New Test. Stud. (), , pp. –. © The Author(s), This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0028688517000145 Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities: Grounds for a Distinction STEVE MASON Department of Jewish, Christian and Islamic Origins / Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat 38, 9712 GK Groningen, The Netherlands. Email:
[email protected] PHILIP F. ESLER School of Liberal and Performing Arts, University of Gloucestershire, Francis Close Hall Campus, Swindon Road, Cheltenham GL50 4AZ, United Kingdom. Email:
[email protected] In NTS . (July ) David Horrell argued that certain passages in Corinthians and Peter showed ‘ethnicising’ traits among the early Christians. He set this result against an alleged trend in scholarship that would distinguish and disparage a closed ethnic Judaism in relation to a new spirit- ual-universal Christianity. The present authors’ work was proffered as represen- tative of this trend, even though no evidence was cited for such a connection and their work moves in a very different direction. Leaving aside Horrell’s interpret- ation of the New Testament passages for reasons of space, this article takes up the larger question of Judaean and Christ-movement identities by reconsidering the position of Ioudaioi and Christ-followers in the early Roman Empire. Using different but convergent (social-scientific and historical-philological) methods, we find that ethnos-language was everywhere applied to the Judaeans, that this reflected normalcy and exchange with the world, and that Judaeans thus met the criteria of an ethnic group.