The Future of Biblical Israel: How Should Christians Read Romans 9-11 Today?
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by Susannah Ticciati in
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The article offers, from a Christian perspective, an ‘interested’ reading of Romans 9-11 with a view to the problem of Christian supersessionism. Focusing on the identity and character of Israel, it offers a theologically engaged reading that resists a classic supersessionist logic. Drawing on recent historical scholarship on Jewish and Christian developments in the early centuries CE, the article argues for the underdetermined, contested and constructed character of postbiblical Israel. It then builds on a minority trajectory within recent Pauline scholarship that finds only one Israel in Romans 9-11, an Israel which embraces Christ-believing Gentiles but does not exclude non-Christ-believing Jews. Finally, it argues for a retrieval of Karl Barth’s insight (developed in the second edition of his Romans commentary) that hardened Israel is the church. Christians are thereby summoned not just to solidarity with others who have been hardened, but also to confession of their own hardening.
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1
Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 384-429.
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6
Jeremy F. Worthen, The Internal Foe: Judaism and Anti-Judaism in the Shaping of Christian Theology (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
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7
Peter Ochs, Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011). The shifts within Roman Catholicism vis-à-vis Judaism are no less fundamental. See Neville Lamdan and Alberto Melloni, Nostra Aetate: Origins, Promulgation, Impact on Jewish-Christian Relations (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2007). However, the argument I pursue in this article finds its resources largely within Protestant postliberalism.
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13
For example, Dunn, ‘The New Perspective on Paul: Paul and the Law’, The New Perspective on Paul, pp. 131-41 (140). Indeed, central to the New Perspective is its contention that Paul’s critique of the Judaism of his day is aimed at its nationalistic or ethnocentric exclusivism (see ibid., passim).
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17
Philip Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Augsburg: Fortress, 2004).
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19
Steve Mason, ‘Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History’, JSJ 38 (2007), pp. 457-512, is a touchstone for this debate. A lively snapshot can be gleaned from the Marginalia Forum, ‘Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Texts’, August 26, 2014; accessible at <http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/jew-judean-forum/>.
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23
Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
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24
Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
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26
Boyarin, Border Lines, p. 73 and p. 263 n. 204, in which Boyarin partially endorses Shaye Cohen’s account of a shift in the second century BCE from ‘Judaean’ in an ethnic sense to ‘Jew’ in a religious sense, but argues that a fully religious definition of Jew only emerges four centuries later.
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28
See Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and David G. Horrell, ‘Ethnicisation, Marriage and Early Christian Identity: Critical Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3 and Modern New Testament Scholarship’, NTS 62.3 (2016), pp. 439-60.
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35
Givens, We the People, pp. 243-72, in the course of which Givens offers a withering critique of ‘ethnic Israel’ (pp. 244-56). Givens indicates the prevalence of the assumption of an ethnic Israel within the scholarly literature. However, we might differentiate between those instances in which the assumption is unreflective, implicitly buying into an unquestioned primordialist account, and those instances in which ethnicity is treated within a constructivist theoretical framework (and there are likely to be instances in which both tendencies are displayed at once). The former are clearly subject to the critique of Denise Kimber Buell and others (see n. 28 above). The latter must be treated with more care. A recent, compelling alternative to Givens’s account of biblical Israel’s relation to Gentile outsiders is offered by Matthew Thiessen in Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Thiessen rereads those scriptural passages which might suggest that outsiders can become Israelites by way of circumcision in such a way as to exclude the possibility. On his reading, eighth day circumcision is emphasised in order to protect an exclusive, genealogical definition of Israel (see esp. pp. 17-65). Thiessen’s reading is incisive, but it is resisted by the complexity of the material it tries to marshal, as well as by the present scholarly consensus. Joel S. Kaminsky gently accuses Thiessen of reading the insider/outsider binary to be found in Jubilees back into the Hebrew biblical texts (review of Thiessen in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 6.1 [2011]; accessible at <https://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/1908>). Moreover, Christine E. Hayes, in Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), while reading Jubilees in a similar way to Thiessen, contrasts its genealogical definition of Israel with an earlier biblical definition that was primarily moral-religious, allowing Gentiles to enter the community to one degree or another. In particular, Hayes notes the limited and non-universal nature of the Torah’s prohibition of intermarriage with Gentiles and its moral-religious motivation by pointing to several examples of accepted exogamy, including the marriages of Moses and Joseph (pp. 24-26 and n. 25). According to Hayes, ‘Ezra is the first to define Jewish identity in almost exclusively genealogical terms’ (p. 10). In keeping with Hayes, Jon Levenson (‘The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism’, in Mark G. Brett [ed.], Ethnicity and the Bible [Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2002], pp. 143-69) points, for example, to Exod 12.38, Ruth 1.16 and Lev. 19.34 as evidence for the possibility of some degree of integration of the foreigner into Israel (p. 162), concluding that biblical Israel defies a simplistic dichotomy between the possibility or impossibility of conversion. In ‘The Gēr in the Priestly Laws of the Pentateuch’ (in Mark G. Brett [ed.], Ethnicity and the Bible, pp. 77-87), Rolf Rendtorff offers a complex picture of the treatment of the gēr in Hebrew biblical law codes, a picture which (again) defies simple binaries. Thus, while Rendtorff concedes that ‘the gēr does not belong to “Israel”’, the thrust of his essay is nevertheless to highlight the inclusivity of many of the laws, and the variegated character of Israel, allowing for different levels of participation, such that one begins to wonder whether his initial concession indicates the creeping in of an Israel/non-Israel binary, and needs to be reworked in the light of his findings. Either way, Thiessen’s account is, by contrast, too neat. An approach to Israelite identity in keeping with Givens’s critique of ‘ethnic Israel’, as well as with Buell’s constructivist account of ethnicity, is to be found in Amanda Beckenstein Mbuvi’s Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Politics of Identity Formation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016). Mbuvi is critical of the pervasive tendency to read Genesis according to a modern understanding of race, showing, by contrast, how it ‘depicts [communal identity] as preeminently a product of negotiation’ (p. 145), and how it envisages, not an in/out binary, but ‘insiders of different stripes’ (p. 137).
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38
See Givens, We the People, pp. 403-406 and 408, where such a reading of the natural/unnatural distinction is implied rather than explicitly elaborated.
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45
Barth, Romans, p. 332. In the following exposition, I capitalise ‘Church’, following the conventions of Barth’s English translator.
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51
Barth, Romans, pp. 408-141 (411), commenting on Paul’s development of the olive tree analogy in 11.17-22.
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The Future of Biblical Israel: How Should Christians Read Romans 9-11 Today?
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by Susannah Ticciati in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
The article offers, from a Christian perspective, an ‘interested’ reading of Romans 9-11 with a view to the problem of Christian supersessionism. Focusing on the identity and character of Israel, it offers a theologically engaged reading that resists a classic supersessionist logic. Drawing on recent historical scholarship on Jewish and Christian developments in the early centuries CE, the article argues for the underdetermined, contested and constructed character of postbiblical Israel. It then builds on a minority trajectory within recent Pauline scholarship that finds only one Israel in Romans 9-11, an Israel which embraces Christ-believing Gentiles but does not exclude non-Christ-believing Jews. Finally, it argues for a retrieval of Karl Barth’s insight (developed in the second edition of his Romans commentary) that hardened Israel is the church. Christians are thereby summoned not just to solidarity with others who have been hardened, but also to confession of their own hardening.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 862 | 59 | 3 |
| Full Text Views | 371 | 16 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 436 | 53 | 0 |
