In the last post, I noted that Ignatius of Antioch developed the term Christianismos, which is commonly though not unproblematically translated as “Christianity.” It may also be surprising to readers to find out that the followers of Jesus were rarely referred to as “Christians” in the New Testament. In Paul’s letters, for instance, he addresses his reader as the “assembly” (ekklēsia) or as the holy ones (e.g., Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Philippians 1:1). Although I think that the Acts of the Apostles is one of the later writings in the New Testament, I suspect that its author was right that the followers of Jesus were also known as followers of the “way” or Nazoraeans (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:5, 14). Here are all the references to the term “Christian” in the NRSVUE translation of the New Testament:

• “So it was that for an entire year they met with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians.’” (Acts 11:26)
• “Agrippa said to Paul, ‘Are you so quickly persuading me to become a Christian?’” (Acts 26:28)
• “Yet if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name.” (1 Peter 4:16)

In my view, the most plausible explanation for the origins of this title is presented in David G. Horrell’s “The Label Χριστιανός: 1 Peter 4:16 and the Formation of Christian Identity” JBL 126.2 (2007): 361-381, which can be accessed on his academia.edu page. I agree with him that 1 Peter predates the book of Acts as the earliest textual witness to this label, though the later author of Acts may have had accurate information that it was first coined in Antioch even if it unlikely that this happened at such an early date, and that it was initially applied to the followers of Jesus as a label of derision before it was positively reclaimed by them. Notice that the readers of 1 Peter suffer for bearing this title and Paul is accused of trying to turn others into Christians when he is on trial. The title also suggests that some “Christians,” or at least the non-Jewish ones, could be distinguished from the wider Jewish community in the eyes of the political authorities. This had to be the case for the Emperor Nero to scapegoat Christians in Rome for causing a fire in the capital and target them for persecution (cf. Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Suetonius, Nero 16). The narrative of Acts ends before covering the persecution that occurred during Nero’s reign and gives the impression that onlookers had trouble distinguishing the Christ followers from other Jewish groups who were debating “questions about words and names and your own law,” “questions of their law,” or “certain points of disagreement with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus, who had died but whom Paul asserted to be alive” (cf. Acts 18:15; 23:29; 25:19 NRSVUE). In his biography of Claudius, Suetonius notes that some Jews were expelled from Rome due to disturbances instigated by Chrestus (Claudius 25). One possibility is that there were debates going on between Jews in Rome over whether or not Jesus was the Christos or “anointed one” (cf. Acts 18:2), which Suetonius misunderstood if he thought that the conflicts were caused by a local person named Chrestus and shows that he really had no idea what was at stake. Even in the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan about how to conduct trials of Christians in the early second century, Pliny had little idea about what the Christians actually believed and practiced apart from what he ascertained from two deaconesses who were tortured and he was mostly bothered by the Christians persisting in identifying themselves with this title and refusing to worship the gods or the emperor (Letters 10.96-97).

There has been a recent scholarly effort to re-describe certain New Testament books as originating “within Judaism” (see here, here, here, here, here), to stress that particular New Testament writers were not “Christians” (see here, here), or even to treat “Christianity” as a largely second century phenomenon in which select first-century writings such as specific letters of Paul or Gospel narratives were redeployed to serve new ends (see here, here). I agree that it is anachronistic to designate the earliest followers of Christ as “Christians,” let alone to imagine that they were adherents of a “Christian religion” that was separate from Judaism. Some Christian writers were trying to carve out distinctions between the Jewish and Christian communities by constructing sharper social boundaries between them in the Patristic era, but there is still plenty of evidence of continued social interactions and mutual influence on each other on the ground in the first few centuries. However, I do not think that we should go too far with this as there are also evident lines of continuity between certain followers of Jesus in the first century and in subsequent centuries based on their shared devotion to Jesus or their convictions about his sacrificial death, resurrection, and exaltation (as well as the development of pre-existent and incarnational Christologies in some quarters), however much certain second century Christians deserve credit for their contributions in systematizing Christian theology or developing ecclesiastical structures.

In the previous post, I mentioned that Second Temple Judaism denotes the period of time from the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple in 516 BCE to its destruction in 70 CE. Jacob Neusner famously preferred to speak about plural “Judaisms” because “[t]he recognitions of the diversity of Judaisms, on the ground, prepares us for the social realities embodied in conflicting holy books” and “there have been through time, diverse groups, each with its worldview and way of life, all regarding themselves as ‘Israel'” (Judaism When Christianity Began: A Survey of Belief and Practice [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002], 6). In contrast to Neusner and Jonathan Z. Smith (cf. “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Theory and Practice [ed. William Scott Green; Chicago: Scholars Press, 1980], 1-25), E. P. Sanders has defended his use of the phrase “common Judaism” even while recognizing the diversity between various Jewish groups and writings. In a chapter on the origins of the phrase, he writes that “one could speak of Judaism – more precisely, Palestinian Judaism – in a way that was fair, generally accurate, sufficiently encompassing, and nontrivial. The agreement depends on two figures: Abraham and Moses. God chose Abraham and his descendants, and later he gave them the law, obedience to which was required of the elect” (Comparing Judaism and Christianity: Common Judaism, Paul, and the Inner and Outer in the Study of Religion [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016], 34). There likely was widespread agreement among Second Temple Palestinian Jews on the importance placed on the exclusive cultic worship of Yahweh, the belief in election, and the practice of Torah, without assuming that there was complete unanimity on even these points in an essentialist kind of way (e.g., the Jewish Hellenizers opposed by the authors of 1 and 2 Maccabees), nor downplaying the significant differences in how these beliefs and practices were lived out on the ground.

The term that has been translated as “Judaism,” however, has its own history. It is derived from the Greek Ioudaismos, which was coined in opposition to hellēnismos. The latter term is often translated as “Hellenism” and denotes the spread of the language and customs of the Greeks (i.e. Hellēnes). The following five examples represent the earliest uses of the term Ioudaismos, which has been rendered as “Judaism” or “the Jewish faith” in the translations from the NRSVUE below:

• “… the appearances that came from heaven to those who fought bravely for Judaism, so that though few in number they seized the whole land and pursued the barbarian hordes” (2 Maccabees 2:21).
• “Meanwhile Judas, who was also called Maccabeus, and his companions secretly entered the villages and summoned their kindred and enlisted those who had continued in the Jewish faith, and so they gathered about six thousand.” (2 Maccabees 8:1).
• “For before the days of separation, he had been accused of Judaism, and he had most zealously risked body and life for Judaism” (2 Maccabees 14:38).
• “when, I say, his decrees were despised by the people, he himself tried through torture to compel everyone in the nation to renounce Judaism by eating defiling foods” (4 Maccabees 4:26)
• “You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors” (Galatians 1:13-14).

One could add the references to Ioudaismos in the letters of Ignatius, the early second-century bishop of Antioch, among the earliest usages of the term (the following translations are from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers in English [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006]). He reminds the Magnesians that “if we continue to live in accordance with Judaism, we admit that we have not received grace” and that “it is utterly absurd to profess Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity, in which every tongue believed and was brought together to God” (Magn. 8.1; 10.3). He exhorts the Philippians that “if anyone expounds Judaism to you, do not listen to him” because “it is better to hear about Christianity from a man who is circumcised than about Judaism from one who is not” in his letters to them (Phil. 6:1). Yet on his blog, Philip A. Harland translates Ioudaismos more specifically as “Judaizing” and its opposite (in Ignatius’s mind) Christianismos as “Christianizing” (see here, here).

There is a debate about translating Ioudaismos. If the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids was sparked when the Jewish people were forcibly compelled to adopt Hellenistic customs (i.e. Hellenization), the term Ioudaismos may have denoted those who promoted “Judaization” at the risk of their own lives. Their efforts were directed at their fellow Jews, especially those who lapsed under pressure, though the verb “to Judaize” tends to denote non-Jews adopting Jewish customs. Alternatively, Ioudaismos may have been a shorthand for a traditional Jewish way of life as conceived by the writer of 2 and 4 Maccabees, which was defended to the death against external threats. Paul too was likely referring to his zealous defence of what he understood to be his ancestral customs that he, for some reason, perceived as threatened by the new Jesus movement. It is anachronistic to imagine that Paul “converted” from one “religion” called “Judaism” to another that was not yet titled “Christianity,” for he likely conceptualized his own experience as his calling to be a prophet to the nations (e.g., Galatians 1:15-16; Jeremiah 1:5), but it is fair to say that his understanding of his own Jewish traditions and religious praxis shifted in light of his confession that Jesus was the crucified and risen Messiah and that the eschatological age had been inaugurated. Ignatius of Antioch wanted to construct sharper boundaries between those who adopted “Jewish” or “Christian” social practices, but there is plenty of evidence of continued interaction between Jews and Christians in the first few centuries and no clear-cut “parting of the ways” at that point in time. In the end, I will continue to refer to groups such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essences, and Christ assemblies as all existing under the larger umbrella of “Second Temple Judaism” and think that this category is a convenient generalization, but I accept that the term Ioudaismos originally had a more specific meaning.

Here is a further bibliography:

• Arbiol, Carlos Gil. “Ioudaismos and Ioudaizō in Paul and the Galatian Controversy: An Examination of Supposed Positions” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44.2 (2021).
• Boyarin, Daniel. Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019). See also Shaul Magid’s review on H-Judaic and “the Marginalia Forum on Daniel Boyarin’s Judaism.”
• Bremmer, Jan A. “Ioudaismos, Christianismos, and the Parting of the Ways” in Jews and Christians: Parting Ways in the First Few Centuries CE? (ed. Jens Schröter; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 57-87.
• Mason, Steve. “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38.4-5 (2007): 457-512.
• Sänger, Dieter. “Ἰουδαïσμος – ἰουδαΐζειν – ἰουδαïκῶς Sprachliche und semantische Überlegungen im Blick auf Gal 1,13 f. und 2,14” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 108.1 (2017).

Since I discussed how Jewish writers used the plural goyim in Hebrew or ethnē in Greek to refer to the rest of the “nations” in the last post, it seems fitting to look at why they were designated as Ioudaioi (“Jews”) in this post. English translators often alternate between translating Ioudaios as “Jew” or “Judaean” depending on whether it is regarded as designating an ethnoreligious group or a resident of Judaea or, more particularly, southern Judaea rather than northern Galilee. The Ioudaioi were descendants of the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes of the united kingdom of Israel before the nation was divided between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah according to the biblical metanarrative. Many citizens of Judah were deported to Babylon in 586 BCE, but the exiles were permitted to return to their homeland during the Persian period even if some remained in the diaspora. The period of time from the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple in 516 BCE to its destruction at the hands of the Romans in 70 CE is referred to as the era of Second Temple Judaism.

Translating hoi Ioudaioi in John’s Gospel is a more debatable matter as they are often set in opposition to Jesus and his disciples in it (e.g., John 5:16, 18; 7:1; 10:31, 33; 13:33; 19:7), even though its author recognizes that Jesus himself was a Ioudaios (4:9, 22) as were his disciples and that other Ioudaioi believed in him (e.g., 8:31; 11:45; 12:11). Should it be translated as “the Jews” in general or at least the ones that interacted with Jesus, “the Judaeans” from the south, or “the Jewish religious leaders.” It may depend on the literary context of each verse. Back in 2016 I reviewed Sonya Shetty Cronin’s Raymond Brown, ‘The Jews,’ and the Gospel of John: From Apologia to Apology, a monograph that examines the evolving views of one of the pre-eminent Johannine commentators of the twentieth century on this question and how he came to realize the troubling legacy that the polemical descriptions of the Ioudaioi had in the reception of this Gospel in light of the history of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. The Enoch Seminar recently put on a conference focusing on the debate between Adele Reinhartz and Wally Cirafesi as to whether John’s Gospel can be regarded as having originated “within Judaism.”

Another question is why English uses two words to translate one Greek word. When I was an MA student, Shaye J. D. Cohen’s important monograph The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Hellenistic Culture and Society 31; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) was assigned in one of my graduate seminars. In his chapter “From Ethnos to Ethno-religion,” he outlines a shift from defining a Ioudaios in terms of ancestry and geography as I noted in the first paragraph above to defining it in terms of a shared cultural and religious identity that could be acquired through religious conversion. Thus, scholars can translate the term as “Jew” since the time of the Hasmonean period, at the same time when proselytes began to be included into the fold. On the other hand, two articles came out in the year that I commenced my Master’s degree, namely Steve Mason’s “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History” JSJ 38.4-5 (2007): 457-512 and John H. Elliott’s “Jesus the Israelite was neither a ‘Jew’ nor a “Christian: On Correcting Misleading Nomenclature” JSHJ 5.2 (2007): 119-154. Part of Mason’s argument is that Cohen’s distinction between ethnicity and religion is anachronistic in antiquity and, like other ethnic groups (e.g., Egyptians), the Ioudaioi would have been associated with their homeland and can be consistently translated as “Judaeans”. Indeed, some ancient thinkers assumed that the distinct character of an ethnic people was shaped by the environment and climate in which they lived, a viewpoint that is expressed in the work Airs, Waters, Places and may be an example of an ancient form of racism (cf. Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004]). Elliott contends that outsiders identified the Ioudaioi by their place of origin, but that Israelite was the preferred label of insiders. More recently, Jason Staples’ The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) has exposed the problematic scholarship on which this latter thesis that Ioudaios was an “outsider” term is based, but also argues that the terms “Jews” and “Israelites” are not simply synonymous in Second Temple Jewish writings as the Samaritans could be identified as Israelites and “Israel” could evoke the eschatological hope for the restoration of the twelve tribes.

I adopted Mason’s translation in my Master’s thesis and, in an early article (cf. “The True Covenant People: Ethnic Reasoning in the Epistle of Barnabas” SR 40.1 [2011], 93n.2), I wrote in a footnote that “the term Ioudaios is better rendered ‘‘Judaean’’ rather than ‘‘Jew’’ because ethnicity and religion were intertwined in antiquity and, like other ethnic groups, Judaeans would have been identified with their place of origin (cf. Against Apion 1.179).” Returning to the issue in my chapter “Christian Claims on the Inheritance of Israel: Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew as a Case Study” in The Bible, Zionism and Palestine: The Bible’s Role in Conflict and Liberation in Israel-Palestine (ed. M. Sandford; Dunedin: Relegere Academic Press, 2016) and listening more to the critics of Mason’s proposal, I acknowledged that I had reconsidered the issue. I wrote that “[a] major drawback [to this translation] is that it overestimates the importance of land at the expense of other criteria [for defining a Ioudaios], especially the dominant role of religious praxis” and “[a] further liability to the translation ‘Judaean’ is that it may downplay the significant continuities between first-century Ἰουδαῖοι [Ioudaioi] and modern Jews” (172). As for Elliott’s thesis, I wrote that “I am not persuaded that the use of Ἰουδαῖος [Ioudaios] in the LXX, Josephus, Philo, the New Testament, and inscriptional and epigraphic evidence does not signal that it was also an insider term” (172). For example, the Samaritan woman addresses Jesus as a Ioudaios in John 4:9, but he positively identifies with the term in 4:22. Thus, while granting that ethnicity and religion were intertwined in the ancient world, I refer to Second Temple Ioudaioi as “Jews” in all subsequent publications. I agree with Staples that a Second Temple Jewish figure like Paul was hoping for the restoration of the twelve tribes that constitute “all Israel” (Romans 11:26), but disagree with his article “What Do the Nations Have to Do with ‘All Israel’? A Fresh Look at Romans 11:25-26” JBL 130.2 (2011): 370-91 that Paul identified non-Jewish Christ followers with the regathered northern tribes of Israel and would maintain that Paul kept the distinction between Israel and the nations even “in Christ.” For further discussion online, check out “Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiography in the Translation of Ancient Texts” at the Marginalia website, which features posts from a number of the major participants in this debate.

Many English translations of Galatians 2:15 distinguish the Jews from the “Gentile sinners.” Alternatively, many English translations of 1 Corinthians 5:1 condemn immoral behaviour that would even shock “pagans.” However, the same Greek word is translated in both case. It is the plural form of the Greek noun ethnos. By the way, this is the etymology of the modern term “ethnicity” as the Greek word was used to designate people groups (e.g., “nation”), but it was also used for other non-ethnic collective groups. Israel could be called an ethnos (e.g., Luke 7:5; 23:2; John 11:48, 50, 51, 52; 18:35; Acts 10:22; 24:2, 10, 17; 26:4; 28:19) and some Christ followers began to speak about their own communities as an ethnos or laos (“people”) of God too (e.g., Romans 9:25-26; 10:19; 1 Peter 2:9-10; cf. my post on the verses in 1 Peter). However, the plural ethnē was generally used by ancient Jewish writers writing in Greek to refer to the non-Jewish “nations.” The nations are referred to as the plural goyim in the Hebrew Bible. English translators often refer to one of the members of the nations as a “Gentile,” which is derived from the Latin gentīlis. It is an othering term, just as the Greeks used the term “barbarians” originally to insult their Persian enemies before it was used more broadly for anyone who did not embrace Hellenistic language and culture. It subsumes all of the diverse non-Jewish ethnic groups under a single label. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and other people groups did not refer to themselves as the “nations.” In some antique Jewish literature in this period, the “nations” are accused of practicing “idolatry” and “sexual immorality” (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon 14:12-25; Romans 1:18-32). It is not until Justin Martyr that we have a non-Jewish Christian in the mid-second century CE positively identifying as a “Gentile” (cf. Terence L. Donaldson, “‘We Gentiles’: Ethnicity and Identity in Justin Martyr” EC 4.2 [2013]: 216-241). There is even a book arguing that Paul played a foundational role in developing the Jewish conception of the Gentile Other (cf. Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018]) and a good discussion about the merits of this thesis can be found online at “Why Goy: An AJR [Ancient Jew Review] Forum.” Finally, I tell my students to avoid translating ethnē as “pagans” since this is an anachronistic term as it was first used by fourth-century Christians to pejoratively refer to “rural” people who continued to worship their ancestral deities rather than become Christians. I recognize that the term “Pagan” has been rehabilitated as a positive self-identifier, just as the title “Christian” was once a outsider term that was applied to followers of Jesus before it was positively claimed by them (cf. Acts 11:26; 26:28; 1 Peter 4:16).

The Greek word έκκλησία (ekklēsia) is commonly translated as “church.” You may be familiar with the adjective “ecclesiastical” or the study of “ecclesiology.” However, this can be misleading for lay Christian readers who naturally think about churches as buildings. For some Christians, “the Church” functions in the same way that “Christianity” does as an abstract category. It is better, though, to translate the Greek term as an assembly. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, it can be used to denote the assembly of Israel (e.g., Deuteronomy 31:30 LXX). It was used in ancient Athens when the free citizens (dēmos) of the city-state (polis) assembled together in a public gathering. Synagogues were gatherings or assemblies of Jewish people as well as non-Jewish proselytes and God-fearers who met together for prayer, scriptural exposition, meals, and other communal activities. Voluntary associations in the Graeco-Roman world could also be designated as assemblies. We can imagine the small assemblies of Christ followers meeting in houses (e.g., Acts 12:12) or in other public spaces. For recent studies on the subject, check out Ralph Korner’s monograph The Origin and Meaning of Ekklēsia in the Early Jesus Movement (Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 98; Leiden: Brill, 2017; cf. the summary on his academia.edu page) and open-access articles “Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term: Some Implications for Paul’s Socio-Religious Location” and “Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term: A Response to Erich Gruen” for the Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting (see also Erich S. Gruen’s “Synagogues and Voluntary Associations as Institutional Models” and Richard S. Ascough’s “Methodological Reflections on Synagogues and Christ Groups as ‘Associations’: A Response to Erich Gruen” in the same journal).

In the last few posts, I have been looking at various categories that scholars have developed in studying the Christology of a given ancient Christian text. I have argued that we can use categories such as posessionist Christologies, incarnational Christologies, or docetic Christologies for texts that depict Jesus as a non-pre-existent human who was possessed by a divine being at some point in his life, as a pre-existent divine being who became fully human in the incarnation, or as a divine being who never took on a human nature but only “appeared” to be human respectively. Of course, the Christologies in the texts are more complex than these abstractions that only highlight one particular feature, but these categories at least enable scholars to classify and compare different representations of Jesus. The next issue that I want to engage is the common translations of key terms that are usually taken for granted. Sometimes these translations are perfectly adequate, but other times they may import anachronistic concepts back into the texts that do not reflect how the terms were understood in the original contexts or that distort the data in other ways. I plan to look at some key terms in the next few posts.

In my previous post about “docetism,” I mentioned how this category has been used, rightly or wrongly, to describe the Christologies of a variety of figures or texts. Although one source that I footnoted was Udo Schnelle’s Antidocetic Christology in the Gospel of John: An Investigation of the Place of the Fourth Gospel in the Johannine School (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), I did not discuss whether the Johannine literature was written to combat docetism. The texts could be plausibly construed in this fashion. It might account for the proclamation that the Word became “flesh” in the prologue of the Gospel (1:14), the emphasis on the visible “signs” that Jesus performed, the indication that Jesus really died when water and blood poured out of his side (19:34), and the notice that the risen Jesus showed his wounds to Thomas (20:27). If there was some kind of “Johannine community” or network of congregations that were known to the “elder” or “presbyter” (2 John 1:1; 3 John 1:1), there was also likely a schism that had happened among them which led some members to abandon them (cf. 1 John 2:19) and to be condemned as “false prophets” and “antichrists.” The warnings against the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the “flesh” (1 John 4:2; 2 John 1:7) could be understood in an anti-docetic way. The enigmatic verse in 1 John 5:6, which insists that Jesus did not come by water alone but by water and blood, could also be taken as referring to Jesus’s full humanity or physical death.

Yet I suspect that docetism, which I define as the denial that the divine Jesus ever had a corporeal body, is a later development not yet on the horizon when the Gospel and letters of John were written. I accept the traditional reading of John 1:14 as referring to the incarnation rather than the moment when the Spirit possessed the human Jesus at his baptism (see my post here), but the evangelist may be more concerned to defend Jesus’s pre-existence and divinity than the fact that Jesus was a human being who recently walked on earth in the prologue. At one level the water and blood are to be understood literally in John 19:34, but more importantly are to be understood metaphorically as signifying Jesus’s atoning death (cf. 1 John 1:7; 2:2) and the cleansing work of the Spirit (cf. John 3:5; 4:10, 14; 7:38-39), and the wound in Jesus’s side serves as a reminder of what his death accomplished. In my “General Epistles” class where I get students to write a paper on the different theories about the “Johannine secessionists” polemicized against in the letters, I direct them to the excellent overview of the different interpretive options in Daniel R. Streett’s They Went Out from Us: The Identity of the Opponents in First John (BZNW 177; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). In the history of research, the opponents have been identified as “Gnostics,” “Docetists,” “followers of Cerinthus,” interpreters of John’s Gospel who overemphasized Jesus’s role in mediating the Spirit and underemphasized Jesus’s ministry and vicarious suffering in the flesh, apostates who denied Jesus’s messianic identity (see especially 1 John 2:22), or the rhetorical constructs created by an author constructing boundaries between insiders and outsiders. At this point, I find Streett’s defence of the “apostate” view pretty convincing, because this view is consistent with the reconstruction that the Johannine believers had some conflict with other members of a local synagogue over their Christological claims (e.g., John 9:22; 16:2) and 1 John 5:6 does not have to be read polemically if the point is that there are at least three witnesses that testify to Jesus’s identity (i.e. his baptism, his atoning death, and the Spirit). The last option is also possible if, in the aftermath of some members abandoning the community, the elder wanted to build firmer boundaries between insiders and outsiders on the basis of particular confessional statements.

Do you agree with me that the Gospel and letters of John were not written to refute docetism or would you still find anti-docetic polemic in these texts?

Docetism is often used as a shorthand for the Christological perspective that Jesus was not really a human being, but only “appeared” to be so. The Christians who embraced this view in the Patristic period may have had trouble with conceiving how a divine being could become fully human or how his divine nature could be mixed with a human nature, so they argued for a “monophysite” view of Jesus’s nature where it was solely divine. Other scholars apply docetism as a category to other views about Jesus, such as the notion that Jesus was a human being who was temporarily possessed by a divine being at his baptism, a view that was advocated by figures such as Cerinthus as I noted in a previous post. I think, however, that such broader definitions of docetism are mistaken. It makes the best sense to me to distinguish between incarnational Christologies in which a pre-existent divine being became incarnate as a human being, possessionist Christologies in which Jesus was a non-pre-existent human being who was possessed by a divine being at some point in time, and docetic Christologies in which Jesus was a divine being who never actually became human. In my article “Classifying Cerinthus’s Christology” Journal of Early Christian History 9.1 (2019): 30-48, I wrote this about Docetism (pp. 34-35):

“Docetism has come under similar scrutiny. The category is derived from the verb δοκέω (‘seem, appear’), which was employed by Ignatius of Antioch when he rebuked those who minimised Jesus’s suffering as a matter of mere semblance (Smyrn. 2.1; Tral. 10.1), and Serapion of Antioch suspected that the Gospel of Peter originated among the δοκηταί [dokētai] (cf. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12.6). Following in Peter Weigandt’s footstep,[1] some scholars equate docetism with a monophysite Christology where Jesus had an undivided pneumatic nature. Other researchers widen the definition to include the views that Jesus was concealed in a phantasmal body, that the human Jesus should be distinguished from the divine Christ, or that the sufferings of Jesus were illusory or another unfortunate person was crucified in his stead. Hence, this category has been applied as a heuristic device to lump together diverse thinkers like Cerinthus, Basilides, Marcion, Saturnilus, Cerdon, Valentinus, and Mani.[2] Pamela Kinlaw has outlined new models of human/divine interaction such as metamorphosis and inspiration (i.e. possession) that may be less anachronistic in an ancient Mediterranean context, but, in her judgement, her models fit comfortably under the umbrella of docetism.[3] Her reasoning is that metamorphosis and possession exist on a continuum, for the former entails a change in external form and the latter a change in substance.[4] The problem with such overly broad definitions is that noteworthy differences between texts may be glossed over or erased in their indiscriminate application. An epiphany of a deity or spirit is not analogous to the inspiration of a human prophet or shaman, nor is the latter subject’s physical substance altered when under the state of inspiration. I prefer Weigandt’s approach of abstracting the denial of Jesus’s corporeal existence as the key marker of difference and will restrict docetism to examples of a direct theophany, or to a polymorphism in which a spiritual being appears in multiple guises simultaneously,[5] for neither of these options entail an ontological change in Jesus’s divine essence.”

Footnotes

[1] Peter Weigandt, “Der Doketismus im Urchristentum und in der theologischen Entwicklung des zweiten Jahrhunderts” (Doctoral diss., Heidelberg, 1961); cf. Norbert Brox, “‘Doketismus’ – eine Problemanzeige,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 95 (1984): 301-314; Udo Schnelle, Antidocetic Christology in the Gospel of John: An Investigation of the Place of the Fourth Gospel in the Johannine School, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 63-70; Christoph Markschies, “Kerinth: Wer war er und was lehrte er?,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 41 (1998), 72.

[2] Michael Slusser, “Docetism: A Historical Definition,” Second Century 1, no. 3 (1981): 163-172; Simone Pétrement, A Separate God: The Origins and Teaching of Gnosticism, trans. Carol Harrison (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 145-152; Martin Hengel, Die johanneische Frage. Ein Lösungsversuch mit einem Beitrag zur Apokalypse von Jörg Frey (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993),178n.78; Georg Strecker, The Johannine Letters, trans. Linda M. Maloney; Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 69-76; Pamela E. Kinlaw, The Christ Is Jesus: Metamorphosis, Possession, and Johannine Christology (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 75-79, 93.

[3] Kinlaw, The Christ Is Jesus, 79-93

[4] Kinlaw, The Christ Is Jesus, 12.

[5] See the discussion of theophanies and polymorphism in Kinlaw, The Christ Is Jesus, 15-40.

I had a discussion with Michael Bird and Jeremiah Coogan on whether “adoptionism” is a useful category for describing a particular Christological view about how Jesus “became” the Son of God on Bird’s Nazareth to Nicea podcast. I did the podcast on my work laptop, so Michael probably had to do some work editing the quality and sound on my end, and I thank him for the invitation to chat on this topic. I hope that you enjoy the podcast and you can check out my previous post on adoptionism for some nuancing of my thoughts on the subject.