Theopedia

James D. G. Dunn

Overview

James D. G. Dunn (1939-2020) was a British New Testament scholar who taught at the University of Nottingham and, from 1982 until his 2003 retirement, at Durham University, where he held the Lightfoot Chair of Divinity.1 He is best known for giving the New Perspective on Paul “not only its moniker but also the coherence it needed to take deeper root within scholarship,” building on E. P. Sanders’s account of Second Temple Judaism to argue that Paul’s phrase “works of the law” named boundary markers of Jewish identity, chiefly circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath-keeping, rather than a general system of merit.2 Reformed evangelical scholarship has responded to that reading at length, particularly his treatment of Galatians 3:10-143 and Romans 9:30-10:5.4

Life and Ministry

Dunn was born on 21 October 1939 in Birmingham, England. He earned a BSc in economics and statistics from the University of Glasgow in 1961 and a BD there in 1964, then a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1968 under C. F. D. Moule with a thesis on “The Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” followed by a second Cambridge BD in 1976. He was licensed as a Church of Scotland minister in 1964.1

He served as chaplain to overseas students at the University of Edinburgh from 1968 to 1970, then joined the University of Nottingham as a lecturer in divinity in 1970, becoming a reader in 1979. He moved to Durham University in 1982 as Professor of Divinity and held the Lightfoot Chair of Divinity from 1990 until his retirement in 2003, after which he was named Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006 and served as president of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 2002. He died on 26 June 2020 in Chichester, West Sussex.1

Theological Contribution

Naming and shaping the New Perspective

Dunn’s central contribution built directly on Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), which Dunn credited with breaking the older mold of Pauline scholarship “altogether by showing how different these reconstructions are from what we know of first-century Judaism from other sources.”5 Andrew Michael Hassler describes Dunn’s role as tailoring “Sanders’ paradigm-shift to make it more palatable to a broader swath of Pauline scholarship,” in the process buttressing weak points in Sanders’s own treatment of Paul and giving “the blossoming New Perspective on Paul not only its moniker but also the coherence it needed to take deeper root within scholarship.”2 Dunn’s 1983 article “The New Perspective on Paul,” published in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, gave the movement its name.6

“Works of the law” as boundary markers

Dunn argued that when Paul opposed justification by “works of the law” (Gal. 2:16), Paul did not mean meritorious observance of the law in general but specifically the “badges” of Jewish identity, circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath-keeping, that marked Jews off from Gentiles.2 On his original 1983 statement, these works were “simply what membership of the covenant people involves, what mark out the Jews as God’s people,” not “works which earn God’s favour, as merit-amassing observances.”2 He later clarified the claim in “Yet Once More - ‘The Works of the Law’” (2008), stating that “works of the law” were “not to be understood as restricted to circumcision, food laws and Sabbath issues” but rather “characterize the whole mindset of ‘covenantal nomism,’” carrying “not a special restricted sense, but a general sense given particular point by certain crucial issues and disputes.”7 On this reading, justification became less a matter of how a sinful person is declared righteous before God apart from works and more “acceptance into a relationship with God characterized by the grace of Israel’s covenant,” with Paul’s target being Jewish restrictiveness rather than Jewish legalism.2

Despite this redefinition, Dunn maintained some traditional emphases. He affirmed as a “central point of Christian faith that God’s acceptance of any and every person is by his grace alone and through faith alone,” calling it a “fundamental fact that no person can stand before God except by God’s forgiving, justifying grace,” and went so far as to call justification the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, the doctrine by which the church stands or falls.8 Hassler observes that “it is striking how ‘Lutheran’ he sounds at times,” even while Dunn’s work opened the door to an approach that emphasizes the social and corporate aspects of justification, often at the expense of the individual.8

Galatians 3:10-14 and the curse of the law

Dunn read the curse Paul pronounces on those who “rely on works of the law” (Gal. 3:10) not as a curse for failing to keep the law perfectly, but as an “ecclesiological” curse on Jewish nationalism: Israel had misused the law as an exclusionary boundary marker, and Christ bore that curse to open the covenant people to Gentiles.3 Aaron Thomas O’Kelley argues this reading “must be deemed implausible for several reasons,” including that Deuteronomy 27:26, the verse Paul quotes to establish the curse, threatens it for disobedience to the law in general, not for exclusive nationalism.3 O’Kelley also notes that Dunn’s own account equivocates about who bears the curse and why, at points locating it on Israel’s nationalism and elsewhere describing Christ’s work as delivering “the heirs of the covenant promise from the ill effects of the too narrow understanding of covenant and law held by most of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries.”9 Seyoon Kim summarized the shift: “It is no longer the curse for a wrong understanding of the law, but the curse of a wrong understanding.”9

Romans 4 and 9-10

In Romans 4:6-8, Paul cites David’s confession that his “lawless deeds” were forgiven and his “sins” covered (Ps. 32:1-2). Dunn read David’s “lawless deeds” as covenant-boundary language rather than moral sin. Hassler answers that David, a circumcised, law-observant Israelite already inside the covenant, could not coherently illustrate an ethnic-boundary problem: “If Paul was mainly concerned with the social separation created by the law, how is David one of the quintessential figures to whom appeal should be made?”10

In Romans 9:30-10:5, Dunn read Israel’s “own righteousness” (10:3) and “works” (9:32) as the same boundary markers, ceremonial requirements setting Israel apart as a nation.4 Micah McCormick counters that this reading has “come under significant criticism by scholars such as Simon Gathercole, Thomas Schreiner, Stephen Westerholm, and Douglas Moo,” who take “works of the law” as referring to what the law commands in its entirety, and observes further that 9:30-10:5 uses the bare word “works,” not “works of the law,” setting those works against God’s grace and calling (Rom. 11:6; 9:12, 16).4

Historical Significance

Dunn’s reframing of Paul, alongside Sanders’s and N. T. Wright’s, drew sustained Reformed evangelical criticism on several fronts. On his central “works of the law” argument, McCormick concludes that it is “best to take ‘works of the law’ as referring to what the law commands in toto,” not a subset of ceremonial boundary markers.4 On Galatians 3, Stephen Westerholm pressed Dunn’s ecclesiological reading with a series of questions it leaves unanswered, asking how Israel’s disobedience could be limited to ethnic privilege when Paul elsewhere describes Jews before Christ as living “under sin” no less than Gentiles.11 O’Kelley’s dissertation, approved by Thomas R. Schreiner, treats Dunn’s Galatians and Romans readings as part of a broader argument that the New Perspective’s premises, however accurate about Second Temple Judaism, do not require revising the Reformation’s own categories of grace, merit, and justification.12

Even Dunn’s own retrospective judged Sanders’s treatment of Paul himself weaker than his treatment of Judaism, writing that Sanders had “failed to take the opportunity his own mould-breaking work offered,” so that his “presentation of Paul is only a little better than the one rejected.”13 The same charge has been turned back on Dunn’s own constructive proposal: his clarified, broadened definition of “works of the law” in his 2008 restatement leaves, in Hassler’s assessment, “the point… the same” as his original, narrower claim, since on either version the works in view are boundary-maintaining rather than merit-earning.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “James Dunn (theologian),” accessed 2026-09-09, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dunn_(theologian). No library-held source treats Dunn’s own biography as its subject; this article’s theological-content claims are sourced independently of Wikipedia throughout. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Andrew Michael Hassler, “Introduction,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 13-14. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 168-171. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Micah John McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 172-174. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” in The New Perspective on Paul, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 103, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 10 n.36. ↩

  6. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 65 (1983): 95-122, cited in Micah John McCormick, “Bibliography,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010). ↩

  7. Hassler, “Introduction,” 14 n.48, quoting James D. G. Dunn, “Yet Once More - ‘The Works of the Law,’” in The New Perspective on Paul, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 214. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hassler, “Introduction,” 14-15. ↩ ↩2

  9. Seyoon Kim, Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 133, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 171. ↩ ↩2

  10. Hassler, “Romans 4 and Psalm 32:1-2,” in “Justification and the Individual in the Wake of the New Perspective on Paul,” 136-137, responding to James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8, WBC, vol. 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988). ↩

  11. Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 318, quoted in O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 171. ↩

  12. O’Kelley, “Introduction,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul,” 3, 23. ↩

  13. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” 103, quoted in Hassler, “Introduction,” 11 n.39. ↩