Ethnicity and Inclusion

Religion, Race, and Whiteness in Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities

David G. Horrell

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780802876089
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467459709
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Critica e interpretazione biblica

Some of today's problematic ideologies of racial and religious difference can be traced back to constructions of the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity. New Testament studies, which developed contemporaneously with Europe's colonial expansion and racial ideologies, is, David Horrell argues, therefore an important site at which to probe critically these ideological constructions and their contemporary implications. 

In  Ethnicity and Inclusion, Horrell explores the ways in which "ethnic" (and "religious") characteristics feature in key Jewish and early Christian texts, challenging the widely accepted dichotomy between a Judaism that is ethnically defined and a Christianity that is open and inclusive. Then, through an engagement with whiteness studies, he offers a critique of the implicit whiteness and Christianness that continue to dominate New Testament studies today, arguing that a diversity of embodied perspectives is epistemologically necessary.

PART II

Comparisons of Jewish and Early Christian Perspectives

CHAPTER 4

Shared Descent: Ancestry, Kinship, Marriage, and Family

Notions of shared descent and kinship are central to most attempts to define ethnic identities. For Max Weber, as we have already noted, it is “a belief in … common origins” that is at the heart of the constitution of an ethnic or racial group.¹ Hence Jonathan Hall goes so far—rather too far—as to claim that “fictive kinship” is “the sine qua non for ethnic consciousness.”² Yet no single factor should alone be seen as definitive or constitutive of ethnic or racial identities; various characteristics can acquire greater or lesser salience in different contexts and can be deployed for various rhetorical purposes. Nonetheless, appeals to shared ancestry and descent—and the sense of shared kinship that is built on such bases—are an obvious focus of attention for any study of ethnic identity-construction (and any study of the intersections between ethnic/racial and religious identities). Moreover, as both Weber’s and Hall’s comments indicate, the kinship bonds established through such appeals are essentially fictive, a matter of belief and perception more than objective lines of blood-connection, even if the latter is how the bonds are depicted and commonly understood. Indeed, ancestry is a particularly interesting locus for the interplay between fixity and fluidity to which Buell in particular has drawn attention,³ since it is, in one sense, something that is unalterable—one cannot (as children often bemoan) change one’s biological parents, nor they theirs, and so on—but in reality genealogies are constructed and presented in diverse ways for various purposes, as we shall see.⁴ In addition to the rhetorical uses of genealogy, ancestry, descent, and so on to construct notions of shared ethnic or racial identity, it is also important to consider the social norms and practices that reinforce and reproduce the sense of shared descent and kinship. Particularly important here are norms about marriage and the raising of children.

In this chapter, then, we shall examine how notions of shared ancestry and genealogies feature in both Jewish and early Christian texts and how a sense of shared kinship is deployed to express and develop group identity. We shall then turn to Jewish and Christian rules regarding marriage and assumptions regarding the identity of children.

4.1 Stories of Ancestors: Appeals to Genealogy and Descent

An interest in genealogies—recording who begat whom—is prominently displayed in the Jewish scriptures. Right from the early chapters of Genesis there is a clear concern to record lines of descent: from Adam via Cain and then Seth, from Seth to Noah (see Gen 4:17–5:32), on through Noah’s three sons, Japheth, Shem, and Ham (Gen 10:1–32), then from Shem to Abram (Gen 11:10–29), and from Abram (now Abraham, see Gen 17:5) to Isaac and his two sons Esau and Jacob. Jacob later comes to be called Israel, father of the twelve sons from whom the twelve tribes take their names (see Gen 25:19–26; 32:28; 37:2–3; 49:1–28). The first eight chapters of 1 Chronicles consist of little else than versions of such genealogical records. Needless to say, such records do not exist merely for antiquarian interest but rather because they root the identity of the people for whom the text is intended in stories of their ancestors. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob become the most prominent ancestors on whom the identity of the people of Israel is founded.⁵ Abraham in particular is appealed to as the progenitor of Israel, “the rock from which [they] were cut” (Isa 51:1–2).

Echoing the promise from Gen 17:5, Abraham is sometimes celebrated as a “father of many nations” (e.g., Sir 44:19–21).⁶ Josephus draws genea logical connections between Abraham and various other peoples (e.g., A.J. 1.214, 221, 239, 241), and repeats the tradition that both Jews and Spartans are members of the γένος of Abraham (A.J. 12.225–27; see also 1 Macc 12:21: ἐκ γένους Αβρααμ).⁷ This latter example in particular shows how such genealogical connections—even when implausible—can be (strategically) invoked in order to forge alliances (1 Macc 12:1–7). But a more prominent kind of genealogical appeal is to Abraham as the originator of the Jewish γένος, which is specifically seen as the seed of Abraham (σπέρμα Αβρααμ, Isa 41:8; Pss. Sol. 9:9; 18:3).⁸ Josephus describes Abraham as “our father” (ὁ πατήρ ἡμῶν) (A.J. 1.158). As Birgit van der Lans notes, appeals to the people’s Abrahamic descent are prominent in 4 Maccabees, which refers to them as “Abraham’s children” (οἱ Αβρααμ παῖδες) (6:17, 22; cf. 17:6) and, in a more developed formulation, as “Israelite children, offspring of the seed of Abraham” (τῶν Αβραμιαίων σπερμάτων ἀπόγονοι παῖδες Ισραηλῖται) (18:1).⁹

One indication of the significance of such ancestral claims is found in cases where the conduct of the ancestors and their consequent rewards serves as a motivation for action deemed congruent with this inheritance (e.g., 1 Macc 2:51–61; 4 Macc 6:17–22; 14:20; 15:28; 18:1; this is a theme we shall examine in more depth in the following chapter). Ancestral traditions, and venerated burial places in particular, are also significant in territorial claims.¹⁰ Another indication of the significance of claims about ancestors is exemplified in Josephus’s Contra Apionem. The “extreme antiquity” of the Jewish γένος (C. Ap. 1.1), which Josephus is concerned to establish—and which, he says, he has fully documented in the Antiquities—is, he argues, demonstrable due to the great care and accuracy with which the Jews keep their ancestral records and cherish their scriptures, compared with Greek and other historians (C. Ap. 1.1–46). Especially in the case of priests, strict regulations about whom a priest may marry—in order to keep the lineage “unmixed and pure” (ἄμικτον καὶ καθαρόν)—have necessitated careful and accurate records, which cover “the last two thousand years” (C. Ap. 1.30–36). Here the Jewish claim to authentic and venerable peoplehood is made on the basis of claims about ancestral records, which purportedly demonstrate this identity as γένος.

Also significant are indications that ancestral identity can be changed or abandoned, for good or ill. Philo, with his focus on the importance of virtue, depicts ancestral identity as defined and, indeed, gained or lost through the practice of virtue. In De Virtutibus he remarks, on the one hand, on those among “the founders of the [ Jewish] race” who did not profit from “the virtues of their ancestors” (αἱ τῶν προγόνων ἀρεταί) and, by failing to reproduce these virtues, were “denied any part in the grandeur of their noble birth [εὐγενεία]” (Virt. 206–7). On the other hand, he depicts Abraham, the founder of the Jewish people, as leaving behind the vices of his ancestors—indeed, leaving his race (γενεά) itself—to attain true virtue (Virt. 211–216).¹¹ Thus it seems that kinship and ancestry are defined—and changed—by conduct rather than blood (cf. Virt. 195; see further in ch. 5).

The New Testament, of course, begins in its canonical form with its own “book of Genesis” (Βίβλος γενέσεως) (Matt 1:1), which itself opens precisely with a lengthy genealogy (Matt 1:1–16) intended to recount the lineage of Jesus the Messiah, identified initially, and fundamentally, as both son of Abraham and son of David (Matt 1:1). Matthew’s genealogy is clearly stylized, with its three blocks of fourteen generations (Matt 1:17). It contains certain striking features: the tracing of Jesus’s lineage through Joseph, not Mary, despite the account of miraculous conception that follows (Matt 1:18–25); and the inclusion of four women—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah”—who fit somewhat uneasily into such a deliberately constructed Israelite lineage.¹²

Luke’s genealogy of Jesus is significantly different, naming different lines of paternity, which are traced backward through time rather than forward, ending up with Adam, rather than Abraham, born “of God” (Luke 3:23–38). Again, the line is traced through Joseph, even though Luke signals that this was only what people “supposed” was Jesus’s paternal lineage (ὡς ἐνομίζετο, Luke 3:23). This is significant insofar as it indicates that the setting out of Jesus’s ancestral lineage is deemed valuable, even if it does not—even for the writer—pretend to convey his actual “blood-line.” Such a genealogy can, as it were, valuably insert him into a line of ancestors, giving him the identity of son of David, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, Adam (among others), and ultimately God. Indeed, just as Jewish writers can connect Jewish ancestral claims to other peoples for strategic purposes, as we noted above, so a comparable (universalizing) move is made in Acts 17:28–29, which stresses the idea that all humanity is “God’s offspring” (γένος) as the basis of an appeal to accept the Christian message.

In polemical contexts, New Testament authors can also seek to undermine Jewish ancestral claims: John the Baptist is recorded as challenging his hearers not to rely on their status as Abraham’s descendants since “God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Matt 3:9//Luke 3:8). The image of stones as descendants is an interesting one to which we shall return. In the notoriously polemical John 8, Jesus goes much further, denying the claims of the Ioudaioi to have Abraham, and indeed God, as their “father” and insisting instead that their opposition to him reveals them to be children of the “devil” (ὁ διάβολος) (John 8:39–44). In turn, the Ioudaioi dispute Jesus’s identity as Ioudaios: “You are a Samaritan and have a demon” (John 8:48). From both sides, at least as presented in this dialogue, there is an attempt to deny and discredit the ancestry of the other.

In John, the identity of those who believe in Jesus is defined not in terms of being, or becoming, Abraham’s descendants (cf. John 8:37) but rather in terms of being children of God. This is explicitly described as having come about by God’s fatherly “siring” or begetting of these children (John 1:12–13, ἐκ θεοῦ ἐγεννήθησαν). Indeed, referring to God as “the Father” (with Jesus as “the Son”) is especially frequent in John, and the motif of new birth and of being born of God is a prominent Johannine theme (John 3:3–8; 1 John 2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:4, 18).¹³ Claiming God’s paternity as a basis for the people’s identity is not often found in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish texts, as Katherine Girsch (now Katherine Marcar) has shown, though it is occasionally evident (e.g., Deut 32:18; less directly, Num 11:12; Isa 66:7–9) and seems to become somewhat more prominent in Jewish thought by the first century CE.¹⁴ Elsewhere in the New Testament, there is a brief allusion to the specific idea of rebirth, or regeneration, in Titus 3:5 (παλιγγενεσία) and more prominently in 1 Peter, to which we shall shortly return.

Two particular motifs of ancestral descent thus seem especially significant in terms of the construction of early Christian identity in the New Testament: being Abraham’s descendants and being God’s offspring. In both cases, the language of “seed” (σπέρμα) is used—a point of interest to which we shall return. The former motif is prominent in Paul’s letters, while the second appears in 1 Peter. We shall consider each in turn, focusing on the particular examples of Gal 3 and 1 Pet 1–2.

In Gal 3, seeking to convince his recalcitrant Galatian gentile converts that membership of the righteous, Spirit-filled people comes not by works ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Judith M. Lieu
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Contexts of Research
• Comparisons of Jewish and Early Christian Perspectives
• Reflections on Location and Epistemology
• Bibliography
• Cover Illustrations Credits