Читать книгу Paul Among the Gentiles: A "Radical" Reading of Romans - Jacob P. B. Mortensen - Страница 23

Joshua Garroway approaches the problem of the Gentiles in much the same way as Caroline Johnson Hodge. In his 2008 dissertation for Yale University, Garroway explains that he uses post-colonial theorists’ new perspectives on identity construction.1 He uses the construct of hybridity as articulated by theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha (1949–) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to better understand texts that describe ambiguous Jewish identities in antiquity. Garroway analyses several examples of proselytes and Idumeans, groups long thought to have inhabited the border between Jew and Gentile in the ancient world. And from this background, he turns to Paul’s ‘Christians’. The hybrid space Garroway identifies in Paul’s construction of Gentile identities concerns the observation that baptized Gentiles become Jews in the fullest sense of the word, while remaining Gentiles. The baptized Gentiles become Jews, but not really Jews. So Garroway constructs the neologism ‘Gentile-Jews’ in order to define the hybridized identity.

The intention of Garroway’s neologism is to present an alternative to a certain kind of binary thinking. He wants to challenge the idea of ‘pure’ groups; he wants to challenge the idea that cultures or categories of identity – whether religious, ethnic, national, or otherwise – are neatly bounded. There is no such thing as an essence, and the world – prior to being described – is not naturally divided into classes, cultures, or religions. In other words, there is no such thing as a real Jew or a real Gentile. There is only a discursive production of culture and identity, and language is what creates distinctions among things, just as power is what shapes the role and importance of language in any discursive production. Consequently, the neologism ‘Gentile-Jew’ is created to point out that any binary opposition between Jew and Gentile is first linguistic, but also part of a power play in which the ‘Gentile-Jews’ conceptually refuse to be either one thing or the other, but something else, which contests the terms and territories of both. By juxtaposing the terms of the dichotomy, Garroway identifies the hybrid space that defies classification.