New Testament Writings as Diaspora Spaces

What difference might it make if the New Testament writings were considered to be migrant writings? Here, a brief consideration of theory about “diaspora spaces” might be helpful. Sociologist Avtar Brah proposes that diaspora space is that place

where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed; where the permitted and the prohibited perpetually interrogate; and where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptibly mingle even while these syncretic forms may be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition. [It is a space where] tradition is itself continually invented even as it may be hailed as originating from the mists of time. (Brah, 208, emphasis added)

This thick description reflects the struggle and promise of diaspora spaces, those spaces where migrants and host communities enter into the never-ending dance of self-definition. But what does it have to do with the New Testament? Simply this: If the New Testament writings are, indeed, migrant writings, these migrant rhetorics might be expected to create texts that are diaspora spaces, texts/spaces in which migrant writers and migrant communities struggle with the nature of faithfulness to their understanding of the new Christian movements while living in a majority-pagan world.

So, if the New Testament writings are migrant writings, one might expect to note the juxtaposition, contestation, proclamation, and/or disavowal of multiple subject positions (Brah, 208). Perhaps the quintessential example of such struggle is bound up in the person and history of Saul/Paul of Tarsus. He names himself a Jew, born of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised and a Pharisee (Phil. 3:5). However, he is also named a citizen of the pagan, primarily Greek-speaking Roman Empire, and claims that status by birth rather than through financial or military transaction (Acts 22:25–28). He is Saul, named after the first king of Judea, but without fanfare becomes Paul as he begins his gentile evangelism, no doubt because his Hebrew name is transliterated saulos in Greek (Acts 13:9), and saulos is an adjective that describes “the loose, wanton gait of courtesans or Bacchantes” (Liddell and Scott, s.v. “saulos”). This is a person who claims to himself and to his entire community, Jew and Greek, the promises of the particularly Jewish Abrahamic covenant (Gal. 3:1–9). This same person claims to become “all things to all people” for the sake of his Christian evangelism (1 Cor. 9:22).

Of course, Paul is not alone in this place of juxtaposition, of negotiation between cultures. Other characters carry two names, two identities: consider Tabitha/Dorcas and John/Mark (Acts 9; 12). Neither is Paul alone is standing between cultures and negotiating different subject positions: consider Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, who stands between Roman client privilege in Herod’s household and her support of Jesus—who would, no doubt, have been understood as a wandering Jewish prophet and social critic, and who was killed for sedition against the Roman Empire (Luke 8). However, not every New Testament figure makes the same choices that Paul makes when faced with this negotiation between cultures. The author of the Epistle of James, for instance, in his counsel to the “twelve tribes of the diaspora” (James 1:1), calls for withdrawal and self-preservation (1:27). Similarly, the seer on Patmos island, echoing the prophet’s jeremiad, calls his people to “come out” of Babylon (Rev. 18:4, cf. Jer. 51:45). In a different response to the same question of positionality with respect to one’s own culture and to “the world,” John’s Gospel suggests a third way, a way that is neither of the world nor of the home culture of the migrant outsiders. This way is signified by the Johannine phrase, “sons of God,” and represents the formation of an-other position in society (John 1).

In addition to matters of the subject’s positionality, New Testament writings also reveal the ongoing interrogation of permitted and prohibited, the mingling of accepted and transgressive, and ultimately the creation of syncretic forms that Brah describes as characteristics of diaspora space. Perhaps the most obvious New Testament example of the interrogation of the permitted and prohibited is the conflict regarding the inclusion of gentiles into the early churches without requiring of them the rite of circumcision. This early church-dividing conflict emerges in many of the undisputed Pauline writings, and differently in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul is usually the anticircumcision champion in his own writings; but the author of Luke-Acts makes Peter the standard-bearer after a theophany and an encounter with a gentile named Cornelius (Acts 10; 15). However, circumcision is not the only New Testament example of the interrogation and re-creation of traditions and forms. The “healing on the Sabbath” crisis seen in many of the Gospels is also part of this ongoing interrogation of what is and is not permitted to be done by faithful people during the Sabbath rest. Table fellowship is yet another example of the New Testament interrogation of permitted and prohibited: not merely who was admitted to the table (thus the Syrophoenician woman’s protest in Mark 7) but even more the question of whether meat was to be served (1 Corinthians 8; Revelation 2). After all, meat was almost always sacrificed to the gods, whom Christians and Jews saw as idols. Should, then, Christians eat meat at their symposia, or was this a tacit acceptance of idolatry (Taussig)? These discussions and debates about the interaction between the permitted and transgressive likely preceded the advent of Christianity among the Jewish migrants in Diaspora around the greater Mediterranean world. However, a new urgency in response to these questions would have been felt after the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. After this destruction of the ritual and political center of Judaism, all claimants to the traditions of Abraham and Moses were in ongoing debates regarding what it might mean to be Jewish in a post-temple diasporic reality. This was not specific to the Gospel writers—or even to Christian writers. The rabbis, too, were beginning to argue about the nature of faithfulness after the fall of the temple.

Circumcision, Sabbath observance, and table fellowship were some of the more blatant ways in which this kind of cultural interrogation between permitted and transgressive took place. Other questions also arose, even if they were more subtly addressed. Should slavery persist in the Christian community, and how could one argue for slavery and yet argue that all have one master (see Col. 3:22–23)? What is the appropriate role of women, particularly of wives, in the early church and how might that intersect with the wider society’s understanding of Christians (1 Cor. 7:12–13)? The answers are not straightforward. There are clear moves, particularly among the later Christian writings, to preserve kyriarchy, but the rationale for it is often a subtle rebuke of the dominating structures of the society, even if that rebuke does nothing to alleviate the distress of women, children, or slaves. In Colossians, for example, the command that slaves should obey their masters is followed by counsel to these slaves to perform their tasks “as for the Lord and not for your masters” and a promise that “the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong has been done” (3:23–25). When there is no rebuke, often there is a call for kyriarchal structuring of society as a mark of purity of the church, purity that makes the otherwise illicit church gathering unassailable by the pagan majority. Thus in 1 Timothy, slaves are told to obey their masters “so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed” (6:1).

Ultimately, as Brah posits, these ancient migrant writings represent the invention of a new tradition, a tradition we have come to call Christianity. For an example of this, one need look no further than to the name given to this ancient collection of writings: “New Testament.” New Testament is an appropriation of the language of the Christian meal found in 1 Cor. 11:25 and Matt. 26:28. While most contemporary translations present this as a “new covenant,” the Greek word diathēkē can be used either for “covenant” or “testament” (as in “last will and testament,” see Galatians 3). So, “New Testament” also means “new covenant,” and this in turn cannot be understood without reference to the “old covenant,” as the early Christians would have understood it.

For many of these migrant groups, the “old” or Abrahamic covenant between God and God’s people functioned not only as tradition but also as a fundamental identifier of the people (ethnos—the basis for the concept “ethnic group”). This identifier was traced primarily through the Abrahamic bloodline but could be extended to those who adhered to the identity markers of the covenant, among which were circumcision and the keeping of kashrut. So, when Paul and the Gospel writers, quoting the oral tradition that both trace to Jesus, speak of the table meal of the early church as a “new covenant” or “new testament,” they are not only relating an important story in the birth of the church but also reinventing tradition, reinventing, not exorcising it. To speak of these stories and letters as a “new diathēkē” is both to invent a new way of being a covenant people in the world and to appropriate to the church—made increasingly of people from outside of the Abrahamic bloodline and covenant practices—the ancient diathēkē of the Abrahamic era.

Paul and the author of Luke-Acts do not explicitly value the new covenant as superior to the old covenant. However, for the writer to the Hebrews, the “new covenant” or “new testament” clearly supersedes the older. As the author of Hebrews argues, “if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one” (Heb. 8:7). Yet even this assertion is premised on a reinterpretation of the received Scriptures of the people, the “Old Testament.” The author to the Hebrews would probably not be claiming to invent tradition any more than would Paul or the author of Luke-Acts. Instead, he would assert that this new covenant is the real, heavenly variety—and thus ultimately more ancient than the human copy. And yet he, like Paul and Luke-Acts, is engaging in that diaspora-space activity of inventing, and claiming ancient provenance for, traditions (Brah).

All of this briefly suggests that, as a collection of primarily migrant writings, the writings of the New Testament can be shown to be diaspora space. The examples above are intended to be representative rather than exhaustive, and self-evident rather than nuanced. The struggle with subject positionality, juxtaposition of the permitted and transgressive, and (re)invention of tradition all appear in some of the most important theological discussions in the collection: discussions around identity, around who and what these Christians will be. However, to say that the New Testament writings constitute a kind of literary diaspora space is not to claim some uniformity of migrant reaction to their host cultures or their home culture. Rather, in the next section, four such possible migrant reactions will be explored, both for their presence or absence within the New Testament canon of writings and for their implications for the migrants who hold them.