ethne<\/em>.\u00a0This book is a detailed, carefully researched important study of more than 550 pages complete with copious notes and insights.\u00a0 On Amazon the content of the book is summarized as follows:<\/p>\n\u201cOriginally an ascribed identity that cast non-Jewish Christ-believers as an ethnic other, \u201cgentile\u201d soon evolved into a much more complex aspect of early Christian identity.\u00a0Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine\u00a0<\/i>is a full historical account of this trajectory, showing how, in the context of \u201cthe parting of the ways,\u201d the early church increasingly identified itself as a distinctly gentile and anti-Judaic entity, even as it also crafted itself as an alternative to the cosmopolitan project of the Roman Empire. This process of identity construction shaped Christianity\u2019s legacy, paradoxically establishing it as both a counter-empire and a mimicker of Rome\u2019s imperial ideology.<\/p>\n
Drawing on social identity theory and ethnography, Terence Donaldson offers\u00a0an analysis of gentile Christianity that is thorough and highly relevant to today\u2019s discourses surrounding identity, ethnicity, and Christian-Jewish relations. As Donaldson shows, a full understanding of the term \u201cgentile\u201d\u00a0is key to understanding the modern Western world and the church as we know it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here I will share some reservations about this particular reading of the data, but the careful reader will want to peruse the dialogue which follows this post in a series of posts.\u00a0 Firstly, the term\u00a0ethne\u00a0<\/em>as Donaldson freely admits was used by Jews to \u2018other\u2019 everyone else who was not Jewish. The term does not literally mean \u2018Gentile\u2019 as we know the term today, the term means ethnic group or is less helpfully translated as nation.\u00a0 In view of the very different modern notion of nation states, which is not what the term really meant in the world of the first few centuries of the Christian movement, I avoid that translation.\u00a0Ethne<\/em>\u00a0is in fact the word from which we get the term \u2018ethnic\u2019. Jews distinguished themselves from all other people groups or tribes or ethnicities.\u00a0 Not surprisingly early Jewish Christians picked up the term from their Jewish heritage and used it of both pagans and of converts to Christianity (see e.g. Rom. 9-11).<\/p>\nSecondly,\u00a0 it would have been more helpful if a wider lexicon of terms was examined along with\u00a0ethne<\/em>, for instance the term\u00a0christianoi\u00a0<\/em>found in Acts applied to Christ followers in Antioch, or simply the term\u00a0laoi.\u00a0<\/em>In other words, it would be helpful to know not only how Christians labelled themselves, but also how outsiders labelled them as well, and compare and contrast the two things.<\/p>\nThirdly, while I agree that we do find clear evidence of the rise of anti-Judaism already in a document like the Epistle of Barnabas (which I would date to the second century A.D.) which develops into actual anti-Semitism when the church became largely Gentile in character, I think it is much more difficult to find actual anti-Semitism in the NT documents themselves. For example, the critique of \u2018the Jews\u2019 in the 4th Gospel is of the Jewish authorities who were opposed to Jesus, not a critique of Jews in general as the term is also used neutrally elsewhere in John.\u00a0 Further, as Donaldson himself points out, much of the critique of Judaism, for instance in Galatians or 1 Corinthians is in one sense an in-house critique\u2014 Jews arguing with Jews about the Law, and Jesus, and other subjects. This does not qualify as early evidence of anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n
I have learned a lot from a careful reading of Donaldson\u2019s most recent book, and one of the effects it has had on me, is just to increase the amount of regret and shame I feel about some of the actual anti-Semitism going well beyond a meaningful critique of Judaism we find in the Christian documents of the 2nd through 4th centuries A.D. There is a good reason some commentators have called anti-semitism \u2018the original sin of the church\u2019.\u00a0 But let\u2019s let Terry Donaldson speak for himself\u2014 starting in the next blog post tomorrow.<\/p>\n
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Terry Donaldson is a top drawer scholar who for some time has worked in the social side of the discipline of NT studies, and in this case the social scientific theory of social identity, which is used to study the development of self-understanding in earliest Christianity.\u00a0 In particular this is an examination primarily of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n