In this book David Horrell combines conventional historical investigation of ancient Jewish and Christian sources with exacting meta-critical analysis to produce a thoughtful and compelling volume, which, though a work with the New Testament (and New Testament Studies) as its focus, touches upon a range of issues relevant to the study of ancient Christianity more generally.
The book divides itself into three parts. Part i, ‘Contexts of Research’, consists of three chapters. In the first Horrell identifies what he takes to be a persistent structural dichotomy in the study of early Christianity, namely that between Jewish ethnic particularism and Christian inclusivism/universalism. Central to the establishment of such a dichotomy, Horrell maintains, is F. C. Baur, arguably the father of modern New Testament study; and though Horrell is clear that the manner in which that dichotomy has been expressed by subsequent scholars has changed, often in apparent opposition to Baur, the dichotomy has persisted in often subtle ways. Chapter ii looks at the question of ethnicity and race in relation to the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity. Horrell argues that most have agreed that Judaism was regarded primarily as an ‘ethnos’ in the ancient world, though the term needs to be understood in its ancient context. More importantly, he highlights work, in particular associated with Kimberley Buell, that has sought to show up what the latter termed ‘the ethnic reasoning’ behind second- and third-century presentations of early Christian identity. Horrell maintains that such analysis has not been applied systematically to New Testament sources and it will be part of the aim of his volume to engage in such analysis. Chapter iii gives a brief overview of ethnicity, race and religion in social-scientific perspective. In this context Horrell emphasises the constructed nature of ethnic and racial identities, the related point that such identities are never static and immutably fixed and how study of ancient ethnicities are inevitably bound up in contemporary ideologies and convictions. In the process of his discussion he broadly approves of Anthony Smith's taxonomy of factors that play a part ‘in making and maintaining a sense of ethnic identity’.
The second part of the volume compares ancient Jewish and early Christian perspectives on ethnicity through the taxonomy provided by Smith. So there are chapters on ancient kinship, marriage and family; on culture, practice and the socialisation of children; on territory and symbolic constructions of space; on self-consciousness and ethnicisation, here focusing in particular on ideas of peoplehood; and, in addition to Smith's taxonomy, on mission and conversion. Horrell argues that in broad terms Christians used kinship language, highlighting Paul's assertion that Christians were related to Abraham and were part of a group which could refer to themselves as brothers and sisters. Christians could also speak of a homeland, and though this was often in language of a fictive and eschatological kind, such ways of referencing were frequently witnessed in Jewish sources as well; and they asserted a status as a people with a particular way of life. Ancient Christians, then, were not afraid to think ‘ethnically’. On the other side, the so-called ethnic and particularist Jews allowed non-Jews to become a part of their people. As Horrell notes: ‘Despite a long-established tendency to depict the early Christian movement as a kind of “opening up” of Judaism to the gentiles … “Judaism itself”, as Jon Levinson pithily remarks, “can also be Judaism for the gentiles”’ (p. 295).
The third part, ‘Reflections on Location and Epistemology’, consists of one chapter. In it Horrell summarises what has preceded and then, assuming his claims to be correct, asks, ‘why is it that Judaism has so often been depicted as ethnocentric, particular, or limited by the boundaries of ethnicity and race while early Christians have been seen as exclusive, open, trans-ethnic, or universal in its concerns?’ (p. 309). The answer lies in an examination of the context in which New Testament Studies was and continues to be produced. Informed by ‘whiteness’ studies, Horrell seeks to highlight the particular, yet dangerously universalising, tendencies of white, western assumptions, which have dominated the academy. Such ‘whiteness’, because of its association with ‘Christianity’, which continues to be the dominant identity of those conducting New Testament Studies, needs to be identified and made the starting point for some difficult yet necessary forms of self-reflection, which Horrell, healthily conscious of his own ‘white’ identity, probes in skeletal form in the volume's final five pages.
This is a wide-ranging and carefully constructed book, which merits detailed attention at a number of levels. In one sense it bears all the hallmarks of a sustained hermeneutics of suspicion, conceived in a tone strangely lacking in polemic, in which the distorting assumptions of an apparently objective area of study are ruthlessly exposed. Overcoming those apparent distortions, which have so much to do with the overridingly Christian character of New Testament Studies (why else is there such a discipline?), which nearly always strains at a type of exceptionalism, often conceived on a moral plain, will be very difficult, as Horrell is the first to admit. On another level it is a straightforward historical study, which makes the claim, following a notable minority of scholars, that ‘characteristics commonly associated with “ethnic” groups in general, and with Jewish groups in particular, are also prominent in the discourse and practice of early Christian identity-formation’; and that such constructions ‘are at least competing within the realm identified by ethnos loyalties rather than in a sphere easily separated from them’ (p. 309). These claims seem sound enough, though Horrell is quick to claim that Jews and Christians are not ethnic in the same way. Some, asserting that this is particularly the case in the area of territorial language and language of kinship, might have wanted Horrell to explore the significance of these differences more than he does. Others might wonder, too, particularly in relation to New Testament texts, what difference it would make to Horrell's assessment if we considered these texts as manifestations of Jewish literature, as many would, and which on occasion Horrell himself seems to concede. Following on from this, and in the context of a discussion of the so-called parting of the ways, it might be interesting to see whether amongst so-called separatist writers (those keen to present Jews and Christians as separate), language of a more ‘ethnic’ kind proliferates.
Much more could be said about a book, which, in spite of touching upon a welter of controversial issues, both historical and theoretical, does so in a sober and pellucid way and is bound to stimulate a good deal of debate moving forward.
