In a recent issue of NTS, Steve Mason and Philip Esler present a weighty and substantial case for drawing a clear category-distinction between ‘Judaean and Christ-follower identities’: the former is that of an ethnic group, the latter that of a voluntary association.Footnote 1 Since their essay is framed directly as a response to an earlier essay of mine, it invites a reply.Footnote 2 In offering one, I have tried to avoid simply reiterating earlier arguments, and have concentrated instead on trying to highlight key issues which I see as crucial in this debate. Before I turn directly to these issues, however, I want to clarify two points by way of introduction.
First, I should make clear that I did not – and do not – dispute that ancient Judaism (or Judaean identity, if one prefers)Footnote 3 may be seen as a kind of ethnic identity (though as we shall see, what we might mean by that is open to more discussion). It is, as Mason and Esler richly document, indisputable that both Jewish and non-Jewish authors frequently and standardly depict this group as a ‘people’ – an ἔθνος or γένος – with ancestral customs and norms, distinctive cultural and religious practices, a link with a particular territory, and so on. Equally, I did not claim that early Christianity should be seen as constituting ‘an ethnic group’, although I did point to certain ‘ethnicising’ tendencies in both discourse and practice that suggest some impulses in the direction of ‘becoming a people’ – again, the phrasing may indicate in advance how I think the categories of ‘ethnic’ and ‘non-ethnic’ need to be problematised and differently conceptualised.Footnote 4 (Since the New Testament texts I focus on deal with issues such as the passing on of Christian identity from parents to children, the household as the focus for nurturing the next generation in the faith, and the construction of a Christian ‘way of life’, I find it difficult to see how these particular texts can be seen as ‘preoccupied with the imminent overturning of this world and the creation of a new one … hard to square with an ethnicising Christ-movement settling down in the world’, however much that characterisation might broadly capture the orientation of at least the very earliest Christian movement.)Footnote 5 To some extent, then, we seem to be talking past each other; there do indeed seem to be failures of communication.Footnote 6 What I did question, following Denise Kimber Buell and others on this pointFootnote 7 – and here we come closer to the heart of our disagreement – is the drawing of a clear and categorical distinction, a ‘dichotomy’, between Judaean ethnicity and early Christian voluntarism. It is precisely this distinction that Mason and Esler want to defend.
Second, it is clear from Mason and Esler's essay that the particular provocation for their response was my suggestion that the tendency to draw a sharp categorical dichotomy between Jewish/Judaean ethnicity and Christian trans-ethnic inclusiveness might have some connection with the location of that (long) scholarly tradition within the white, Christian West, and with the particular ideology of implicit Christian superiority combined with ‘tolerant’ inclusion promoted in that context.Footnote 8 My inclusion of their works among a series of selected ‘landmarks’ to illustrate the tendency to draw that dichotomy is a specific cause of amazement.Footnote 9 I was careful in my article to frame these claims tentatively, and to associate them with a broad scholarly tradition rather than with the commitments or purposes of specific individuals. But I want to acknowledge at the outset of this reply that I appreciate how such claims – sweeping and generalised as they may appear – may be found objectionable and unreasonable, particularly when they go against the intentions and explicit arguments of those cited as indicative of the scholarly trajectory. This is an important issue to which I will return towards the end of this essay.
Before returning to those broader contemporary socio-political issues, however, I turn to outlining various reasons why – without denying the categorisation entirely – I find the stark categorical dichotomy between Judaean ethnicity and Christ-following voluntarism problematic.
1. Multiple not Singular Categorisation(s)
Combining their social-scientific and historical-philological perspectives, Mason and Esler set out an established list of ‘indicators of ethnic identity’, derived from the work of contemporary social scientists, and highlight ancient evidence that shows that Jews/Judaeans were recognised as a ‘people’ (ἔθνος). Since the various characteristics of ethnic groups fit this evidence, ‘Judaeans were thus an ethnic group’.Footnote 10 By contrast, early Christ-followers ‘were something else entirely, and had no such place in the world’; they were ‘a voluntary association alienated in crucial ways from the oikoumenē’.Footnote 11 Ethnicity seems here to form a clearly defined and stable category (which cannot be said simply of the word ἔθνος in itself), into which one does or does not place any particular group. There are various risks, I think, with this kind of approach, some of which will emerge further below. One risk highlighted in recent social-scientific work on the subject is that it can reinforce the objectification and reification of the category of ethnic or racial group, which may be a feature of subjective experience on the part of social actors, but which analysis shows to be subjective, constructed and flexible. Thus Rogers Brubaker, for example, questions the tendency to assume ‘groups’ as the fundamental unit of analysis and directs our attention to the specific and variable ways in which social experience may be interpreted in racial or ethnic terms.Footnote 12 In terms of historical analysis, one risk is of a selective reading of the evidence and a neglect of the other categories that might also be relevant to understanding the character and identity of a group or of individuals. Let us immediately acknowledge that the deployment of (modern) categories is inevitable in historical work, as is the selection of relevant evidence, but this is precisely why ongoing critical scrutiny remains vital.
For example, Mason and Esler highlight the ways in which Clement of Alexandria presents ‘a frontal attack on ethnos identity and loyalty … In the circle of Christ's truth, ethnos allegiance is dissolved.’Footnote 13 What this focus does not highlight, however, is the frequency with which Clement designates Christians precisely as a new kind of ‘people’, distinguished from Jews and Greeks, using what Buell, following Jonathan Hall, calls an ‘oppositional’ kind of ethnic reasoning.Footnote 14 For example, Clement refers to ‘three polities … that of the Jews … that of the Greeks … and that of the Christians’ (τρεῖς πολιτείας … Ἰουδαίων … Ἑλλήνων. .. Χριστιανῶν, Strom. 5.14.98.4),Footnote 15 and he repeatedly affirms the declaration of 1 Pet 2.9-10, that Christians form ‘the elect race … a holy nation, the people of God’ (τὸ γένος τὸ ἐκλεκτόν … ἔθνος ἅγιον … λαὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, Protr. 4.59.3 (GCS)).Footnote 16 A particular way in which Clement challenges established ‘ethnos identity’, moreover, is through what Buell, again following Hall, calls an ‘aggregative’ or ‘universalising’ kind of ethnic reasoning to insist that all may potentially join this new ‘people’.Footnote 17 As Buell puts it, Clement ‘positions Christianity as an ethnos – but one that encompasses and erases all others, by referring to humans as one genos, unified by their common condition as created beings’.Footnote 18 For example, Clement announces how both Greeks and Jews have been brought together into what he calls ‘the one race of the saved’ (τὸ ἓν γένος τοῦ σῳζομένου, Strom. 6.5.42.2; cf. Strom. 3.10.70.1–2; 6.13.106.4).Footnote 19 This does not by any means imply that Clement simply locates ‘Christian’ identity among the various established ‘ethnic’ groupings in his world – one reason why the simple dichotomy between ‘ethnic group’ and ‘not ethnic group’ is unhelpful – but it does suggest that his discourse participates in the realm of ethnic identity, deploying its key terms in negotiating Christianity's competitive quest for success. To separate this off from the realm of ‘ethnicity’ and ethnic discourse seems artificial. Indeed, some of the other examples Mason and Esler cite to support their case for category-distinction also seem to reflect not so much this clear categorical difference but rather the difference between an established and recognised ethnos on the one hand, and a would-be ethnos on the other, which is, partly on account of its novelty, suspicious and dangerous. Eusebius, for example, announces that Christ has brought into being ‘a new people’ (νέον … ἔθνος), which is ‘the most populous of all nations’ (πάντων τῶν ἐθνῶν πολυανθρωπότατον).Footnote 20 If we asked whether early Christians were ever seen, by themselves or by others, as a ‘people’, that might better signal the ambiguities and complexities of the issue.Footnote 21 Insofar as early Christian texts deploy precisely the language of πόλις and ἔθνος or γένος, we should acknowledge that their constructions of group-identity are at least competing within the realm identified by polis and ethnos loyalties, rather than in a sphere easily separated from them.Footnote 22
Other examples might also help to highlight the risks of focusing on one particular categorisation of both Jewish and Christian identities. While Mason and Esler contrast Judaean ethnic identity with Christian (or ‘Christ-following’) voluntary associations, some have argued that (outside the Judean homeland) both groups might well be seen by their contemporaries, as well as by scholars, as belonging to the category of associations.Footnote 23 Barbara Borg has recently argued that the (late) emergence of evidence for distinctly Jewish and Christian burial groups in Rome coincides with a wider tendency that emerged in the third century for burial groups to be formed on the basis on common ethnicity – suggesting, Borg argues, that both Jewish and Christian groups were also assuming or claiming some kind of ethnic-like identity.Footnote 24 To take a more specific example, already in the second century Galen describes Jewish and Christian groups in precisely the same terms, seeing both as a kind of philosophical school: he speaks of ‘the school of Moses and Christ’ (Μωσοῦ καὶ Χριστοῦ διατριβήν) and ‘the followers of Moses and Christ’ (τοὺς ἀπὸ Μωσοῦ καὶ Χριστοῦ μεταδιδάξειεν), treating them as examples of defective (Greek) philosophies.Footnote 25 This does not mean that we should then treat Judaism and Christianity as precise equivalents, or specifically as ‘two religions’; I appreciate why Mason and Esler want to push against works that do this.Footnote 26 But it does suggest that there are various categories we might use – and which ancient authors used – in efforts to comprehend Judaism and Christianity in this period: association, philosophical school, ‘people’, and so on. The long-standard category of religion will be considered below. To give pre-eminence only to one risks squeezing the evidence into a single mould – or a singularly dichotomous mould.
2. Multiple, Hybrid and Fluid Ethnicities
Another aspect of Mason and Esler's dichotomous categorisation should also, I think, be questioned. Discussing the ancient understanding, they insist that ‘[e]veryone belonged unavoidably to an ethnos, by virtue of their birth (genos). Loyalty to one's ethnos was an axiomatic virtue.’ Thus, when discussing the characteristics of the early Christian movement, they suggest that ‘[n]one of these attributes matches membership of an ethnos or gens, from which people do not come and go’.Footnote 27 Without denying that people-groups in the ancient world were of course seen and classified as ἔθνη – as famously depicted in visual form at the Sebasteion of AphrodisiasFootnote 28 – there are also various reasons to question the notion that such straightforward, singular and unchangeable categorisation captures the social realities for the people who comprised these groups.Footnote 29 This may briefly be illustrated in three ways.
First, we may note evidence for what appear to be multiple ethnicities, not least on the part of Ioudaioi. Philo, for example, in his treatise on Flaccus, criticising Flaccus’ part in provoking hostility against the Jews of Alexandria, comments concerning the Ἰουδαῖοι that,
while they hold the Holy City where stands the sacred Temple of the most high God to be their mother city (μητρόπολιν), yet those [lands/countries] which are theirs by inheritance from their fathers, grandfathers, and ancestors even farther back, are in each case accounted by them to be their fatherland (πατρίδας) in which they were born and reared, while to some of them [sc. these lands] they have come at the time of their foundation as immigrants to the satisfaction of their founders. (Flacc. 46 (trans. Colson, LCL); cf. also Conf. 78; Contempl. 18; Legat. 281)
Indeed, part of Flaccus’ crime against the Jews, according to Philo, was precisely to attempt to deny their true Alexandrian citizenship, to cut away their ‘ancestral customs’ (πατρίων) and political rights, and to denounce them as ‘foreigners and aliens’ (ξένους καὶ ἐπήλυδας) (Flacc. 53–54). From being both Ἰουδαῖοι and Alexandrians, Flaccus’ actions seek to make them only one or the other.
A similarly multiethnic depiction of the Ἰουδαῖοι is found in Luke's account of the ‘devout Jews (Ἰουδαῖοι … εὐλαβεῖς) from every nation (ἀπὸ παντὸς ἔθνους)’ (Acts 2.5) who gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of Weeks.Footnote 30 Those present are later specified as including:
Πάρθοι καὶ Μῆδοι καὶ Ἐλαμῖται, καὶ οἱ κατοικοῦντες τὴν Μεσοποταμίαν, Ἰουδαίαν τε καὶ Καππαδοκίαν, Πόντον καὶ τὴν Ἀσίαν, Φρυγίαν τε καὶ Παμϕυλίαν, Αἴγυπτον καὶ τὰ μέρη τῆς Λιβύης τῆς κατὰ Κυρήνην, καὶ οἱ ἐπιδημοῦντες Ῥωμαῖοι, Ἰουδαῖοί τε καὶ προσήλυτοι, Κρῆτες καὶ Ἄραβες.
Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians. (Acts 2.9–11, ESV)
Elsewhere in Acts, Luke can specify other Ἰουδαῖοι as Ποντικὸν τῷ γένει (18.2 (Aquila)) or as Ἀλεξανδρεὺς τῷ γένει (18.24 (Apollos)), just as Josephus can describe a certain Atomos as both Ἰουδαῖος and as Cyprian ‘by race’ (Ἄτομον … Ἰουδαῖον, Κύπριον δὲ τὸ γένος, A.J. 20.142). Elsewhere Josephus is explicit about the fact that Jews living in various places are rightly referred to by the names of those places – as Alexandrians, Antiochenes, Ephesians, Romans, and so on (C. Ap. 2.38–42). These and other passages are, of course, open to various interpretations.Footnote 31 As Esler has noted elsewhere, commenting specifically on the reference to Atomos, ‘dual or nested ethnicity’ is not uncommon; this may be one way of accounting for those who apparently hold multiple ethnic identities.Footnote 32 A similar way of seeing such texts – specifically Acts 2 and Philo's In Flaccum – is as evidence for what Cynthia Baker terms ‘broad Jewish ethnic diversity’, or for ‘Jews as a multi-ethnic or multiracial people’.Footnote 33 More generally, as Teresa Morgan observes, ‘ethnic’ designations may be used of groups of various sizes, from cities or groups of cities to larger regions and kingdoms.Footnote 34 However we understand them, such references complicate the notion that people clearly belonged, stably and identifiably, to one ethnos.
Similar perspectives are also suggested by the evidence for a second kind of complexity: what Michael Peppard describes as ‘ethnic hybridity’. In a study of personal names from late ancient Galilee, Peppard discerns in the onomastic data a crossing of languages, scripts and traditions that suggests that the people whose identities are recorded in the inscriptions ‘chose to both represent and create their ethnic hybridity’.Footnote 35 Peppard's study also probes the tendency of earlier scholarship to interpret such data in the light of particular (and questionable) models of ethnic and religious purity. He remarks, on the interpretation of the onomastic data from Beth She‘arim, that ‘the data that seemed “irregular or awkward” to its original interpreters only seemed so with respect to a conception of late ancient Jewish ethnicity as a well-defined, uniform, and already given category’.Footnote 36 Peppard's reference to the way in which data are interpreted through the lens of scholarly constructions and categories bears wider consideration. As William Arnal, James Crossley and others have suggested, even such seemingly unassailable emphases of recent scholarship as the Jewishness of Jesus are constructed and shaped in the light of contemporary socio-political contexts and priorities.Footnote 37 In this connection, Halvor Moxnes suggests that newer research on Galilee – and, importantly, our own changing cultural pressures and challenges – might result in a somewhat different depiction of Jesus’ identity as part of the cultural complexity and hybridity of Galilee's population, a characteristic to which Peppard also draws attention.Footnote 38 This revised depiction would, like earlier depictions, also be the product of both historical evidence and contemporary contexts – specifically our post-modern concern with the fluidity, complexity and constructedness of identity – but that illustrates the point that historical scholarship is shaped by both ancient evidence and contemporary context, and that critical reflection should concern itself with both (a point to which I shall return).
Finally, a third kind of complexity arises from the evidence concerning changes in ethnicity, something that Mason and Esler seem to deny (‘people do not come and go’ from their ethnic identity).Footnote 39 Some scholars come to virtually the opposite conclusion.Footnote 40 Gideon Bohak, for example, suggests that the ancient world was one ‘where the assimilation (or degeneration, depending on one's perspective) of immigrants into natives was virtually taken for granted’.Footnote 41 From this perspective, and noting the decline and then disappearance of the ethnic marker Ἰουδαῖος in Egyptian papyri between 330–30 bce, Bohak questions the assumption of Jewish ‘ethnic continuity’ in Greco-Roman Egypt, arguing that the descendants of Jewish migrants to Egypt during the Hasmonean period ‘rarely were identified as “Jews” – either because they migrated back to Judea or because they assimilated into their surrounding environment’.Footnote 42 References to what are traditionally labelled as ‘conversion’ to or ‘apostasy’ from Judaism fit a similar picture: while that terminology problematically implies an essentially ‘religious’ kind of boundary-crossing, the evidence nonetheless suggests that people could, and did, both join and leave the Jewish people, however much such moving might be subject to criticism.Footnote 43 In a wide-ranging survey of recent scholarship and primary evidence, Morgan also documents multiple instances of individuals who either change their ethnic identity or acquire new identities alongside their existing ones in a process she labels ‘accretive’.Footnote 44 This might be in relation to tax status, rising social status, or decisions to display their identity differently in different contexts or to different audiences – something Morgan labels ‘code switching’.Footnote 45 We cannot legitimately assume that, despite such varied and changeable depictions of identity, people knew that everyone had one ‘real’ and unchangeable ethnicity, determined by birth or ‘blood’, for that would be to import a primordial assumption about ethnicity which the evidence itself does not seem to support. On the contrary, there seem good reasons to question the idea that everyone belonged, stably and identifiably, to one ethnos, from which they generally did not and could not depart.
3. Ethnicity and Religion
Another questionable feature of Mason and Esler's discussion is the separation of religion from ethnicity. They rightly note, following a number of recent publications, that ‘religion’ is a problematic category for the ancient world, where what we might define as ‘religious phenomena’, as Esler elsewhere terms them,Footnote 46 were thoroughly integrated into socio-political life (and indeed into ethnic identity).Footnote 47 Yet at least two things remain puzzling, and – to me, at least – unconvincing with regard to their separation of the two realms of life.
First, they appeal to contemporary sociological work by Claire Mitchell to illustrate that religion can play an important part in ethnic identities.Footnote 48 But they then assert that ‘ethnic identity and religion remain separate’,Footnote 49 even though this runs counter to what Mitchell herself argues,Footnote 50 and even though ‘religion’ is one of the features that Anthony Smith includes within his well-established list of characteristics of ethnic groups.Footnote 51
Second, Mason and Esler's argument that ‘[i]t makes little sense to homologate ethnic and “religious” identities’Footnote 52 seems difficult to sustain precisely because of their (and others’) insistence that in the ancient world ‘religion’ cannot be separated out from other areas of social life, and specifically not from the realm of ethnicity.Footnote 53 Critiquing the notion that ‘a “religious” identity could become an ethnic one’ could only make sense in a context where ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’ are separately identifiable.Footnote 54 As Paula Fredriksen has put it, in antiquity, ‘gods also attached to particular peoples; “religion” ran in the blood … ethnicity expressed “religion” (acknowledging the anachronism of both terms for our period), and religion expressed “ethnicity”’.Footnote 55 That bald assertion needs some nuance, not least in terms of the incorporation of ‘foreign’ deities, such as the Egyptian Isis, into the sphere of popular Roman ‘religious’ devotion,Footnote 56 and the evidence, as we have seen above, that ethnicity was not simply defined by ‘blood’ or birth. But the broader point stands.Footnote 57 As Esler puts it elsewhere, ‘“[r]eligious” phenomena … certainly do occur [in the ancient world] but they are connected with, or rather embedded in, a wider identity that is best described as “ethnic” in character’.Footnote 58
Let us take one well-known example to illustrate the point, Philo's description of what it is that ‘incomers’ to the Jewish people have both left and joined: ‘their kinsfolk by blood (γενεὰν μὲν τὴν ἀϕ’ αἵματος), their country (πατρίδα), their customs (ἔθη) and the temples (ἱερά) and images of their gods (ἀϕιδρύματα θεῶν)’ (Virt. 102 (LCL)). Here it is clear that religious practices are inextricably integrated into a broader depiction of ethnic identity. As Esler has elsewhere noted, ‘all six of the diagnostic features [of an ethnic group] described by Hutchinson and Smith are found or implied here’.Footnote 59 But if this is the case, then early Christian depictions – such as Paul's description of the transition made by Gentile converts when they ‘turned to God from idols’ (1 Thess 1.9) and adopted a way of life that was ‘not like the Gentiles’ (1 Thess 4.5), or 1 Peter's characterisation of the turn away from a worthless ‘ancestral’ way of life (1 Pet 1.18) – cannot easily be removed from the same kind of discursive and social context, in which loyalty to, or departure from, an ethnicity-defining way of life is in view. Whatever one labels the early Christian groups, joining them – at least on the kind of basis that the New Testament letters depict – could hardly not be disruptive of ethnic identities, insofar as these are constituted, among other things, by loyalty to an ancestral way of life including its religious and cultural practices. It may be less neat to admit that the categories of religion and ethnicity blur together in the ancient world (and, indeed, in the modern world too), but it seems to be closer to the truth.
4. Ethnic Identity and Fictive Kinship
There is one final facet of the categorical distinction Mason and Esler draw that I wish to question. In a closing remark, they accept the value of ‘efforts to find “ethnic reasoning” in particular early Christian texts’, but assert that they ‘consider such language fictive’.Footnote 60 In other words (I assume), the appeal to established topoi such as ancestry and siblinghood is, in some sense, ‘real’ in ‘real’ ethnic groups, but fictive when taken up in early Christian discourse or other comparable contexts. Once again, I do not want to deny that some distinctions along these lines might at times validly be made.Footnote 61 But I want to question how cogently the category-distinction can be drawn here.Footnote 62
At least since Max Weber, social-scientific discussions of ethnicity have stressed that the appeal to shared kinship relations is precisely fictive, in the sense that it is believed rather than real.Footnote 63 In other words, it is constructed and believed narratives of shared ancestry, blood, family lineage, and so on, that constitute and undergird a sense of ethnic identity.
Caroline Johnson Hodge has shown how ‘discourses about kinship and ethnicity’ are variously deployed in the ancient world, through what she terms ‘the ideology of patrilineal descent’, to construct and reconstruct family histories and group identities.Footnote 64 Again, we may illustrate the issue with an example. When 1 Maccabees records various letters intended to create alliances between Jews, Spartans and Romans, appeal is made to the common ancestry of Jews and Spartans – that they are siblings (ὅτι εἰσὶν ἀδελϕοί) and of the people of Abraham (ἐκ γένους Αβρααμ, 1 Macc 12.21), a tradition that Josephus also repeats (A.J. 12.225–7). Is this fictive or real kinship? The distinction can hardly be drawn: appeals to ancestry and kinship are flexible and malleable, and are deployed for strategic purposes as well as for maintaining a sense of group identity. But if this is so, as Johnson Hodge shows, Paul's arguments about converts becoming Abraham's seed (Gal 3.29) cannot be so easily separated from other appeals to shared ancestry and kinship. As with the appeals for converts to leave one (ancestral) way of life and begin another, so too in the realm of ancestry and kinship, it is hard neatly to separate early Christian discourse from the wider realm of ethnic discourse among Jews and other people-groups.
5. On Critical Reflection
The preceding sections offer some reasons why I continue to find a clear categorical contrast between Jewish ethnicity and ‘superordinate’, ‘trans-ethnic’ Christian identity at best partially cogent,Footnote 65 and needing significant nuance and diversification. It is clear, however, as noted above, that the particular reason for Mason and Esler's response to my essay was not simply this claim in itself, but the suggestion that the scholarly tendency to draw this stark contrast might reflect the location of that scholarship in ‘the traditionally Christian countries of the Western world’ and that this perspective ‘may both reflect and legitimate the assumed superiority of a Christian model of “tolerant” social inclusion promoted in secularised form – and often with “intolerant” force – by the globally powerful countries of the white Christian West’.Footnote 66 Mason and Esler's objections are several: that the distinction they draw is a purely historical one, based on the evidence of the sources; that in any case it was a difference ‘not in the Christians’ favour’;Footnote 67 that they explicitly disavow any connection between this historical perspective and Western Christian triumphalism or supersessionism; and that my suggestions are made without evidence.
In making a response to such points, two initial observations seem pertinent, both of which I will build on further below. The first is that I deliberately offered these (tentative) concluding remarks in a general way, relating them to the tendencies and location of the discipline rather than to particular individuals’ work, because – notwithstanding the question of whether the suggestions are found plausible – I do not think it is helpful to personalise the issues. It is also important to note that I did not claim that proponents of the categorical distinction between Jewish/Judaean ethnicity and Christian trans-ethnic openness were themselves promoting or supporting such contemporary socio-political or religious ideologies – indeed quite the opposite is most likely the case; rather, that the persistence of various forms of this dichotomy may both reflect and legitimate the particular contemporary contexts of that historical work. The second observation, closely related to the first, is that attempts to probe the ways in which our discipline's concepts, categories, historical analyses and reconstructions may be shaped by their location in contemporary socio-political, geographical, religious and ethno-racial contexts will inevitably and necessarily entail considering something other than the explicit intentions and arguments any of us presents. For that reason, indeed, we cannot convincingly dismiss such critical probing simply by asserting that we explicitly reject the ideological or political tendencies in which our work may be implicated, whether this is supersessionism or some other regrettable ‘ism’.Footnote 68 As Arnal comments in relation to the ways in which constructions of the historical Jesus reflect contemporary identity issues, ‘the question of personal agenda is irrelevant’; it is the ‘correspondence’ between certain historical constructions and contemporary perspectives that is pertinent.Footnote 69 Our potential enmeshment in such contemporary ideologies cannot be so easily disproven, just as, say, declaring ourselves committed to non-sexism and gender equality does not mean that forms of unconscious and unintended ideological or practical bias – and, equally important, wider conventions and social practices – have thereby been eliminated.Footnote 70
But since Mason and Esler criticise my lack of ‘evidence’ and explicitly call for engagement with their ‘actual arguments’,Footnote 71 I will attempt to illustrate more specifically the basis for my suggestions. I should immediately concede that I am not aware of examples in Mason's work that explicitly draw the kinds of contrast between Jewish ethnicity and Christian trans-ethnicity, and the comparatively positive value of the latter, that might suggest the kind of alignment with contemporary ideologies to which I pointed – though the ongoing discussion of the translation of term Ioudaios indicates, in part, how historical and contemporary considerations may come together.Footnote 72 The citation of his work exemplified the dichotomous categorisation of Jewish/Judaean and Christian identities in historical discourse that might – so my suggestions – bear critical analysis in terms of the uses to which such a dichotomy is put. The implications of our historical analyses, the categories with which we conduct them, and the (inescapable) correlations between historical reconstructions and contemporary ideologies, are, I want to argue, concerns that we should include within our disciplinary critical reflection.
Esler's work provides, I think, more relevant illustrations. For example, in an analysis of the Gospel of John, Esler argues that what John is doing in the famous prologue (specifically in John 1.9–13) ‘is contrasting a new identity that is non-ethnic, strongly marked by fictive kinship and intimate relations with God, with an original identity of an altogether different kind – one that was ethnic in character … the Johannine group … was in the throes of generating for itself … a trans-ethnic identity’.Footnote 73 Elsewhere, the Gospel of Matthew is analysed along similar lines: ‘Matthew is writing for a group or groups of Christ-followers that embrace Judean and non-Judean members sharing a new, trans-ethnic, superordinate group identity in-Christ. This identity is quite distinct from that of the Judean ethnic group …’Footnote 74 Matthew's Jesus moves beyond his initial ‘Judean ethnocentrism’ towards ‘a new form of group identity that transcends the boundaries of ethnicity’.Footnote 75
These perspectives are most extensively developed in Esler's earlier major work on Romans, published in 2003. Fundamental to the argument is the categorisation of both Jewish/Judean and Greek identities as ethnic.Footnote 76 What this means with regard to Romans, Esler proposes, is that Paul is confronting a situation of inter-ethnic conflict, rivalry between Judeans and Greeks, with the tensions particularly visible, for example, in Rom 14.1–15.13.Footnote 77 Esler's overall thesis about Romans is that Paul is attempting to construct a new and positive form of group identity, a non- or trans-ethnic identity in Christ, that can encompass but not obliterate diverse ethnic identities: ‘In the language of modern social identity theory, Paul's strategy amounts to an exercise in recategorization, the creation (or perhaps invocation) of a common ingroup identity.’Footnote 78 The new identity in Christ ‘transcends the fundamental ethnic division among them between Judeans and Greeks’.Footnote 79 Paul allows ethnic difference to remain, but provides the foundations for a new ‘common identity’.Footnote 80 With his project cast in this way, Paul might seem to anticipate and embody the modern Western model of multicultural, multiethnic liberalism.
As an ‘ethnic’ group, on this analysis, Jews come into conflict with other ethnic groups, and, precisely as ethnic groups, offer little prospect for inclusion or broader welcome, for finding modes of peaceable co-existence – despite the evidence concerning the various ways in which Jewish groups might accommodate sympathisers and converts, or be integrated into their local societies, or might themselves be ‘multiethnic’. The goal of peaceable co-existence seems to depend on the creation of some kind of trans-ethnic new identity, which is precisely what Christ offers. The distinction seems here to be very much in the Christians’ favour.Footnote 81
And these positive achievements are not presented merely as historical reconstructions; they are also seen as having positive value for the contemporary world. Esler announces near the beginning of his work on Romans that ‘the contemporary issue driving the current study of Romans is the nature of Christian identity … in a world rent by violent, often murderous conflict between groups, in particular those of an ethnic kind’.Footnote 82 The argument comes full circle when the enduring value of Paul's strategy for overcoming inter-ethnic conflict is made clear in the closing sentence of the book: ‘In a world still torn by ethnic conflict, this is a message [about the overcoming of ethnic conflict through a new common identity in Christ] that will continue to resonate.’Footnote 83
All this does not mean to imply, I hasten to stress, that Esler is supportive of the neo-imperial actions of the Western nations, or of the particular strategies by which the so-called ‘British values’ of tolerance and democracy are imposed by law, or whatever other contemporary manifestations of Western (post-)Christian superiority we might point to. But it does, I suggest, indicate something about the location of the production of this work, which bears, I would argue, a non-coincidental structural similarity with the kind of vision that undergirds the project of Western (post-)Christian political and multicultural liberalism.
Lest this seem an overly personalised or polemical point, let me illustrate how a similar critical analysis might raise questions about my own earlier work on Pauline ethics, Solidarity and Difference.Footnote 84 This project too, one might observe, is thoroughly ‘Western’ in its orientation, setting as a methodological framework for reading Paul the liberal-communitarian debate in ethical theory, exemplified by the contrasting work of Jürgen Habermas and Stanley Hauerwas.Footnote 85 The primary conundrum, in a sense, is that central to the Western liberal project: how to nurture forms of communal solidarity while at the same time preserving and tolerating difference and diversity. And it is Paul, and his attempts to foster both solidarity and difference in Christ, who serves as the primary focus for reflections on how contemporary plural societies might negotiate and sustain their peaceable existence. I am not uncritical of Paul in this study, and I try to make clear that Paul's focus on Christ as the basis for communal solidarity is not superior to, but simply different from, a Jewish focus on Torah as central to corporate life.Footnote 86 But nonetheless it is the Pauline moral vision that stands at the centre of reflection on contemporary social challenges. It is a work, then, which displays the marks of its production in a specific historical, religious and geo-political context.
Such critical analysis does not mean that I regard either my own earlier work or that of Esler – from which I have learnt so much – as lacking in substantial historical, exegetical or ethical insight. Nor does it mean that I reject the relevance and importance of reflection on the contemporary issues that clearly lie as motivations behind both our studies. But it does mean that such work can and should be subjected to a critical scrutiny that seeks, in part, to assess not only the historical and exegetical claims, but also the ways in which the knowledge generated is a product of a particular time and place. In Walter Mignolo's words, ‘the knower is always implicated, geo- and body-politically, in the known’; and what is known is always known by ‘a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space’.Footnote 87 This kind of particularising of our own work, acknowledging the partiality and specificity of our insight, I have argued elsewhere, following in the footsteps of others,Footnote 88 is crucial both to recognising our need for the insights of other differently embodied interpreters and also to giving equal value to a wide variety of perspectives in biblical studies rather than assigning some a marginal status around an unlabelled but dominant core.Footnote 89
Indeed, to end on what I hope is both an irenic and a challenging point, I am quite prepared to admit that I may be wrong in my particular suggestions concerning the ways in which the scholarly dichotomy between Jewish ethnicity and trans-ethnic Christianity may, in part, reflect its contexts of production. But I would reiterate the challenge to probe critically the ways in which our historical categories and analyses are, unavoidably, in some ways shaped by their contexts of production, contexts that have geopolitical, ethno-racial and religious dimensions. This kind of meta-critical analysis is by no means uniquely required of New Testament or early Jewish studies – and it has sometimes concerned the basic configuration and orientation of whole disciplines.Footnote 90 It is, as I have remarked elsewhere, ‘easier to see how the scholarship of the past was enmeshed in the racial and religious ideologies of its time than it is to appreciate how far our own present work continues to be shaped by such ideologies’.Footnote 91 Difficult as it may be, part of our critical self-analysis as scholars should be to try to reflect on the ways in which our particular location shapes our work. Our concepts and categories both arise from and take effect within particular contemporary contexts. Probing our biases must therefore go deeper than aligning ourselves with either a ‘humanistic’ or a ‘social-scientific’ approach, and responsible history must do more than proclaim the desire to ‘understand the past as it was’.Footnote 92
