Religion, Ethnicity, and Way of Life: Exploring Categories of Identity

Abstract

Recent scholarship has raised questions about some of the most basic categories traditionally used in the discipline of New Testament studies (and related fields), notably that of ‘religion’, which has been argued to be anachronistic for the ancient world. The category of ‘ethnicity’ has been proposed as a more appropriate label for Judaism (or Judean identity) of the time, though the early Christian movement is less often seen in these terms. However, both categories are shown to be modern constructions which cannot be neatly separated or unproblematically applied to early Jewish and Christian sources. In an attempt to avoid – or at least expose – some of the problems of such categorisations, the study focuses on terms related to ‘way of life’, exploring some of the ways in which both Jewish and early Christian depictions of joining or leaving fit within this broad category. The results do not imply that we can dispense with our modern analytical categories, but they do suggest that distinct categorisations as either ‘religious’ or ‘ethnic’ are unlikely to prove convincing, and cannot form a basis for distinguishing the category of Jewish/Judean ‘ethnic’ identity from that of early Christian identity.