Monday, 22 June 2015

Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle,
ed. Mark D Nanos, Magnus Zetterholm, Fortress Press, 2015, page 171

After citing Rogers Brubaker's "Ethnicity Without Groups", Johnson Hodges picks up on the way language can be used:

In the ancient world, ethno-racial language is often deployed in practices of identity-creation a discourse Denise Buell names "ethnic reasoning" (Buell, Denise Kimber, 'Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity', Columbia University Press, 2005). Buell and others have shown the great flexibility of ethnic language to argue for human difference and sameness among authors in Paul's time. The language of peoplehood is useful for "group-making projects".