S15 E01: When Virtue Turns into Vice: The Problem of Loyalty

So we tend to think of identities in binary opposition to another.

You have Montagues and you have Capulets.

Very good.

You have Labor and Tory.

I was worried some of you might say Reform.

Uh, Protestant and Catholic.

Sunni and Shia.

Very good.

Man City and [laughs] They seem to be their own worst enemies today, so.

Uh, Black and white, man and woman.

I could go on.

In my own discipline of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, one binary is all but inescapable: Jew and Gentile.

In the words of James Dunn, "Jews naturally invokes the counterpart Gentiles, each defining itself by the exclusion of the other." Jews equals non-Gentiles.

Gentiles equals non-Jews.

And this allows scholars to tell a story of hostility between Jews and Gentiles, painting a scene of sweeping social and political discord.

And it is out of this ethno- uh, ethnic conflict, we are told, that the religion of Jesus and Paul and the literature of the New Testament emerges, a message, supposedly, of universal acceptance over tribalism.

Now, this narrative is often told at Judaism's expense.

The 19th century biblical critic, F.C. Baur, could write that, "The idea of Christianity found in the bounds of national Judaism, the chief obstacle to its universal historical realization.

Nevertheless," he says, "Christianity exerted- asserted itself as a separate, independent principle, and took its stand as a new enfranchised form of religious thought and life, essentially differing from all the national peculiarities of Judaism." Now, while Baur's Christian universalism mirrors his hopes for the unification of the German people, which of course, for Baur, does not include Jews, scholars since the 1990s have seen in Christianity's third way an answer to modern racial tensions.

Former King's professor, Graham Stanton, wrote that, "Followers of Jesus, both Jews and Gentiles, saw themselves as a distinct religious group over against both the Judaism and Gentiles of the ancient world, a new people, in effect, a third race." The Christian message is, on this reading, the agent of ethnic reconciliation, both in the first century and today.

Now, this is a convenient myth.

Framing Jewish and Gentile identities as the problem allows Christianity to become the solution, and this is part of a larger effort by Christian sympathetic scholars like Tom Holland to see in Christianity the root of all modern virtues, like ethnic reconciliation, charity, and even humility.

The problem remains, however, that our sources do in fact speak in ter- terms of binary opposites, hoi Ioudaioi in Greek, the Jews or Judeans, and ta ethnē, uh, the Gentiles or the nations.

So the influential Jewish text Jubilees commands Jews, "Separate yourself from the Gentiles, and do not eat with them." The Greek philosopher Epictetus ridicules the convert to Judaism, "Why do you act the part of a Jew when you are a Greek?" And the Roman historian repeats the anti-Semitic trope that Jews are extremely loyal towards one another, but towards every other people, they feel only hate and enmity, while converts to Judaism learn to despise the gods and to disown their own country.

The picture is of two mutually exclusive loyalties, not dissimilar to Kipling's essentialist vision of the world, "East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet." But history tells a different and, of course, far more interesting story.