“How come is everything so white?”
In a 1971 BBC interview with Michael Parkinson, Muhammad Ali recalled the time he asked his mother about the ubiquitous contrast he noticed growing up in 1950s Louisville. Good, beautiful, powerful things tended to be white—Jesus, Mary, Santa, Snow White, Miss America, and the White House. Blackness was scarcer and invariably negative—black cats, the ugly duckling, and the dastardly act of blackmail (“Mama, why don't they call it whitemail? They lie too!”). Even desserts expressed the dichotomy: angel food cake was white; chocolate cake was the devil's food.
In this important volume, David Horrell poses Ali's harrowing question to his own academic discipline: How come New Testament Studies is so white? Alternatively, why is it so Christian? Horrell fears not only that New Testament Studies is disproportionately white and Christian in terms of personnel, but that white, Christian, and largely European and/or North American perspectives determine the fundamental assumptions and internal logic that shape the discipline's inquiry. In particular, he focuses on the historically Christo-centric way in which ethnicity has been construed. Whereas (ancient) Judaism is so often presented as ethnic (and, as such, particularistic and exclusive), (ancient) Christianity comes into view as transethnic (and, as such, universalistic and inclusive). Christianity thus emerges as the more enlightened, superior alternative. Horrell aims to expose and destabilize this enduring assumption and in so doing to encourage further interrogation of white, Christian normativity in New Testament Studies.
This provocative book is divided into three parts. The opening chapters consider the history of research. Nothing is new here, but Horrell presents previous scholarship fairly and thoroughly, effectively laying the groundwork for the subsequent investigation of ancient Jewish and Christian identity. Especially important is the first chapter, “A Persistent Structural Dichotomy,” in which Horrell shines a spotlight on the scholarship of F. C. Baur (1830s), E. P. Sanders (1970s), and Philip Esler (2000s). Despite the differences in vocabulary, methodology, and theoretical frameworks that have developed over many decades, Horrell shows that even recent scholarship remains committed, mutatis mutandis, to Baur's formative distinction between a limited, inferior Judaism and a universalized, superior Christianity.
The next part of the book explores, in turn, five characteristics typical of ethnic groups according to contemporary social-scientific scholarship: a notion of shared descent (chapter 4), a common way of life (chapter 5), a homeland (chapter 6), self-consciousness as a people (chapter 7), and a sense of mission (chapter 8). Each chapter considers how the given characteristic is expressed, first in Jewish texts of the late Second Temple period and then in Christian texts of the first century. This juxtaposition of the sources yields the eye-opening realization that, as Horrell puts it: “Notwithstanding their significant differences, both Jewish and Christian traditions exhibit the kinds of discourse and practice associated in social scientific taxonomies with ethnic groups” (308). Put another way, sociohistorical analysis suggests that ancient Christians, some of them at least, constituted ethnic groups no less than did their Jewish counterparts. To be fair, one of the chapters is a stretch, as Horrell is at pains to show that early Christian sources exhibit anything close to the sense of homeland so widely manifest in ancient Judaism. The remaining chapters, nonetheless, make a strong case for unmooring New Testament scholarship from the tacit assumption that early Christianity represents some sort of transcendent, universalized alternative to “ethnic” Judaism. Indeed, as Horrell daringly proposes: “One might . . . see Jewish communities as offering more open, inclusive, tolerant models of affiliation and participation, given the evidence for various kinds of sympathizers, affiliates, patrons, and proselytes” (309).
This provocative possibility typifies the last part of the book: a lengthy essay exploring the religious and racial “location” of New Testament scholarship in light of contemporary critical theory, especially whiteness studies. Horrell argues that the Christian interpreters who have dominated New Testament Studies for two centuries have written as though from a universal, human perspective, when “that perspective is in fact particular, and particularly Christian” (323). Whereas other religious or racialized perspectives are identified as such—a “Jewish view” or an “African American view,” for example—Christian views are generally presented as normative and unexamined, disembodied and unlocated. Horrell calls for New Testament Studies to move forward by “making Christianness strange” (319), as he puts it, by interrogating white, Christian, and/or Western scholarship and considering it no less particular than minority perspectives.
It is a worthy aspiration. At the same time, insisting too stridently on the embodiment and location of knowledge also runs the risk of effacing the notion of objective reality or of rendering scholarship an act of cultural or religious performance or a demonstration of power, rather than a pursuit of the truth as such. Horrell acknowledges this potential pitfall and expects that future contributions to the field by any author “should still be subjected to rigorous critical examination” (343); yet, he also wonders aloud whether “historical and exegetical study,” the methods by which such rigorous critical examination have traditionally been undertaken, are in fact nothing but “the master's tools” (341). This tension between subjective observers and objective reality will no doubt linger in the postmodern academy for years to come. What Horrell rightly demands is that no group of observers, by dint of race, religion, or any location, be regarded as less subjective than others. If his call is heeded, New Testament Studies will be the better for it.
