Identity Matters: Judean Ethnic Identity In The First Century CE

Identity Matters: Judean Ethnic Identity In The First Century CE | Bible Interp

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By Philip F. Esler

“Identity Matters” is the title of a recent book by a group of social scientists on ethnic and sectarian conflict.1 And so it does. If a person is explaining who he or she is or a group who they are, they are answering one of the most fundamental questions of all. It is also invariably true that people or groups answering the question “Who are you?” have a much richer understanding of themselves than outsiders will. Indeed, one of the major problems in human and social relations is the practice of stereotyping the other, of reducing the enormous complexity and richness of what it means to be the people they are to a handful of characteristics alleged to typify them.

Accordingly, when we explore issues of personal and group identity we are obliged to take the question very seriously and to be sensitive to the self-understandings of the people and groups we are investigating. If those in focus come from a different culture, we are also into the distinction between emic and the etic, between insider, indigenous viewpoints and outsider, often social science informed viewpoints. When the people in question are in the past, we encounter the additional complication of how the subsequent course of history of their descendants, physical and spiritual, affects, or should be allowed to affect, our interpretation.

The issue I am raising here is that a central feature of both scholarship on, and popular understanding of, the first century CE Mediterranean sits very awkwardly with this approach to identity. This is the assumption that in talking about that world and the impact Jesus had on it, we are dealing with two religions, “Judaism” and “Christianity,” whose adherents can appropriately be called “Jews” and “Christians.” These are widely regarded as two entities of the same genus, with a symmetrical relationship to one another, so that, for example, it is appropriate to use the metaphor of “the parting of the ways” to describe the eventual separation between them. This two-religion view is a deeply embedded and largely unexamined assumption in discussion of the first century CE yet is difficult to reconcile with even a modest amount of historical scrutiny informed by the social sciences.

The key issue is to get right the identity of the people referred to in our sources as Ioudaioi (in Greek) or Judaei (in Latin). Rather than seeing them as “Jews” who were adherents of the religion “Judaism,” they are, in my view, best viewed as the members of an ethnic group originating in Judea most appropriately called “Judeans.” Even scholars who have now begun to drop words like “ethnic” or “national” into discussion of people they continue to refer to as “Jews” rarely appreciate the implications of this step.

Here is a contemporary example of the difference between ethnic and religious identities. The “troubles” in Northern Ireland, now on the road to resolution, concern two groups of people whom many social scientists describe as the “Unionist” and “Nationalist” communities.2 Many non-specialist observers, however, understand the issue in terms of “Protestants” and “Catholics.” The reason that the Unionist/Nationalist terminology is preferable is that the identities in issue cover far more than denominational allegiance. These identities embrace: (a) a proper name identifying each group; (b) a tradition of common ancestry; (c) a shared history or shared memories of a common past, including heroes, events and their commemoration; (d) a common culture, embracing such things as customs, language (with Irish important for Nationalists) and religion (Protestant or Catholic); (e) a link with a homeland, whether in actual occupation or in diaspora contexts; and (f) a sense of communal solidarity. These characteristics are precisely the six indicators of ethnic identity identified by John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith in their well-known formulation.3 Note that religion forms only one part of one of these six characteristics, which shows the extent to which ethnicity is a far more inclusive category than religion. Nevertheless, we must also realize that in some contexts, including Northern Ireland, the religious dimension of a broader ethnic identity can become quite prominent. Ethnic and religious identities are different but each can impact the other.4 In times of ethnic conflict, the religious dimension can increase, as happened among both (Orthodox) Serbs and (Catholic) Croats in the war following the break-up of Yugoslavia.5

In the Contra Apionem of Josephus we have a work by a Ioudaios from the late first century in which, as I have shown elsewhere;6 he vigorously defends his people, his ethnic group, the Ioudaioi, against an attack that has been made on them. He does not argue that his people belong to a different category from others, quite the contrary. His strategy is to show that they are a particularly impressive example of a category that also includes the Romaioi (Romans), Hellenes (Greeks), Aigyptioi (Egyptians) and some forty other peoples. These are all ethnic groups, and the six characteristics of ethnicity identified by Smith and Hutchinson featured in Josephus’ account of his own people and also appear for many of the others discussed. While Josephus mentions religious elements of ethnic identity relating to his own and other groups, he is not defending what we would call a “religion” (a concept which is in itself anachronistic for the first century CE, as Wilfrid Cantwell Smith and Bruce J. Malina have pointed out),7 but his people in a far broader and recognizably ethnic way…