Ethnicity, Race, and Ancient Jewish and Christian Identities: Themes in Recent Research

“Situated critically in our age of identity politics and inclusion, this incisive and discerning study undermines a dichotomy between ‘ethnic’ Judaism and ‘universal’ Christianity perpetuated in various forms in modern New Testament scholarship to the present. Not itself pretending to have a view from nowhere, it invites further interrogation of its own conclusions. Both modest and profound, it marks a hermeneutical watershed in biblical studies, issuing a pressing summons to biblical scholars and Christian theologians alike to a reparative, self-critical approach to today’s fraught issues of identity.”

— Susannah Ticciati King’s College London

“In this hugely important and timely volume, David Horrell offers a fresh and persuasive account of early Christian identity creation. Deploying insights from whiteness studies, he convincingly demonstrates the unacknowledged and unreflective, yet influential, role that race has contributed to Christian exceptionalism endemic in scholarly accounts of the early church as uniquely open, inclusive, universal, and non-ethnic over and against the ‘ethnic particularity’ of Judaism. Through careful and wide-ranging readings of Jewish and New Testament texts, he shows there were in fact forms of non-ethnic inclusivism in Judaism, as well as ethnicization tendencies in early Christianity. In what is sure to become a classic text on early Christian identity, David Horrell issues a welcome challenge to all scholars (himself included) to be more attentive to our own racial locatedness and particularity.”

— Paul Middleton University of Chester

“Racism is perpetuated by claims about history, identity, and religion, especially within the Christian tradition. Resistance to racism must, then, include the reassessment of those claims, pressing back through the problematic history of interpretation to consider the biblical texts themselves in all their complexity and nuance. In this stunning work of engaged scholarship, David Horrell shows how ill-founded claims about early Christianity reveal our complicity in hermeneutical and theological discourses marked by racist assumptions and consequent practices. Horrell’s careful survey of ancient identity construction makes this an important book for scholars and students of Jewish and Christian identity. But the final chapter on the endemic presence of whiteness in New Testament scholarship makes Ethnicity and Inclusion essential.”

— Sean Winter Pilgrim Theological College, University of Melbourne