Peter W. Dunn

Peter W. Dunn, "The Charismatic in the Acts of Paul: Second Century Trends"

I presented this paper at the 29th annual meeting of the Society of Pentecostal Studies (March 16-18, 2000) at my own alma mater Northwest College (now Northwest University), Kirkland, WA.  While the Acts of Paul is a unreliable biography of Paul, it nevertheless remains a valuable source for the beliefs and practices of the second-century church.  I wrote:  "Where contemporary sources corroborate this portrayal [of the Christian life from a second century perspective], we are likely standing on firm ground when trying to ascertain trends in the second-century church."  The two most notable trends in the Acts of Paul are the connections of the charismatic gifts with sexual continence and with martyrdom.  The portrayal of women prophets speaking freely in the church assembly suggests both an ignorance of 1 Corinthians 14.34-35 and a date for Acts of Paul before the Montanist crisis.

“Testing Pauline Pseudonymity:  3 Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles Compared”. Proceedings:  Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Biblical Societies (2000), 63-68.

While at the annual SBL conference in San Diego last week, I asked Jim Leonard if he would make contributions to Recension, and I have learned from him that upon his return to Cambridge he began his own blog, Treasures Old and New: Biblical Texts and Meaning.  I'd like to think that I was the stimulus for this worthy project.  Jim and I were both TA's for Gordon Fee, for whom Jim writes an encomium, entitled, "Gordon Fee and Textual Criticism".  In an earlier post on the same page, Jim writes that Fee's view that the Pastoral Epistles are authentic has had a serious influence on later commentators.  He writes,

The impact of Fee's analysis was so great that my survey of the best six commentaries on PE earlier in this decade showed that four of the six accepted Pauline authorship. In my estimation, the best commentary on PE is by Robert Mounce in the Word Biblical Commentary, which is profoundly indebted to Fee in reconstructing the situation behind the PE.

I thus provide my own contribution to the subject, in which I argue that in contrast to an uncontested inauthentic Pauline letter, the second-century 3 Corinthians, the PE most likely belong to the first century.  This contrast most clearly comes out of an analysis of the orthodoxy and heresy of the respective documents. 

Review of Anne Jensen. Thekla die Apostolin

I wrote this review before the book actually appeared in print in 1995, based on a MS that Jensen had kindly provided for Willy Rordorf (which as his doctoral student provided me with access too).  I once spoke with Father Justin, a Romanian monk, about why Thecla had been removed from the list of martyrs.  His response was that the Western church has been removing the Eastern saints for some time now.

November 5, 2007

Les Actes de Paul et l’héritage paulinien

I presented this paper at the annual meeting of AELAC at Dole, France, on July 2, 1994.  It is essentially a resumé of a large part of my doctoral dissertation, entitled, The Acts of Paul and the Pauline Legacy in the Second Century (University of Cambridge, 1996).