1 Mason, S. and Esler, P. F., ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities: Grounds for a Distinction’, NTS 63 (2017) 493–515CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Horrell, D. G., ‘Ethnicisation, Marriage and Early Christian Identity: Critical Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3 and Modern New Testament Scholarship’, NTS 62 (2016) 439–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although Mason and Esler present their essay as a contribution ‘to the larger debate about “ethnic reasoning” in ancient Christianity’, their main focus is on responding to my essay; they list in a note some other major works in this area (Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 495 with n. 8; cf. Horrell, ‘Ethnicisation’, 444 nn. 16–17).

3 I do not want to enter the debate about the best translation of Ioudaios here, since this would require another lengthy consideration, though see the literature cited in n. 72 below. I retain the established convention of using ‘Jew’ and ‘Judaism’ partly as a default position, and partly due to a sense that the ‘religious’ and ‘ethnic’ dimensions of this identity cannot easily be pulled apart – on which see further below. I also retain the default language of ‘Christian’, ‘Christianity’, etc.

4 So Horrell, ‘Ethnicisation’, 458: ‘We should not, however, hastily and simplistically conclude that early Christian identity “is” therefore “ethnic”, or that the early Christian groups were “ethnic groups”; such box-like categorisation is unlikely to be either cogent or illuminating. Indeed … it is much more likely that the categories are fuzzy and overlapping: ethnic, religious, cultural and social facets of group-identity intersect in complex ways. What is more relevant is the conclusion that in both discursive and practical ways, the texts we have examined indicate how ethnic categories and features are deployed in the construction of Christian group-identity and that it is apposite to speak of this identity-construction as in some respects a form of ethnicisation, “the making of a people”.’

5 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 495.

6 Cf. Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 494: ‘Evidently communication has failed.’

7 See esp. Buell, D. K., Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a work which has influenced a series of further studies, cf. n. 2 above.

8 Cf. Horrell, ‘Ethnicisation’, 459–60; Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 494.

9 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 494: ‘we were amazed to find our publications completing a short list of “landmarks”, from F. C. Baur through James Dunn and N. T. Wright …’

10 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Following Identities’, 496.

11 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Following Identities’, 511 and 515.

12 Brubaker, R., Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Grounds for Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), esp. 48–84.

13 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Following Identities’, 508–9.

14 Hall, J. M., Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buell, D. K., ‘Race and Universalism in Early Christianity’, JECS 10 (2002) 429–68Google Scholar, at 441–2.

15 Cf. also Strom. 6.5.41.6–7, part of which quotes from the Kerygma Petrou, but it is nonetheless clear that Clement himself affirms the threefold classification of Greeks, Jews and Christians.

16 Cf. also Paed. 1.6.32.4; Adumbr. (on 1 Pet 2.9); Strom. 7.7.35.2; 7.10.58.6; 7.12.73.5. For discussion of this reception of 1 Pet 2.9–10, see Horrell, D. G., Becoming Christian: Essays on 1 Peter and the Making of Christian Identity (LNTS/ECC 394; London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013) 145–52Google Scholar.

17 Buell, Why This New Race, 138–65.

18 Buell, D. K., Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 106Google Scholar.

19 See further Buell, ‘Race and Universalism’, 446–50.

20 Hist. eccl. 1.4.2 (LCL, alt.), cited by Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 503. On this theme in Eusebius, and specifically the ethnic construction of Christian identity in Eusebius’ Praeparatio evangelica, see Johnson, A. P., Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 198–233.

21 See again the discussion in Buell, Why This New Race, esp. 94–115, focused particularly on Justin's Dialogue with Trypho. For a New Testament example, note the emphatic deployment of ‘people’ terms – ἔθνος, γένος, λαός – in 1 Pet 2.9–10, and the discussion of this text and its impact in early Christian literature in Horrell, Becoming Christian, 133–63.

22 For an extended presentation of the ‘classical paradigm’ for ‘mapping peoples’ in terms of ethnos and polis, see Mason, S., Orientation to the History of Roman Judaea (Eugene, OR: Cascade/Wipf and Stock, 2016) 97–146Google Scholar. On such loyalties and identities in the context of Corinth, and Paul's correspondence to the city, see Concannon, C. W., ‘When You Were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthian Correspondence (Synkrisis: Comparative Approaches to Early Christianity in Greco-Roman Culture; New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 E.g. Harland, P. A., Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians: Associations, Judeans, and Cultural Minorities (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009)Google Scholar, esp. 16–18, 25–46.

24 Borg, B. E., ‘Does Religion Matter? Life, Death, and Interaction in the Roman Suburbium’, Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics (ed. Gasparini, V. et al. ; Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming 2019)Google Scholar.

25 Galen, De pulsuum differentiis 2.4 and 3.3, cited from Walzer, R., Galen on Jews and Christians (Oxford Classical and Philosophical Monographs; London: Oxford University Press/Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1949) 14Google Scholar. See pp. 37–56 for Galen's view of Judaism and Christianity as ‘defective’ philosophies.

26 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 498.

27 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 499 and 508 respectively.

28 Smith, R. R. R., ‘Simulacra Gentium: The Ethne from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias’, JRS 78 (1988): 50–77Google Scholar.

29 Among those who have previously stressed the fluidity and flexibility of ethnicity (and race and religion) – in juxtaposition with appeals to its apparent ‘fixity’ – see esp. Buell, Why This New Race, 5–10, et passim; also Buell, D. K. and Hodge, C. Johnson, ‘The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul’, JBL 123 (2004) 235–51Google Scholar.

30 Baker, C. M., ‘“From Every Nation under Heaven”: Jewish Ethnicities in the Greco-Roman World’, Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (ed. Nasrallah, L. and Fiorenza, E. S.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009) 79–99Google Scholar, at 91–5.

31 See, for example, the discussion of the situation in Alexandria in Mason, Orientation, 129–46.

32 Esler, P. F., Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul's Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) 72–4Google Scholar.

33 Baker, ‘Jewish Ethnicities’, 93 and 81 respectively.

34 Morgan, T., ‘Society, Identity, and Ethnicity in the Hellenic World’, Ethnicity, Race, Religion: Identities and Ideologies in Early Jewish and Christian Texts and in Modern Biblical Interpretation (ed. Hockey, K. M. and Horrell, D. G.; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018) 23–45Google Scholar, at 24–6.

35 Peppard, M., ‘Personal Names and Ethnic Hybridity in Late Ancient Galilee: The Data from Beth She‘arim’, Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity in Ancient Galilee: A Region in Transition (ed. Zangenberg, J., Attridge, H. W. and Martin, D. B.; WUNT 210; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) 99–113Google Scholar, at 113.

36 Peppard, ‘Personal Names’, 106; see 105–7.

37 See Arnal, W., The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity (Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction; London/Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2005)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Jesus as Battleground in a Period of Cultural Complexity’, Jesus beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural Complexity (ed. H. Moxnes, W. Blanton and J. G. Crossley; London/Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2009) 99–117; Crossley, J. G., Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century (London: Equinox, 2008) 143–72Google Scholar; idem, ‘Jesus the Jew since 1967’, Jesus beyond Nationalism, 119–37.

38 See the ‘postscript’ in H. Moxnes, ‘From Ernest Renan to Anders Behring Breivik: Continuities in Racial Stereotypes of Muslims and Jews’, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, 113–29, at 126–8. On the broader issue of identity in Galilee: Moxnes, H., ‘Identity in Jesus’ Galilee: From Ethnicity to Locative Intersectionality’, BibInt 18 (2010) 390–416Google Scholar.

39 See above, citing Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 508.

40 Note the discussion of ‘the fixity and fluidity of ethnicity/race in antiquity’ in Buell, Why This New Race, 37–41, et passim.

41 Bohak, G., ‘Ethnic Continuity in the Jewish Diaspora in Antiquity’, Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities (ed. Bartlett, J. R.; London/New York: Routledge, 2002) 175–92Google Scholar, at 191.

42 Bohak, ‘Ethnic Continuity’, 187; see appendix on 192.

43 On this large subject, see e.g. Wilson, S. G., Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004) 23–65Google Scholar; Donaldson, T. L., Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 ce) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007) 469–92Google Scholar; J. M. G. Barclay, ‘Ἰουδαῖος: Ethnicity and Translation’, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, 46–58.

44 Morgan, ‘Society, Identity, and Ethnicity’, 35.

45 Morgan, ‘Society, Identity, and Ethnicity’, 34–8.

46 E.g. Esler, P. F., ‘Giving the Kingdom to an Ethnos That Will Bear its Fruit: Ethnic and Christ-Movement Identities in Matthew’, In the Fullness of Time: Essays on Christology, Creation, and Eschatology in Honor of Richard Bauckham (ed. Gurtner, D. M., Macaskill, G. and Pennington, J. T.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016) 177–96Google Scholar, at 181; idem, God's Court and Courtiers in the Book of the Watchers: Re-Interpreting Heaven in 1 Enoch 1–36 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017) 15.

47 For landmark and recent works making this case, see Smith, W. C., The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991 [1962]) 15–50Google Scholar; Nongbri, B., Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barton, C. and Boyarin, D., Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Mitchell, C., ‘Behind the Ethnic Marker: Religion and Social Identification in Northern Ireland’, Sociology of Religion 66 (2005) 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, ‘The Religious Content of Ethnic Identities’, Sociology 40 (2006) 1135–52.

49 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 497.

50 Mitchell discusses religion as ‘an ethnic marker’ (‘Behind the Ethnic Marker’, 8–10; ‘Religious Content’, 1138–40) and notes widespread agreement that ‘religion can be a basis of ethnic identity’ (‘Religious Content’, 1136; emphasis original). Her key argument, against a widespread tendency to downplay religion's social significance, is that religion is not merely a marker of what is ‘really’ an ethnic identity, but is crucial in social identification and community construction, such that ‘religion often constitutes the fabric of ethnic identity’ (Mitchell, ‘Religious Content’, 1137; further 1143–8).

51 These characteristics are set out in Smith, A. D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 22–31Google Scholar, and more briefly summarised in Hutchinson, J. and Smith, A. D., ‘Introduction’, Ethnicity (ed. Hutchinson, J. and Smith, A. D.; Oxford Readers; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 3–14Google Scholar, at 6–7. The list has been widely used, including by Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 496.

52 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 497.

53 On this point, see Buell, Why This New Race, 35–62.

54 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 497.

55 Fredriksen, P., ‘What “Parting of the Ways”? Jews, Gentiles, and the Ancient Mediterranean City’, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ed. Becker, A. H. and Reed, A. Y.; TSAJ 95; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) 35–63Google Scholar, at 39 (emphasis original). Cf. also eadem, ‘Judaizing the Nations: the Ritual Demands of Paul's Gospel’, NTS 56 (2010) 232–52, at 234–40.

56 On the incorporation of ‘foreign’ cults into Roman ‘religion’, see further Beard, M., North, J. and Price, S., Religions of Rome, vol. i: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 245–60Google Scholar.

57 For example, Hurtado, L., Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016) 82–7Google Scholar refers to cults such as Isis under the label ‘voluntary religion’, while accepting (78–9) the broader point made by Fredriksen.

58 Esler, God's Court, 15.

59 Esler, God's Court, 17.

60 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 515.

61 For example, there seems a clear difference between the use of ἀδελϕός to denote siblings in a familial group (as e.g. in Gen 37.2; Mark 3.31–2) and its use to express an anticipated relationship between a king and a potential ally (cf. 1 Macc 10.16–18; Josephus, A.J. 13.45; cf. 1 Kings 9.13).

62 Cf. also Buell, Why This New Race, 9.

63 Weber, M., ‘Race Relations’, Max Weber: Selections in Translation (ed. Runciman, W. G.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978 [1922]) 359–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 364.

64 Hodge, C. Johnson, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 19–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quoted phrases on 19).

65 For uses of these terms, see Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 505, 507, 510.

66 Horrell, ‘Ethnicisation’, 460. Cf. Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 494–5.

67 For this phrase, see Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 494.

68 This is especially so when, as with the example Mason and Esler cite as indicating their rejection of supersessionism, the statement rejecting this stance comes as a brief coda, entirely separate from the orientation and content of the essay that precedes it. See Esler, ‘Giving the Kingdom’, 196; Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 495 with n. 5.

69 Arnal, ‘Jesus as Battleground’, 104 (emphasis original).

70 See, for example, Helen Bond's blog-post detailing the forms of sexism she has encountered in our discipline – most of which, I would think, emanate from colleagues (and I include myself here) who are unaware that this is what they are doing, and whose explicit intentions and commitments run counter to such sexist practice. http://historicaljesusresearch.blogspot.com/2014/12/helen-bond-on-sexism-and-nt-scholarship.html (accessed 7 June 2018). The broader issues of sexism and gender bias in, say, SNTS (and other organisations) are more complex, multifaceted, and in part historical and structural, such that they cannot simply be addressed at an individual level.

71 Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 493, 515.

72 Current discussion centres around Mason's seminal article: Mason, S., ‘Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History’, JSJ 38 (2007) 457–512Google Scholar. See esp. Law, T. M. and Halton, C., eds., Jew and Judean: A MARGINALIA Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Texts (Los Angeles: Marginalia Review of Books, 2014)Google Scholar. A recent and mediating assessment is offered by Barclay, ‘Ἰουδαῖος’; note too Mason's conciliatory comments in Orientation, 278.

73 Esler, P. F., ‘From Ioudaioi to Children of God: The Development of a Non-Ethnic Group Identity in the Gospel of John’, In Other Words: Essays on Social Science Methods and the New Testament in Honor of Jerome H. Neyrey (ed. Hagedorn, A. C., Crook, Z. A. and Stewart, E.; Social World of Biblical Antiquity, Second Series 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2007) 106–37Google Scholar, at 127 and 133 respectively.

74 Esler, P. F., ‘Judean Ethnic Identity and the Matthean Jesus’, Jesus – Gestalt und Gestaltungen. Rezeptionen des Galiläers in Wissenschaft, Kirche und Gesellschaft (ed. von Gemünden, P., Horrell, D. G. and Küchler, M.; NTOA 100; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) 193–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 208.

75 Esler, ‘Giving the Kingdom’, 188, 190. Cf. also Esler, P. F., ‘Intergroup Conflict and Matthew 23: Towards Responsible Historical Interpretation of a Challenging Text’, BTB 45 (2015) 38–59Google Scholar.

76 See Esler, Conflict and Identity, 54–61 (on Greek ethnicity) and 62–74 (on Judean ethnicity).

77 See Esler, Conflict and Identity, 74–6, 108, 339–56.

78 Esler, Conflict and Identity, 360.

79 Esler, Conflict and Identity, 360.

80 Esler, Conflict and Identity, 355, 65.

81 Cf. Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 494.

82 Esler, Conflict and Identity, 10.

83 Esler, Conflict and Identity, 365.

84 Horrell, D. G., Solidarity and Difference: A Contemporary Reading of Paul's Ethics (Cornerstones; London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015 ² [2005])Google Scholar.

85 And on the ‘implicit racism’ that may be woven into Habermas’ work, see Kaufman, C., ‘Is Philosophy Anything if It Isn't White?’, The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy (ed. Yancy, G.; Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010) 245–63Google ScholarPubMed, at 254–7.

86 See e.g. Horrell, Solidarity and Difference, 214 n. 87, 215, 223–4 with n. 100.

87 Mignolo, W. D., ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture & Society 26/7–8 (2009) 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 4 and 2 respectively.

88 Among those who have stressed the locatedness and specificity of the dominant approaches in biblical studies, see e.g. Myers, W. H., ‘The Hermeneutical Dilemma of the African American Biblical Student’, Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (ed. Felder, C. H.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991) 40–56Google Scholar; Segovia, F. F. and Tolbert, M. A., eds., Reading from This Place, vol. i: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States; vol. ii: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995)Google Scholar; Sugirtharajah, R. S., ‘Muddling Along at the Margins’, Still at the Margins: Biblical Scholarship Fifteen Years after the Voices from the Margin (ed. Sugirtharajah, R.S.; London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2008) 8–21Google Scholar.

89 Horrell, D. G., ‘Paul, Inclusion, and Whiteness: Particularising Interpretation’, JSNT 40 (2017) 123–47Google Scholar, esp. 139–41. Cf. also D. K. Buell, ‘Anachronistic Whiteness and the Ethics of Interpretation’, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, 149–67; W. H. Wan, ‘Re-Examining the Master's Tools: Considerations on Biblical Studies’ Race Problem’, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, 219–29.

90 For example, consider the debates in Classics around the arguments of M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, vol. i: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985; vol. ii: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (London: Free Association Books, 1987 and 1991), or the critical reflection on the whiteness of philosophy in Yancy, G., ed., The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010)Google ScholarPubMed and in the work of R. Bernasconi (see e.g. ‘Waking up White and in Memphis’, White on White/Black on Black (ed. G. Yancy; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) 17–25), or the efforts of anthropology to reconfigure itself away from a traditional orientation towards Western observation of non-Western societies – see e.g. the early critique by Asad, T., ‘Introduction’, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (ed. Asad, T.; London: Ithaca, 1973) 9–19Google Scholar; and Said, E. W., ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry 15 (1989) 205–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 D. G. Horrell, ‘Introduction’, Ethnicity, Race, Religion, 1–20, at 16.

92 See Mason and Esler, ‘Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities’, 495, for the description of their ‘actual biases’, and 515, for the aim of simply understanding the past.