MetaCatholic

Loren Rosson has another post on whether Ioudaios should be translated “Jew” or “Judean.” A previous post on the topic can be found here. I take both of these together. I am broadly sympathetic to the idea that the sense of “Judean” has got lost in the characteristic ways we write and speak about the ancient world, and that sense varies between geographical specificity and generic ethnic identity.

However, it is easy to become over-dogmatic about this, and those who do are in danger of mistaking the nature of words. The meaning of words does not stay still. While all in this debate agree, I think, that the specific meaning of a word is determined by how it functions in context., I think they are missing the way in which repeated usage in certain contexts begins to shift the meaning of a word. In this particular case, the generic ethnic use of the word in many contexts suggest that it is requiring a sense of adherence to a particular set of traditions and practices, irrespective of ethnic identity. It is beginning to designate religion rather than ethnicity.

The question whether we should use “Judean” to designate both the ethnic and the religious uses, or “Judean” for the former and “Jew” for the latter, or even maintain Jew for both, is not as straightforward as Loren and others seem to think. There is a particular nonsense in saying Josephus settles the question. As far as I know, he did not speak English, and can’t be determinative for English usage. From the point of view of contemporary English usage, I am made very uneasy by attempts to suggest Jesus did not self-identify as a Jew, and that Paul preferred to avoid the term for himself. I can just see the ways in which this academic point could be used to reinforce anti-Semitic arguments, just when the Jewishness of Jesus is beginning to take root in popular consciousness.

That apart, I think the evidence for varied usage in the NT is less clear cut than the “Judean” argument would have it be, and that the “religious” sense of “Jew” is beginning to emerge, partly as a response to the widespread presence of the Diaspora self-identifying with their place of birth as well as their ancestral traditions, but especially in early Christian writing to refer to those who shared their ethnicity, but nor their beliefs and practices. It is, at least in part, the Christian writings that speed the transformation of Ioudaios from Judean (ethnic) to Jew (religious.

I note the following numbered examples (all NRSV), with a brief following discussion:

1. The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. (John 2:13 cf also John 5:1 and 7:2 for similar uses )
2. The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) (John 4:9) and also [Jesus says] You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. (John 4:22)
3. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes (Acts 2:5-10)
4. There he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. (Acts 18:2) and also Now there came to Ephesus a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria. (Acts 18:24) and also Paul replied, “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city; I beg you, let me speak to the people.” (Acts 21:39)
5. For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.(Romans 1:16)
6. For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart– it is spiritual and not literal. (Romans 2:28-29)
7. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. (1 Corinthians 9:20)
8. I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; (Galatians 2:14-15)

Example 1 is ambiguous: ethnicity is central, but it is used to identify practices shared by many who come from the whole known world to Jerusalem. Example 2, given John’s regular negative use of “the Jews” is striking. Jesus the Galilean is addressed as a Jew, and accepts that address. The context of a debate about worship focuses the distinction of religious practices more than ethnicity, though ethnic issues are also present. Again there is ambiguity here.

Example 4 offers three cases in Acts where a different ethnicity, or at least a double ethnicity is described. They illustrate something of the problem about simply assigning ethnicity to the term “Jew” in any straightforward way. There is perhaps a semi-parallel in the way in which people of varied ethnicity could and were identified as Roman citizens, even when they had never been to Rome. A cultural identity could exist that in fact had no ethnic component. When that cultural identity is marked by a particular set of practices (it was things like sabbath observance, diet, and not participating in sacrifices that marked Jews out in the Roman world) the word begins to denote someone who adopts these practices at least as much as it connotes them while denoting ethnic identity. (Example 3 to some extent supports this varied pattern of double ethnicity.)

Paul’s characteristic way of dividing the world into Jew and Greek (Example 5) is not obviously an ethnic division. While it would be possible to take it as “my race and the rest” the fact that “Greek” designates a fundamental cultural classification suggests that “Jew” should be held as doing the same. Example 6 takes this further: by making “Jew” refer to something inward and spiritual, and not a matter of outward observance, cultural practices and the ethnic culture they once demarcated are left trailing in the dust.

Then I take examples 6 and 7 together. That “we ourselves are Jews by birth” needs to be held in tension with “to the Jews I became as a Jew”. The fact that Paul can say both suggests that the word is indeed in flux. It can denote birth ethnicity, and it can denote sharing a set of practices. Paul, who in one context can refer to himself as a Jew, can in another refer to himself as becoming like a Jew. The juxtaposition reinforces the fluidity of the word, and leaves little doubt that it means ethnicity in one context, but adherence to a set of cultural practices in another, where the ethnic connotations have almost disappeared.

None of that settles exactly how to translate the word in English, where we do indeed have two words. Judean combines geography and ethnicity, Jew combines religious identity and ethnicity, in the modern as in the ancient world.. One could opt for translating it everywhere as Judean. My problem with that is first that it doesn’t really work as a translation in, at the least, examples 6 & 7 above. But also that eliminating the vocabulary of “Jew” entirely from the NT would be a retrograde step in acknowledging the Jewishness of Jesus, and play into the hands of those who would like to divorce him from his people.

One could make a case for maintaining Judean and Jew together as translations, and varying them according to context. That accords with the most usual translations strategy of recognising that words shift their meanings in context, and the lexical stock of one language never overlaps that of another precisely. Finally, one could make a case for translating it regularly as Jew, on the basis that consistent translation could fill out the range of meanings, and approximate it to its Greek usage. If this strategy were to be followed, then I think it should probably be footnoted with “or Judean.” Those opting for dynamic equivalence translations will probably need to follow the second strategy, those seeking more formal equivalence, the third.

Update 11/09/2007: April DeConick has two particularly pointed posts on this topic that you should take a look at.