Took a trip to London on Tuesday night to catch up with some friends, and, on the train journey there and back, I managed to read James D G Dunn’s “A New Perspective on Jesus”. (It’s a short book that fitted into my jacket pocket…)

I thought it was excellent. It goes through the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ and skewers some liberal assumptions about the nature of the tradition, and gives a straightforward account of how the oral tradition would have functioned. The book is really a short summary of his longer book, “Jesus Remembered”, which I guess I’ll now have to read. Not for beginners in New Testament studies, I wouldn’t have said, but if you know what ‘form criticism’ or ‘Q’ refer to, then you’ll be fine.

It turns out that Dunn was the person who coined the phrase ‘A new perspective on Paul’, referring to the post-Sanders revolution in how to understand the Apostle, which I had always associated with Tom Wright (coming to a Learning Church near you in the autumn ;-). I hope Dunn makes a similar impact with his work here.