{"id":2884,"date":"2012-08-07T01:49:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T05:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasonstaples.com\/blog\/?p=2884"},"modified":"2021-06-15T22:23:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T02:23:27","slug":"maurice-casey-on-anti-judaism-and-anti-semitism-in-kittels-theological-dictionary-of-the-new-testament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonstaples.com\/bible\/maurice-casey-on-anti-judaism-and-anti-semitism-in-kittels-theological-dictionary-of-the-new-testament\/","title":{"rendered":"Maurice Casey on Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament"},"content":{"rendered":"
I’ve been steadily plugging away at the first portion of my dissertation (the one having to do with early Jewish understandings of Israel and Israelite restoration eschatology) this summer, and I’ve found it necessary to spend a good bit of time parsing the distinctions between the key terms \u1f38\u03bf\u03c5\u03b4\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 (Jews\/Judaeans\/Judahites), Israel, and Hebrew in early Jewish usage. One of the most widely cited interpretations of the relationship between the \u1f38\u03bf\u03c5\u03b4\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 and Israel(ite) is derived from Karl Kuhn’s article on the terms in Kittel’s TWNT<\/em> (1938; English in 1965), which asserted that “Israel” was the preferred “insider” designation for the people while \u1f38\u03bf\u03c5\u03b4\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 was the “outsider” term, sometimes carrying a disparaging nuance. In working through the evidence, I have concluded that there is no evidence of such an insider\/outsider distinction (though there is a distinction between the terms), nor is there any hint of a “disparaging” sense to the term \u1f38\u03bf\u03c5\u03b4\u03b1\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2, but rather Kuhn simply read the world of prewar Germany into the ancient evidence. In working through my section on this material, showing where anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish assumptions have in fact underlay the understanding of these terms in a great deal of New Testament scholarship since Kuhn\/Kittel (both of whom were Nazi party members), I came across an excellent (and very fun) article: Maurice Casey, “Some Anti-Semitic Assumptions in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament<\/em>,” NovT<\/em> 41.3 (1999): 280\u201391.<\/p>\n
Not only does Casey anticipate many of the observations I had come to in my own research, his article is written so sharply and with so much clear displeasure at the continued uncritical use of the\u00a0TWNT\/TDNT<\/em> as to be an unusually fun read for a top-tier academic article. Casey’s opening made it clear that he was going to be on fire throughout:<\/a><\/p>\n