Wise words from James Dunn

• Unity & Diversity in the New Testament, SCM Press Ltd, 1977, page 53:
  
  “Should we then say that Jesus was confessed as God from the earliest days in Hellenistic Christianity? That would be to claim too much.
  (1) The emergence of a confession of Jesus in terms of divinity was largely facilitated by the emergence of Psalm 110:1 from very early on (most clearly in Mark 12:36; Acts 2:34f.; I Cor. 15:25; Heb. 1:13).
  
  The Lord says to my lord:
  ‘Sit at my right hand,
  till I make your enemies your footstool.’
  
  Its importance here lies in the double use of kyrios [lord]. The one is clearly Yahweh, but who is the other? 
  Clearly not Yahweh, but an exalted being whom the Psalmist calls kyrios. 
  (2) Paul calls Jesus kyrios, but he seems to have marked reservations about actually calling him ‘God.’ ... Similarly he refrains from praying to Jesus. More typical of his attitude is that he prays to God through Christ
  (Rom. 1:8; 7:25; II Cor. 1:20; Col. 3:17). 
  (3) ‘Jesus is Lord’ is only part of a fuller confession for Paul. For at the same time as he affirms ‘Jesus is Lord’, he also affirms ‘God is one’ (I Cor. 8:5-6; Eph. 4:5-6). Here Christianity shows itself as a developed form of Judaism, with its monotheistic confession as one of the most important parts of its Jewish inheritance; for in Judaism the most fundamental confession is
  ‘God is one.’ ‘There is only one God’
  (Deut. 6:4). Hence also Rom. 3:30; Gal. 3:20, I Tim. 2:5 (cf. James 2:19). Within Palestine and the Jewish mission such an affirmation would have been unnecessary — Jews and Christians shared a belief in God’s oneness. But in the Gentile mission this Jewish presupposition within Christianity would have emerged into prominence, in face of the wider belief in ‘gods many.’
  The point for us to note is that Paul can hail Jesus as Lord not in order to identify him with God, but rather, if anything, to distinguish him from the One God
  (cf. particularly I Cor. 15:24-28; ...).”
  
  
• Page 221:
  
  “Jesus was not himself preexistent; he was the man that preexistent Wisdom became.”
  
  Page 226:
  
  “Paul does not yet understand the risen Christ as the object of worship; he is the theme of worship, the one for whom praise is given ... the one through whom the pray-er prays to God (Rom 1:18; 7:25; II Cor 1:20; Col 3:17), but not the object of worship or prayer. So too his reticence about calling Jesus ‘God’. Even the title ‘Lord’ becomes a way of distinguishing Jesus from God rather than identifying him with God (Rom. 15:6; I Cor. 8:6; 15:24-28; II Cor. 1:3; 11:31; Eph. 1:3, 17; Phil. 2:11; Col 1:3).”
  
  
  
• The quotes that follow are all taken from
  James Dunn's Christology in the Making,
  Second Edition, SCM Press Ltd, 1996:
  
  
• Concerning John 1:1-14 and the Logos [Word], page 243:
  
  “The conclusion which seems to emerge from our analysis thus far is that it is only with verse 14 that we can begin to speak of the personal Logos. ... Prior to verse 14 we are in the same realm as pre-Christian talk of Wisdom and Logos, the same language and ideas that we find in the Wisdom tradition and in Philo, where, as we have seen, we are dealing with personifications rather than persons, personified actions of God rather than an individual divine being as such. The point is obscured by the fact that we have to translate the masculine Logos as ‘he’ throughout the poem. But if we translated logos as ‘God's utterance’ instead, it would become clearer that the poem did not necessarily intend the Logos in verses 1-13 to be thought of as a personal divine being. In other words, the revolutionary significance of v. 14 may well be that it marks ... the transition from impersonal personification to actual person.
  This indeed is the astounding nature of the poem's claim. If it had asserted simply that an individual divine being had become man, that would have raised fewer eyebrows. It is the fact that the Logos poet has taken language which any thoughtful Jew would recognize to be the language of personification and has identified it with a particular person, as a particular person, that would be so astonishing: the manifestation of God become a man! God's utterance not merely come through a particular individual, but actually become that one person,
  Jesus of Nazareth!”
  
  
• Concerning the Spirit, Wisdom and Word of God; pages 219,244:
  
  “Our conclusion here is borne out by what we learned above concerning the Spirit of God and the Wisdom of God in pre-Christian Judaism. As they were ways of speaking about Yahweh acting toward and in his creation, so too with the word of God. As they enabled the Jewish writers to speak of the immanence of God without threatening his transcendence, so with the Word. ...
  
  Wisdom. 9:1-2,17 
  
  O God of my fathers and Lord of mercy,
  who has made all things by your word,
  and by your wisdom has formed man ...
  
  Who has learned your counsel,
  unless you have given wisdom
  and sent your holy Spirit from on high?
  
  
  In short, all three expressions are simply alternative ways of speaking about the effective power of God in his active relationship with his world and its inhabitants. ...
  
  John ... used Wisdom and Logos language of Christ, identifying Christ as Wisdom, as the man that the Logos became, but did not seem to think of pre-existent Wisdom-Logos as a personal being or of Christ as one who had been pre-existent as such.”
  
  
• Concerning the fact that Luke has no knowledge of a literal preexistence of Jesus Christ, pages 50-51:
  
  “In his birth narrative however Luke is more explicit than Matthew in his assertion of Jesus’ divine sonship from birth (1:32, 35; ...). Here again it is sufficiently clear that a virginal conception by divine power without the participation of any man is in view (1:34). But here too it is sufficiently clear that it is a begetting, a becoming, which is in view, the coming into existence of one who will be called, and will in fact be the Son of God, not the transition of a pre-existent being to become the soul of a human baby, or the metamorphosis of a divine being into a human foetus… Luke’s intention is clearly to describe the creative process of begetting … Similarly in Acts there is no sign of any christology of preexistence.”
  
  
• Concerning the literal preexistence of the Messiah in Jewish literature, page 294 note 37:
  
  “That the Messiah himself existed before creation is nowhere stated in Tannaitic literature …
  “the name of the Messiah” is the idea of the Messiah, or, more exactly, the idea of redemption through the Messiah. This idea did precede creation.”
  (Klausner, Messianic Idea, p. 460; see also Strack-Billerbeck II, pp. 334ff.,
  Mowinckel, He That Cometh, p. 334; ... Vermes, Jesus, pp. 138f.)”
  
  
• Concerning the literal preexistence of the Messiah by the writer of Hebrews, pages 55-56:
  
  “It would certainly go beyond our evidence to conclude that the author has attained to the understanding of God's Son as having had a real pre-existence. In short, a concept of pre-existent sonship, yes; but the pre-existence perhaps more of an idea and purpose in the mind of God than a personal divine being.”