Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives: On Use and Abuse of Sacred Scripture by Cain Hope Felder;

Author:Cain Hope Felder; [Felder, Cain Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006080 RELIGION / Biblical Criticism & Interpretation / General, REL006630 RELIGION / Biblical Studies / History & Culture, SOC070000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations
Publisher: National Book Network

Secularization in the New Testament

Ambiguities with regard to race in the New Testament do not appear within the context of what I have defined as sacralization. Accordingly, I have tried to show that the New Testament disapproves of an ethnically focused idea of corporate election (or “Israel according to the flesh”). In fact, the New Testament offers no grand genealogies designed to sacralize the myth of any inherent and divinely sanctioned superiority of Greeks and Romans in any manner comparable to the Table of Nations found in Genesis 10. Further, many Palestinian Jews of Jesus’s time could be easily classified as Afro-Asiatics, despite the fact that European artists and American mass media have routinely depicted such persons as Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, Matthew, Mark, and Luke report that an African helped Jesus carry his cross (Matt. 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26; contra John 19:17).

Consequently, if one is to explore the subject of racialist tendencies in the New Testament narratives, one must turn to a different phenomenon—namely, the process of secularization. The question now becomes, How did the expanding church, in its attempt to survive without the temporary protection it derived by being confused with Judaism, begin to succumb to the dominant symbols and ideologies of the Greco-Roman world? We will want to see how, in this development, the universalism of the New Testament circumstantially diminishes as Athens and Rome become substituted for Jerusalem of the Old Testament, as, in effect, the new centers for God’s redemptive activity.

The conceptualization of the world by early Christian authors of New Testament times scarcely included Sub-Saharan Africa and did not at all include the Americas or the Far East. These early Christian writers referred to Spain as “the limits of the West” (1 Clem. 5:7; Rom. 15:28); they envisioned the perimeters of the world as the outer reaches of the Roman Empire.1 For New Testament authors, Roman sociopolitical realities as well as the language and culture of Hellenism often arbitrated the ways in which God was seen as acting in Jesus Christ. Just as Jerusalem in the Old Testament had come to represent the preeminent holy city of the God of Israel (Zion), New Testament authors attached a preeminent status to Rome, the capital city of the world in which an increasingly Gentile church was emerging.2

It is no coincidence that Mark, probably the earliest composer of the extant passion narratives, goes to such great lengths to show that the confession of the Roman centurion (only here the Latinism kentyrion [centurio] in the Synoptic passages) brings his whole gospel narrative to its climax.3 For his part, Luke expends considerable effort to specify the positive qualities of his various centurions (hekatontarches).4 There is even a sense in which their official titles symbolize Rome as the capital of the Gentile world, for their incipient acts of faith or confessions, according to Luke, find their dénouement in the Acts 28 portrait of Paul, who proclaims relentlessly the kerygma in Rome. The immediate significance of this New Testament tendency to focus

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