublishersInc., 2004, $20.00.

The first of these three short books on aspects of the life of Jesus is an extrapolation ofthe methodology that lies behind James Dunn’s large book Jesus Remembered (2003),here published separately so it doesn’t get swamped in the larger context. It consists ofthree lectures given in various locations and a previously published article as anappendix. He aims to re-align the quest for the historical Jesus by making threecorrectives. (I don’t think Dunn is aiming to establish a Fifth Quest; that would be toomuch.) First, he states that an objectively authenticated historical Jesus – the Jesus ofthe historians – is a chimera. Clearly there was such a figure but he is irretrievable, aswhat we have are accounts of Jesus as he was remembered by others, all of whom hadstrong beliefs about him. So narratives about Jesus are faith-laden; this is inevitable,there is nothing we can do about it but there is, Dunn insists, nothing wrong withfaith. This insight may be stated in a new way but there is nothing new about it. Wehave long since turned away from von Ranke’s objective history and anyone who hasspent any time on hermeneutics knows that any account of a historical figure offers afigure as understood and interpreted by that interpreter. All historical figures andevents are interpreted figures and events. Dunn prefers to talk about the impact Jesushad on his disciples, even before his death, and Dunn confirms that the SynopticGospels contain whole tracts of pre-Easter faith-laden accounts of Jesus. I should adda word of caution that Dunn seems to re-open a fissure in the concept of ‘history’,between fact and interpretation, that I had thought we had moved beyond – he quotesKahler approvingly.Second, Dunn wants to shift the default mechanism in our analysis of Gospel

texts away from a literary paradigm to one of orality and aurality, speaking and

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hearing. He points out that Jesus appeared in a predominantly illiterate societyand the earliest stage of the Christian tradition was an oral tradition. He acceptsthe importance of literary criticism on the Gospels: he accepts the primacy ofMark and the likely existence of Q, but he outlines the general characteristics ofan oral tradition that preceded and overlapped the specificity of a written tradition.(All that needs adding is that it is likely that there was an early fragmentary writing ofJesus traditions in notebooks that ran alongside the oral tradition and the publicationof our extended Gospels.) The main characteristic of orality was flexibility so thatwithin what was a performed tradition were variant memories of sayings andactions with no one identifiable original version. This is best demonstrated in Dunn’sappendix.Third and finally, Dunn wants to avoid ‘atomistic exegesis’ which results from

focussing on what is distinctive about Jesus – he attacks the traditional criteria foridentifying the ‘historical Jesus’. He prefers to draw a larger picture of what ischaracteristic of Jesus. Dunn is surely right to move away from the ‘criteria’ to lookfor a Jesus who is embedded within Judaism, though we should ignore his caricatureof the ‘supersessionist’ interpreter who in reality need not be anti-Semitic nor regardJudaism as ‘an empty husk’. But we do have to ask what makes what is characteristicof Jesus characteristic? For Dunn it seems to be mainly repetition. If motifs arerepeated often enough, they become characteristic, e.g. the kingdom of God. But theJesus alluded to in this short book lacks much content, lacks specificity. It’s notenough to say that Jesus discussed matters central to Judaism, we want to know whatwe can learn from what he said about Jewish issues. Dunn’s Jesus looks rather flabbyand watered down from the figure who had the impact Dunn alludes to in the firstchapter. But Dunn is right to push the burden of proof onto those who want to exciseelements from the Gospels and, while questions still hang in the air, there is goodcriticism here and some wise words at the end.The Historical Jesus Through Catholic and Jewish Eyes results from two colloquia at

Creighton University in the late nineties. It begins with a by and large useful survey ofrecent historical studies on Jesus by Bernard Brandon Scott, but it’s odd to have askeda member of the Jesus Seminar to begin the Catholic section of the book, and he willnot raise the confidence of many British readers by saying that he cannot take theproject of N. T. Wright seriously because of his allegedly anti-Enlightenmentpresuppositions. Scott probably could not take Luke Timothy Johnson seriouslyeither, who has contributed chapter two and who tries to put ‘history’ in its placeagainst the real Jesus of faith. There are shades of Dunn here. Both are critical ofliberal Protestant historical Jesus research but both unfortunately open up a divisionbetween history and faith when what is needed is integration. There follow chaptersby Daniel Harrington on the Jewishness of Jesus and Monika Hellweg on theinfluence of historical Jesus research on Catholic systematic theology andChristology.From the second colloquium we have Jewish contributions by Michael Cook on

Jewish research on the historical Jesus (inconsistencies in Jesus towards the Judaismof his day are attributed to different historical strata in the Gospels, and the possibleinfluence of Paul on the later composition of the Gospels is regretted) and Amy-JillLevine on Jesus’ attitude to divorce and sexuality. Adele Reinhartz throws a Jewishperspective on Hollywood films about Jesus (films that embed Jesus in Judaism –Zeffirelli – are supercessionist, while those that attenuate his Jewishness are morecongenial – Pasolini, Arcand) and Alan Segal offers a personal portrait of Jesus thatseems unremarkable but whose assertions might be more provocative for a Jewishreader. The collection ends with a too short survey by Jonathan Brumberg-Krauss ofthe characteristics of Jewish scholarship in this area which has offered importantinsights in recent years. Altogether a useful but not stunning volume.

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Pondering the Passion, What’s at Stake for Christians and Jews is much moresatisfying – at least until the last section on Mel Gibson’s controversial film whichhas provoked this broad collection. There are good chapters on the Jews underRoman rule and on Jewish law and the trial of Jesus, this latter again by MichaelCook, and on the reasons for Jesus’ execution. These illustrate the tendency of thebook to exonerate the Jews of Jesus’ time to the extent of arguing, with someplausibility, that there was no trial before Caiaphas, and more generally to attackChristian supersessionism, and later to lay into Mel Gibson. There are two usefulchapters on the passion narratives and four good chapters on the Arts: the benignportrayal of the Jews in early Christian iconography; the tendency of J. S. Bach in hisPassions to limit traditional anti-Semitism; the pernicious influence of theOberammergau play; and a short survey of ‘Celluloid Passions’ from the past onehundred years.Clark Williamson firmly bases ‘What does it mean to be saved?’ in the Bible, a

summary any Catholic would have been pleased to have written, and Louis Royanswers ‘Why is the death of Jesus redemptive?’ Then four chapters on Gibson’s film:Philip Cunningham starts well with a detailed analysis of the sources that Gibson’sscript draws on – various bits of the Gospels, Anne Catherine Emmerich’s nineteenthcentury visions and the scriptwriter’s own imagination. Cunningham identifieshistorical inauthenticities and theological problems in the script. But after this thecontributors lose their composure with a strident moral attack on Gibson, anoverwrought suggestion of the psychological damage that might result from seeing thefilm, and an anxious reflection of the difficulties of educating adults in the context of‘the film’, a film that at the present time does not seem likely to be revived in thecinema and the DVD of which can now be picked up for less than d5. Such a fusswhen it was in production, such limited interest now.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith. By Francis Watson. Pp. xv, 584, London, T & TClark International, London, 2004, $34.95.

Francis Watson has opened an imaginative and fresh perspective on Paul as aninterpreter of scripture. He’s not the first in this field, of course, and the authorexpresses his debt to Richard Hayes whose Echoes of Scripture located the heart ofPaul’s theology in his interpretation of scripture, though Watson surveys the field atmuch greater length. The greater length is needed to examine not just the scripturaltexts and Paul’s interpretation of them, but also – and herein lies the originality of thebook – readings of the same texts by other more or less contemporary Jewish writers.The focus of the book is on ‘the fact that Paul and his fellow-Jews read the same texts,yet read them differently’. It is about ‘readers and their divergent readings’. The law‘is above all a text that is read’.Paul’s theology is here seen to develop from the interpretation of scripture, not at

all from an independent theology which has turned to scripture for ad hominem proof-texts for potential Jewish converts. So Paul entered into a dialogue and a dispute withnon-Christian Jewish authors through reading the same texts, i.e. the Torah, andoffering a divergent interpretation. This shows that the interlocutors shared ‘a singleintertextual field’, a sign that there had been no significant ‘parting of the ways’, asDunn put it, by this stage in Christian history. It also suggests a breadth and variety oftheological understanding in Jewish religion at that time, not rooted in a sociologicalaccount of the different parties (Sadducees, Pharisees, etc) but through range ofscriptural interpretations.

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