I finally got around to reading Elliott’s well-written piece on what terminology scholars should employ when identifying Jesus and his contemporaries in the land of Israel: “Jesus the Israelite was Neither A ‘Jew’ Nor a ‘Christian’: On Correcting Misleading Nomenclature,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5 (2007) 119-154 (abstract).

Others such as Loren Rosson have commented positively on Elliott’s article. In another post, I have already discussed Steve Mason’s convincing argument that the term Ioudaioi should be translated as “Judean” with its geographical, ethnic, and cultural implications: see Was there such a thing as ancient “Judaism”? Namely, those in antiquity who identified others by their cultural center, place of origin, or ethnic group naturally assumed a way of life associated with that geographical area, including practices and beliefs that we as moderns tend to call “religious”. “Religion” was integrated within an overall perspective that was focussed more on ethnic groups and their different ways of life.

Elliott’s article rightly follows others such as Esler (Elliott didn’t have Mason’s piece) who see major problems in translating Ioudaioi as “Jews”, or ioudaismos as “Judaism”. Elliott’s focus is not on that point, which has been well argued by others. Instead, Elliott draws on ethnic identity theory and suggests that a person’s or group’s self-identification is best used in scholarly pursuits.

Elliott then pursues evidence for what Jesus and other contemporaries in the land of Israel called one another, surveying identifications in the New Testament, Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha. He touches on the inscriptions from Delos (involving “Israelites”) briefly but generally does not deal with epigraphical evidence (partly because his focus is on Jesus, perhaps). His answer based on literary evidence is that in the majority of cases, insiders identified one another using terms such as “Israelite” and “children of Israel” but that at times “Judeans” (Ioudaioi) was used to identify people associated with the region of Judea in a broad sense (encompassing adjacent regions such as Galilee). However, “Judeans” was primarily an outsiders’ perspective on identifying what insiders would call “Israelites”, in Elliott’s view. Gradually, diaspora “Israelites” adopted outsiders’ terminology and began identifying themselves as “Judeans” within a diaspora context.

I am largely convinced by many of Elliott’s points. However, my own area of research on immigrants in the diaspora, including Judean immigrants, would suggest that the main terminological focus of inscriptions in Asia Minor and elsewhere is Ioudaioi. People from the land of Israel who migrated and settled elsewhere tended to identify themselves as “Judeans” (as a quick survey of the indices of Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis shows). “Israelites” rarely occurs as an identification of a specific group in the diaspora, with the exception of those on Delos.

Elliott may be right that Jesus (or his earliest followers) were most often designated “Israelite”, “Galilean”, or “Nazarean”. It may also be true that the term “Israelites” should be used in discussing specific writings that do indeed use that terminology. Yet in the case of scholars who are dealing with those from Israel within the broader context of the ancient Mediterranean, “Judeans” remains most appropriate, particularly in light of the preference for that term in the Greek inscriptions (as a self-designation) and in authors like Josephus (”Israelites” would need to be reserved for the exceptional cases when it is used as a self-designation on monuments, as at Delos). This is where the evidence of Paul’s use of “Judean”, which Elliott sees as exceptional, fits in as well.

We scholars are outsiders too. We need not always (and sometimes shouldn’t) adopt specific insider (emic) language to designate the groups we are studying, even though we always need to be attentive to, and descriptive of, what that insider language is. “Holy ones”, “brothers”, “the righteous” and such are examples of value-loaded insider language that we wouldn’t want to adopt as scholars as general designations of the early followers of Jesus (or Paul). We want to avoid value-loaded language whether it is the stereotyping labels of outsiders or the praising self-designations of insiders. Thankfully neither “Israelite” nor “Judean” fall into the value-loaded category. This may be where I differ from Elliott’s more specific point about the need for scholars to use the categories of insiders, but this does not detract from Elliott’s overall contribution here.

Here I continue the discussion of Matthew’s portrait of Jesus as the new David and new Moses (part 2 of 2). I also delve into tensions between Matthew’s community and other groups of Jews or Judeans in the late first century. This is part of series 2 (”Early Christian portraits of Jesus”) of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast.

Podcast 2.5: Matthew’s portrait of Jesus - New Moses, part 2 (mp3; archive.org page with various downloading options here).

You may also subscribe to this and subsequent episodes through iTunes or another podcatcher. View credits for my introductory music remix.

Hat tip to one of the pastors at The Meeting House (Joel Percy), who showed the following mash-up video in connection with his talk on common Christian notions of sin. I laughed till I cried, despite the fact that most others were slightly less amused or perhaps less aware of what was being critiqued via the presentation of Jesus:

I am enjoying creating the podcasts and have found that subscriptions and downloads are more than enough to continue (about 400 ongoing subscribers and over 1000 downloads for certain episodes). What began as a mere experiment at the prodding of my web-savvy wife, is now what I would consider a relative success. Thanks to those who are listening and making my preparation of material seem even more worthwhile. I love to teach, so it’s great to have a larger audience (even though it would be nice to interact more in person with the listeners — and you don’t get to hear all the jokes, or the “ah’s” and “um’s” which are edited out).

I have been hosting the individual audio mp3 files for my podcast on archive.org all along. Now the people over at archive.org have been nice enough to establish a “collection” page which gathers together all of my podcast audio into its own independent sub-section on archive.org: Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Podcast collection page (accessible from archive’s “Podcasts” and “Religion and Spirituality” sections under “Audio”). This does not change anything about the main feed for my podcast and the access through iTunes, which still remain the same (with a new half-hour episode being released bi-weekly).

There are some advantages to this added venue for my podcasts. Let me explain. Currently, I stagger the release of episodes (organized into series) which are broadcast twice a month through my blog and feed (which also gets sent to iTunes). So far I have been releasing series 1 on “Paul and his communities” (completely released) and series 2 on “Early Christian portraits of Jesus” (part way through). Sometime next Fall, I will officially begin posting series 3 on “Diversity in Early Christianity: ‘Heresies’ and struggles” (which deals with things like the Ebionites, Marcionites, “gnostics”, Nag Hammadi writings, and early Christian apocrypha). All of the episodes that have been officially released so far are of course also accessible here on this site under the podcast category.

The advantage of the archive collection page is that it leaves it up to you, the (potential) listener, to get episodes when you want them and to jump ahead a series if you would rather. You can now access some episodes (or series) of my podcast before they are officially released on my blog (in the event that I have them ready and uploaded to archive.org — I’m not a machine;). This means that if you know quite a bit about Paul or the Gospels, and therefore haven’t been listening to the first two series, you can now jump forward (on archive.org) to a future, more advanced series on “Diversity in early Christianity: ‘Heresies’ and struggles”. This also means that if you happen to be finding the bi-weekly process too slow and are often waiting for a podcast to listen to during the commute, then you can move ahead and get them now in some cases. But if you do jump ahead, you may use a couple of years worth of releases up in no time (I won’t be able to officially release new ones any faster than twice a month to ensure consistency over large spans of time).

Another nice thing about my archive.org collection is that it tells you the number of downloads and which episodes were downloaded most in the last week, in the past month, and since the beginning of the podcast (look at the right column on that page and scroll down).

I hope some of you find this helpful. Let me know what you think, or if you have other suggestions.

Here I discuss the Judean portrait of Jesus as the new David and new Moses in the Gospel of Matthew (part 1 of 2). This is part of series 2 (”Early Christian portraits of Jesus”) of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast.

Podcast 2.4: Matthew’s portrait of Jesus - New Moses, part 1 (mp3; archive.org page with various downloading options here).

You may also subscribe to this and subsequent episodes through iTunes or another podcatcher. View credits for my introductory music remix.