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6 “No Distinction between Jew and Greek” The Roles of Food in Defining the Christ-believing Community The first adherents of what we now call Christianity were, of course, Hellenistic Jews from Judea and the surrounding provinces. Like the early Sages, they inherited not only the Jewish scripture but also Jewish ideas and practices of their time and place. Among the latter are the notion of a binary distinction between holy Jews and mundane gentiles, a distinction marked in no small measure by differences in dietary practice, and Judean restrictions that limit access to otherwise permissible food associated with foreigners. Belief that Jesus was the messiah (Greek: christos), however , radically affected the manner in which these Jews understood their ancestral texts and traditions. Some Christ-believing Jews embraced a new style of thinking about the relationship between Jews and gentiles, maintaining that one need not be Jewish at all in order to gain full membership in the community of those who believe in Jesus as Christ. The success of proselytizing efforts among gentiles—the “gentile mission”—determined the fate of the Church, as gentiles quickly came to outnumber Jews within the Christ-believing community. These gentile Christians developed a conception of Christianity as a religion not only separate from Judaism but also in direct opposition to it.1 The evolution of norms regarding food in general and food associated with foreigners in particular reflects the evolution of Christian identity itself. As Hal Taussig perceptively frames the formation of this identity , “In the beginning was the meal.”2 The New Testament offers glimpses into the beginnings of the gentile mission and the styles in which the earliest Christ-believers imagined their community’s identity; because they did not conceive of this identity as being wholly separate from or necessarily opposed to Judaism, it is anachronistic to refer to these figures as “Christians.” Of particular relevance for the present study are several of the Pauline 87 letters, written in the fifth decade of the first century, and Acts of the Apostles, written in that century’s eighth decade as the continuation of the Gospel of Luke. These works emphasize the importance within the Christ-believing community of the common table. Indeed, Acts lists “the breaking of bread” among the core activities of those who embrace the gospel and accept baptism (Acts 2.42). In Paul’s words about membership in the Christ-believing community, “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek . . . for ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’” (Rom. 10.12–13, citing Joel 2.32). The Hellenistic Jews whose works we considered in chapter 3, in contrast, believe quite strongly in the distinction between Jew and Greek, and many of the earliest Christ-believers shared that conviction. Paul and fellow advocates of the gentile mission, therefore, face the challenge of reconfiguring the traditional Jewish conception of the proper social order, made manifest in Judean foreign food restrictions. The magnitude of this challenge becomes apparent when we reflect upon the portrayal of Jesus at table in the Gospels. Although the Gospels famously recount that Jesus ate with “tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 9.11 // Mark 2.16 // Luke 5.30), people on the margins of Jewish society, it is surely significant that we never hear of Jesus eating with gentiles .3 Quite the contrary, Jesus compares gentiles to “dogs” who are unfit to share the food of the Jewish “children”; “the dogs under the table” may “eat the children’s crumbs,” but gentiles may not sit at Jesus’ table as equals and have no right to expect Jesus’ attention (Mark 7.27–28; cf. Matt. 15.26–27, part of the first epigraph introducing part III).4 Jesus himself had no interest in ministering to gentiles: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he declares (Matt. 15.24). If Jesus shared meals with gentiles—or, more precisely, if the authors of the Gospels imagined that Jesus had done so—there would surely be reference to this in their works.5 Those who subsequently argued for the legitimacy of eating with gentiles could have made their point quite simply and effectively: “What would Jesus do?” Rather, our sources indicate that Jesus, a Jew conveying his message to the Jewish community of Judea, observed the foreign food restrictions discussed in chapter 3. This practice implies that Jesus’ conception of the social order was more similar to that of his Judean predecessors...

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