Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible

and Theology
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"Judaeans" or "Jews"?Does It Make A Difference to Us?

Leland J. White
Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible and Theology 1995; 25; 54
DOI: 10.1177/014610799502500201

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Presenting the Issue
"Judaeans" or "Jews"?—Does It Make A Difference to Us?
Etyiftyyears
reality of death camps
soldie rs exposed the stark
years ago American soldiers
whose names are now burned
into human memory. Biblical scholarship-to say
nothing of biblical faith-can no more ignore the new
world created by the revelation of Auschwitz, Dachau,
and the other death camps than it can pretend that
Galileo and Darwin never existed. If modern science
turned our world upside down, the Holocaust turned
it inside out.
Science challenges the naive common-sense as-
sumption that the natural world is as it appears. The
moral void laid bare in the heart of Christian Europe
compels biblical scholars to ask whether the faith of
communities shaped by the Bible is moral, and if not
how it may become so.
Biblical scholars have contributed significantly to
the dialog within the church and with Jews that has
explored the roots of the anti-Judaism that led to the
Holocaust. In the light of historical criticism the charge
of deicide against Jews has collapsed. By showing the
multi-stage development through which the gospel
accounts of Jesus’ death passed, historical critics have
laid a foundation for recognition that each layer of the
tradition calls for accurate contextualization. The sim-
plistic conclusions that inspired centuries-long teach-
ing of contempt for &dquo;Jews&dquo; based on what &dquo;Jews&dquo; did in
Jesus’ tinie must be rejected.
Nonetheless, much more is required. Biblical
scholars must move from the historical critics’ intuitive
vision of the chasm that separates the twentieth-cen-
tury reader from the first-century text to the fuller
recognition that all texts, including the Bible, take
their meaning from social institutions, from the cul-
tural systems of which they are a part. The social
sciences, notably cultural anthropology, demonstrate
that twentieth-century social institutions such as &dquo;the
church&dquo; or &dquo;Judaism&dquo; differ from their supposed histori-
cal antecedents not only in terms of accumulated
developments within each, but in terms of their loca-
tion within and significance for quite different cultural
systems.
54
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Invested as they are with the cultural overlay of the
contemporary world, the terms church and Judaism
signify entities non-existent in the first-century Medi-
terranean world. There were no &dquo;Jews&dquo; or &dquo;Christians&dquo;
or &dquo;Judaism&dquo; or &dquo;church&dquo;-as present-day people un-
derstand these terms-in the social world in which
Jesus lived and died and the gospel traditions devel-
oped.
Mapping out terrain historical critics intuit, social-
science approaches to the Bible reveal that &dquo;Jews&dquo; is a
misleading translation of &dquo;Judaioi&dquo; for twentieth-cen-
tury English-speaking people who understand &dquo;Jew&dquo; as
a noun indicating a religious identity, i.e., the proper
label for adherents of a particular religious tradition or
faith. &dquo;Judaioi,&dquo; properly speaking, designated people
from Judaea. It was an ethnic designation, which peo-
ple throughout the Roman Empire applied to all those
whose roots lay in the ancient kingdom and land of
Judah.
Modern religions exist as free-standing institutions
alongside nations, families, economies, etc. Traditional
religious life in the ancient Mediterranean world and
elsewhere was embedded in political and/or familial
institutions, as was traditional economic life. Over time
the church established its institutional autonomy. In-
deed, religious institutional autonomy was often forced
on unwilling church people by civil leaders divesting
ecclesiastics of their civil powers. At times ecclesiastics
established barriers to political jurisdiction in religious
affairs.
Today, in the industrial West, the domains and
obligations of the citizen and the believer are marked
off from one another; each is served by political and
religious institutions independent of one another. Nei-
ther blood nor politics binds such believers to either
church or synagogue. A social world more unlike that
of the first-century Mediterranean can scarcely be
’
imagined.
To the
Judaean elite in Jerusalem Jesus and his
disciples Galileans, provincial kin within the
were
house of Israel, who were sometimes understandably
but reprehensibly neglectful of Judaean authority be-
cause of their remoteness and exposure to gentiles, i.e.,
non-Israelites.
But Roman authorities in Judaea and Galilee, like
people throughout the empire, would have identified
both Jesus and the Judaean elite in terms of their ethnic
roots in Judaea. Throughout the empire emigration
from Judaea reaching back even before the Babylonian
exile had deposited pariah communities of Judaeans in
most major cities.
In social-science terms these assemblies were dis-
tinguished from the host society as minorities with
alien, i.e., Judaean, patterns of kinship, dining, hygiene,
education, and ritual, among other things. The &dquo;syna-
gogue&dquo; was an ethnic
assembly. It is anachronistic to
think of Jewish religion permeating all these aspects of
life in the diaspora. Instead, the communal structures,
books, rites, and observances that would later be seen
as constitutive of Judaism were part and parcel of life
as a Judaean, whether in Judaea, Galilee, or elsewhere.
Jesus and his disciples before and after his death
were seen as blasphemous, not irreligious or heretical,
because they were perceived as lacking respect for
Judaean norms, not religious norms but social norms
sanctioned with divine authority.
Rabbis were teachers whose instruction extended
like the Torah to the whole gamut of inherited knowl-
edge. Similarly, priests and pharisees were not part of
a religious establishment, but ethnic leaders legiti-
mated by association with temple and Torah. They
represented respectively opposed elite and perhaps
semi-elite segments of Judaean society with different
strategies for maintaining ethnic identity in the face of
Roman domination and Herods of compromised, i.e.,
mixed ethnic legitimacy.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob stood
behind all the norms and authorities in Judaean life,
including the power fathers exercised over wives,
slaves, and children in their homes. To hold a father,
rabbi, or priest in contempt was to dishonor, insult God.
The messiah is king. In first-century Judaea defin-
ing messiahship religiously and not politically was not
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an option. Jesus’ proclamation of God as king chal-
lenged Judaean social structures. For this he was con-
demned and because Jesus’ messiahship relativized
particularistic Judaean norms, his disciples became in-
creasingly isolated from Judaeans who held to norms
that would be valid until God’s messiah might say
otherwise.
&dquo;Messianic assemblies,&dquo; a term David Bossman
employs in this issue in &dquo;Paul’s Mediterranean Gospel:
Faith, Hope, Love,&dquo; better conveys the social world of
Jesus’ disciples in the Judaean diaspora than does
&dquo;church,&dquo; because &dquo;church&dquo; has acquired the connota-
tions associated with autonomous institutionalized re-
ligion.
In &dquo;Death with Honor: The Mediterranean Style
Death of Jesus in Mark,&dquo; John Pilch indicates that the
traditional Mediterranean pattern that makes sons
lifelong dependents shapes Mark’s account of Jesus’
death.
James Sanders, in &dquo;Scripture as Canon for Post-
Modern Times,&dquo; reminds us that the Bible took shape
as much in the consciousness of the communities that
have read it as in the intentions of individual authors.
T. R. Hobbs’ BTB Readers Guide, &dquo;Aspects of
Warfare in the First Testament World,&dquo; opens up the
data bank we need to understand biblical war as a
major social institution.
If we think it quaint or unseemly for a cardinal to
bless an aircraft carrier, we need ask how we have
created new social patterns where religious leaders are
neither warriors nor kings, where &dquo;Jews&dquo; and &dquo;Chris-
tians&dquo; may be citizens of one nation, indeed members
of the same family. To find our way in the new moral
universe we inhabit today there is no better place to
begin than with a clearer map of the world our biblical
forebears inhabited. We have to find out what their
road signs meant to find our way in the text they have
left us.
’IF&dquo; ’I .............
Leland J. White
Editor
55