The third volume of James Dunn's examination of ‘Christian origins’ is focused on the period between 70 and 180 ce, in which many of the New Testament writings are understood to have been composed and in which the identity of early Christianity and contemporary Judaism began to take on distinct shapes in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. Within this period, Dunn is particularly attentive to the presence and development of ‘Jewish Christianity’: understood in the context of a real, but complex, parting of the ways, Jewish Christianity has an identity that is contested on both sides. The process of defining Christian identity in negative terms as ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ (Gal 3:28) leads eventually, through conflict, to the development of theologies that are some way removed from the core beliefs of the earliest Christian communities.

The chapter and part numbers reflect the fact that this book does not stand alone, but brings to its close a trilogy of studies. Part 10 opens with a general discussion of the issues that bear on this particular time period (chapter 38), followed by an overview of the sources that will be used to discuss the late first century (chapter 39) and the second century (chapter 40). The New Testament writings constitute the sources for the first and a range of writings inform the second, including the apostolic fathers, the apologists and heresiologists, and the various apocryphal works that would be excluded from the canon. Part 11 (Jesus Still Remembered) looks at the transformation of pre-textual traditions about Jesus into written Gospels (chapter 41–3). In certain regards, Dunn is quite conservative with this material, allowing the canonical gospels to retain a certain priority in our understanding of the Jesus movement and only cautiously allowing the Gospel of Thomas to make a distinctive contribution, set in dialogue with the Fourth Gospel. At the same time, Dunn's approach is far from ‘canonical’: his handling of this material seeks to reconstruct various worlds behind the text, from the time of the historical Jesus to that of the author's own time. As he moves into the discussion of second century ‘memories’ of Jesus in chapter 44, Dunn is attentive to the question of whether we are dealing with the effects of the textual gospels or of oral tradition, offering some interesting arguments for the latter. All of this allows his reading of the second century material to contribute in carefully limited ways to the picture of the historical Jesus and the developing theology of the Christian movement.

Part 12 comprises two chapters discussing, in turn, Jewish Christianity (chapter 45) and the Parting of the Ways (chapter 46). While Dunn is careful to avoid a simplistic ‘parting of the ways’ model, he recognises that the expressed identity of each community (each of which has to negotiate its own internal diversity) is developed in relation to the other. To some extent, this involves a critical rejection of some of the recent treatments of Jewish–Christian relations that have, in his view, overemphasised the unity of the two and that have failed to recognise the extent and severity of the tensions or conflicts. Hence, a framework is set in which the evidence of the various writings can be interpreted: these writings continue trajectories identifiable in the pre-70 ce period, while also reflecting the disruptive impact of Jerusalem's fall on the identity and belief of both communities.

Part 13 considers ‘The Continuing Influence of Paul and Peter’. Paul's own writings were examined in the previous volume and here (chapter 47) Dunn turns to the works that he locates in the second generation: the Pastoral Epistles, Acts and 2 Peter. This done, he examines the reception of Paul in the second-century writings, identifying various echoes of his teachings in the Apostolic Fathers before going on to look at the ‘legendary Paul’ of the apocryphal texts and at the Gnostic appropriations of the apostle. A similar approach is then taken (chapter 48) with Peter, although Dunn's scepticism over the traditional authorship of 1 Peter means that he deals with it here as a pseudepigraphon, alongside other ‘Petrine’ works. In both chapters, the range of texts covered requires the data found in each to be handled in a fairly cursory way: there is a sense that Dunn includes much of this material out of a desire to be thorough, rather than out of any concern to probe its significance in detail.

Part 14 is labelled ‘Beyond the First Generation’, perhaps surprisingly, since the work as a whole might really have been so titled. In fact, the first of the two chapters here is really a discussion of John and the Johannine traditions (chapter 49), in which Dunn takes a fairly conservative approach to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. Crucially, he locates the earlier material in this trajectory within Jewish Christianity but recognises that it presses the boundaries and borders, particularly in terms of the christology at its core, which has now moved away from any merely functionalist or adoptionist account of the divinity of Jesus towards something that represents a more obviously high christology.

Evaluating a work of this kind involves some recognition of the genre to which it belongs, which is distinctively a function of the career point from which it is written. It is an example of the ‘magisterial’ appraisal of a field of study that is offered by a scholar who has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in it. Such works survey a broad range of issues and the relationships between them, with a sensitivity to the currents running through those relationships that can only be attained by the mature scholar. This, though, means that what we have is a really a capstone to, and not a development of, that long career. There is little by way of close reading of texts, and not much that might be considered fresh analysis of those texts. Dunn has done that work elsewhere; here, he draws on it to offer broad observations and decisions on matters of debate in the field. The result can feel repetitious, as the same texts are discussed in relation to multiple questions, and those who have not followed Dunn's publications through the years will doubtless find it frustratingly limited in its depth of engagement with the primary texts themselves. But those who do know Dunn's work will appreciate that it draws together threads from his decades of research.

This allows us to pinpoint the issues that ought to be of genuine critical significance for its readers, for these are associated with the views that Dunn has consistently advocated through his career. Most obviously, there is a sense established from the beginning of the book that the later theological formulations of the church do not represent legitimate extrapolations from the earliest beliefs about Jesus. Dunn considers the traditions of the church, by and large, to be marked by a consistent (and apparently regrettable) tendency to project back onto the New Testament writings some kind of rule of faith to which they conform, even if the authors did not realise it. Hence, the growing definition of Christian identity is not to be evaluated ‘by looking forward and taking our lead from what eventuated . . . But from the past, that is from the character of the first generation we have so far sketched out . . . Would Peter, James and Paul have been as satisfied with what happened in the second century, and thereafter, as Eusebius was?’ (p. 41). The result is a work that, like all of Dunn's scholarship, assigns a particular normative significance to the (reconstructed) beliefs of the first generation, essentially considering the development of higher christologies to be departures in some sense. This aligns the book with certain movements in modern theology, and positions it sharply against others. The beliefs that are eventually isolated in the conclusions as belonging to the true core identity of Christianity are, in fact, disappointingly thin, particularly given the scale of the discussion that has preceded them. However this might be evaluated, it means that the ultimate worth of this volume rests on Dunn's rationale and criteria for retrieving the earliest Jesus traditions, which are here largely assumed. Serious critical engagement with this volume, then, really requires the reader to go back to Dunn's earlier works and their scholarly reception: it is there, not here, that the real critical moves are made.