Abstract
This chapter introduces the central problem of the book regarding the politics of race/ethnicity in Matthew’s passion narrative. Jesus is crucified under an ethnoracial title as ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων (“King of the Judeans”). Despite the explicit use of terminology, previous scholarship has understood the title curiously in non-ethnoracial ways. How and why are dominant readings of Jesus’ crucifixion in Matthew’s passion narrative rendered in terms that are effectively non-ethnoracial? The argument of the book works on two levels—exegetical and methodological—with the primary goal of critiquing the dominant narrative and presenting an alternative reading of Matthew’s passion narrative.
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- 1.
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. The most common English Bible translation of ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων is “King of the Jews” (KJV, RSV, NIV, NASB, ESV, ASV, NKJV, HCSB, NLT). A rationale for rendering the title as “King of the Judeans” will be developed in Chap. 5.
- 2.
The titulus inscribed on the cross is different in all four Gospels. However, the following highlights ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων as a core element all four accounts share in common:
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Οὗτός ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων (Matt 27:37);
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Ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων (Mark 15:26);
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Ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων οὗτος (Luke 23:38);
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Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων (John 19:19).
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- 3.
For a helpful overview of ideological criticism, see: Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2000).
- 4.
My approach to race/ethnicity is influenced by Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, Racism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), and Randall C. Bailey, Tat-Siong B. Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., They Were All Together in One Place: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). Race/ethnicity is often stigmatized morally and politically. Hence, one of the advantages of a theoretical (rather than an empirical) approach to race/ethnicity is its conceptual clarity and utility. See Chaps. 3 and 4 for further discussion of a discursive and a dialectical approach to race/ethnicity, respectively.
- 5.
Although the biological basis of race has been debunked, the damaging effects of this modern myth are ongoing. See: Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69–85.
- 6.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). For a performative approach to race/ethnicity, see: Louis F. Mirón and Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Race as a Kind of Speech Act,” Cultural Studies 5 (49): 85–107. For uses of speech act theory in biblical interpretation, see: J. Eugene Botha, “Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation,” Neotestamentica 41.2 (2007): 274–94; Richard S. Briggs, Words in Action: Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation: Toward a Hermeneutic of Self-involvement (Edinburgh: New York, 2001).
- 7.
For further discussion, see: Steve Fenton, Ethnicity: Key Concepts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 51–72; Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 137–176.
- 8.
Denise K. Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xi.
- 9.
Calling attention to white identity as a racialized identity is a central tenet of whiteness studies. Woody Doane, “Rethinking Whiteness Studies,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, eds. Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 3–18; here, 3: “What is new and unique about ‘whiteness studies’ is that it reverses the traditional focus of research on race relations by concentrating attention upon the socially constructed nature of white identity and the impact of whiteness upon intergroup relations. In contrast to the usual practice of studying the ‘problem’ of ‘minority groups,’ the ‘whiteness studies’ paradigm makes problematic the identity and practices of the dominant group.” See further: Michael K. Brown, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 10.
For representative examples of minority biblical scholarship, see: Margaret P. Aymer, Eric D. Barreto, Gay L. Byron, Jin Young Choi, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Francisco Lozada, Emerson Powery, Love Sechrest, Fernando Segovia, Mitzi Smith, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Sze-kar Wan, Demetrius Williams.
- 11.
For representative examples of dominant biblical scholarship, see: Cynthia M. Baker, Denise Buell, Greg Carey, Cavan W. Concannon, Philip Esler, Caroline Johnson Hodge, David G. Horrell, Shawn Kelley, Joseph Marchal, Jeremy Punt, Anders Runesson, Jeffrey Siker.
- 12.
For race/ethnicity in Matthean scholarship, see: Dennis C. Duling, “Ethnicity, Ethnocentrism and the Matthean ethnos,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 35 (2005): 125–43; John Riches, Conflicting Mythologies: Identity Formation in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); Anders Runesson “Judging Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew: Between ‘Othering’ and Inclusion” in Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel and Early Christianity: Studies in Memory of Graham N. Stanton, eds. Daniel M. Gurtner, Joel Willitts, and Richard A. Burridge (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 133–151; Love L. Sechrest, “Enemies, Romans, Pigs, and Dogs: Loving the Other in the Gospel of Matthew,” Ex Auditu 31 (2015): 71–105; David Sim “Christianity and Ethnicity in the Gospel of Matthew” in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark G. Brett, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 171–196.
- 13.
For an overview of the complex intersection between race/ethnicity and biblical interpretation, see: Katherine M. Hockey and David G. Horrell, eds., Ethnicity, Race, Religion. Identities and Ideologies in Early Jewish and Christian Texts, and in Modern Biblical Interpretation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2018). For an overview of race, ethnicity, and religion in the US more broadly, see: Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
- 14.
Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007), 6: “All deviance in societies dominated by white people is measured as distance from selected white norms of a given society. Those norms are usually class-based, gender-biased and ageist, they may or may not be secular or Christian to varying degrees, but the key point is that these norms dictate the criteria by which the behaviour of people who are not racialised as white are understood and evaluated.”
- 15.
Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, “Toward Minority Biblical Criticism: Framework, Contours, Dynamics,” in They Were All Together in One Place: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 3–46.
- 16.
Jeffrey Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus: Case Studies in the ‘Black Christ,’ the ‘Mestizo Christ,’ and White Critique,” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007): 26–53.
- 17.
Bailey, Liew, and Segovia, “Toward Minority Biblical Criticism,” 13, n. 7.
- 18.
The scope of the problem, as a number of scholars have pointed out, is enormous:
Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (London: Routledge, 2002), 3–4: “For most modern Europeans, racism was a morally and empirically justifiable way of thinking. This was true for thinkers in most academic disciplines, including biblical scholarship, for most of modern history. Repulsion in the face of overt racism is a relatively recent phenomenon. If this assessment is true, it raises a number of interesting and disturbing questions … Behind these questions lurks another question specifically directed to biblical scholarship: if racism is embedded deeply within the culture and political practice of modern European countries (as slavery, imperial conquests, and the Shoah imply), and if it is also embedded in the thought of the great intellectuals of the modern era (as I hope to show), is it not reasonable to assume that racist thought has also found its way into the disciple of biblical scholarship? After all, modern biblical scholarship did not emerge in a vacuum.”
Jeffrey Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 27: “The history of Western Christian theology (often articulated in art) has seen the ascendancy of Jesus as a white Christ with a resultant de facto white God endorsing white power claims over other racial/ethnic groups.”
Stephen D. Moore, God’s Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 110: “Although its pedestal was erected during the Renaissance and the ‘Age of Exploration,’ it was not until the nineteenth century that the image of Jesus as not just fair-skinned but blond and blue-eyed as well was fully in place, towering over the world.”
Halvor Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-Century Historical Jesus (London: I.B. Taurus, 2012), 146–7: “In that sense, Renan’s picture of Jesus as non-racial is characteristic of later representations of Jesus. Mass media, especially films, provide good illustrations of cultural presupposition, and the many popular Jesus movies from the 1920s to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) are pertinent examples. Jesus’ opponents, the mob in scenes from the Passion, and even his disciples are played by men from the Middle Easy or North Africa, but Jesus himself is always played by a white European or North American. It seems that in order to present the story of Jesus as universal, to lift him out of his historical setting in a Middle Eastern context, he has to be made in a white man.”
Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 28: “Images of Jesus were crucial to racism in establishing the primary criterion of whiteness: Christ himself. It is not the Caucasian male who was the model of the authentic white man, but rather an idealized ‘White Man,’ namely Christ. For the European male to define himself as a ‘white man’ he had to fantasize himself as Christ, a Christ who had to be imaged not as Jew but as Aryan … Yet by converting to Christianity, blacks did not become white, any more than Jews became Aryans. The ultimate impossibility of Christianizing nonwhites highlighted the problem of race at the heart of Christian theology. Missionary efforts recapitulated Christianity’s fundamental supercessionist flaw: the effort to Christianize Judaism was a theological miscegenation.”
Julian Kunnie, “Jesus in Black Theology: The ancient ancestor visits,” in The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology, eds. Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 94–110; here 94: “For too long, Judeo-Christianity has been viewed as a Western Christian tradition mediated by the entrepreneurial agents of colonial missionaries from Europe for the ‘enlightenment’ of the vast majority of the world’s people, most of whom are overwhelmingly of color. Since Christianity as we know it in most places in the world today, with the exception of places such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, India, and other places in close proximity to the confluence of the African-Asian world, has generally been a Western European transmission with its concomitants of colonization and slavery, much of the world has ineluctably been indoctrinated with the hegemonic ideological imposition that Jesus of Nazareth was a ‘white man’ so depicted in the plethora of books, paintings, pictures, and stained-glass windows around the world.”
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12: “This is the modern problem of imagining the human being in racial terms, and within these terms positioning whiteness as supreme. As a central ideological component in constructing the modern world as we have come to know it, the racial imagination arose inside of, nurtured itself on, and even camouflaged itself within the discourse of theology. That is, it articulated itself in a Christian theological idiom.”
Karen Teel, “What Jesus wouldn’t do: A white theologian engages whiteness,” in Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do?, ed. George Yancy, (London: Routledge, 2012), 19–36; here 20: “Whiteness has developed through a long and tortuous history…a history that some scholars contend has its root in an ancient and fundamental perversion of Christianity’s Jewish origins. There can be no doubt that it began at least as long ago as the European Christians who, even before thinking of themselves as ‘white,’ created the U.S. system of race-based slavery. ‘Whiteness’ is a properly and peculiarly white Christian theological problem that demands a white theological response.”
Tim Wise: “The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god” (CNN interview, December 16, 2013, n.p. [cited March 28, 2014] Online: http://www.timwise.org/2013/12/tim-wise-on-cnn-1216-discussing-white-jesussanta-imagery-and-racist-iconography/).
Teju Cole: “From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex … The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening” (“The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” March 21, 2012, n.p. [cited March 31, 2014] Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/).
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Park, W. (2019). Introduction. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in Matthew's Passion Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02378-2_1
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