Ethnicity and inclusion : religion, race, and whiteness in constructions of Jewish and Christian identities / David G. Horrell. [print]

A persistent structural dichotomy: Jewish ethnic particularism and Christian inclusivism -- Ethnicity, race, and ancient Jewish and Christian identities: themes in recent research -- Ethnicity, race, and religion in social-scientific perspective -- Shared descent: ancestry, kinship, marriage, and family -- A common way of life: culture, practice, and the socialization of children -- Homeland: territory and symbolic constructions of space -- becoming a people: self-consciousness and ethnicization -- Mission and conversion: joining the people -- Implicit whiteness and Christian superiority: the epistemological challenge.

Some of today's problematic ideologies of racial and religious difference can be traced back to constructions of the relationship between Judaism and early Christianity. New Testament studies, which developed contemporaneously with Europe's colonial expansion and racial ideologies, is, David Horrell argues, therefore an important site at which to probe critically these ideological constructions and their contemporary implications. In Ethnicity and Inclusion, Horrell explores the ways in which "ethnic" (and "religious") characteristics feature in key Jewish and early Christian texts, challenging the widely accepted dichotomy between a Judaism that is ethnically defined and a Christianity that is open and inclusive. Then, through an engagement with whiteness studies, he offers a critique of the implicit whiteness and Christianness that continue to dominate New Testament studies today, arguing that a diversity of embodied perspectives is epistemologically necessary.

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