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Reviewed by:
  • Ethnicity, Race, Religion: Identities and Ideologies in Early Jewish and Christian Texts, and in Modern Biblical Interpretation ed. by Katherine M. Hockey, David G. Horrell
  • Shawn Kelley
katherine m. hockey and david g. horrell (eds.), Ethnicity, Race, Religion: Identities and Ideologies in Early Jewish and Christian Texts, and in Modern Biblical Interpretation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Pp. 256. £91.80.

New Testament scholars have long struggled with the possibility that Christian and/or biblical anti-Judaism may have paved the way for the Holocaust. This important volume, edited by Katherine Hockey and David Horrell, intervenes in this contentious debate and advances the terms of the debate considerably. According to Horrell, the goal of the volume is to “explore and illuminate how ideas and ideologies of ethnicity, race, and religion contribute to the construction and interpretation of Jewish and Christian identities in biblical and early Christian texts and in the traditions of scholarship dealing with those texts” (p. 8). The volume includes a helpful introduction by Horrell and twelve essays divided into three groupings.

Part 1 (“Ethnicity, Religions, and Identity in Antiquity”) takes up the contentious question of whether, and how, modern categories of ethnicity and identity can be applied to [End Page 167] the very different world of antiquity. The essays, by Teresa Morgan (“Society, Identity, and Ethnicity in the Hellenic World”), John M. G. Barclay (“ Ἰουδαῖος: Ethnicity and Translation”), and Judith M. Lieu (“Identity Games in Early Christian Texts: The Letter to Diognetus”), provide broad historical contexts for thinking about these categories in antiquity. The authors, rightly in my view, see ethnicity/race as socially constructed rather than biologically given. Morgan is particularly helpful on shifting views on ethnicity in the Greek and Hellenistic worlds, while Barclay takes on the much-debated question of whether Ioudaios is best understood as a religious, ethnic, or racial label, and Lieu explores ethnic identity in the Letter to Diognetus. These essays provide the reader with both modern theoretical categories and careful attention to the way that these categories were employed in a variety of ancient texts, customs, and social settings.

Part 2 (“Ethnicity, Race, and Religion in European Traditions of Biblical Scholarship”) changes the focus from antiquity to modern scholarship and raises the crucial yet distressing question of the degree to which formative scholarship reflects the racial values of its own historical context. This question has received far less attention in biblical scholarship than it has in the rest of the academic world, and this volume is to be praised for bringing it to the fore. Perhaps because this line of inquiry reflects my own scholarly interests, I found this section to be especially engaging and challenging. Gregory L. Cuéllar (“S. R. Driver and Higher Criticism: Mapping ‘the Differences of Race’ in Genesis”) uncovers the fascinating and appalling examples of overt racism (racialization is too benign a term) in formative scholarship on Genesis. He examines this work within the highly racialized world of nineteenth-century museums, universities, and libraries. Kathryn Ehrensperger (“What’s in a Name? Ideologies of Volk, Rasse, and Reich in German New Testament Interpretation Past and Present”) connects Nazi-aligned German biblical interpretation to earlier racialized versions and explores the way that this history shapes and perhaps limits contemporary German scholarship on ethnicity. Halvor Moxnes (“From Ernest Renan to Anders Behring Breivik: Continuities in Racial Stereotypes of Muslims and Jews”) traces the migration of popular racial prejudices into scholarly discourse by identifying parallels between Renan’s Islamophobia, which shapes his analysis of biblical Judaism, and that of the mass murderer Anders Breivik. James G. Crossley (“Other Problems from a British Perspective: ‘Jewishness,’ Jesus, and the New Perspective on Paul”) explores the rhetoric of the New Perspective, showing that it maintains problematic elements (i.e., a reified and essentialized Judaism) and locates this rhetorical shift within the larger geopolitical context of neoliberalism.

Part 3 (“Challenging White, Western Traditions of Interpretation: Critique and Alternatives”) asks how scholarship might begin to free itself from Western racialization. The section opens with a persuasive analysis by Denise Kimber Buell (“Anachronistic Whiteness and the Ethics of Interpretation”), which demonstrates the whiteness of mainstream biblical scholarship, a racialization made all the more potent by...

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