The whole country was designated “Judea” since Judean laws governed the area, except for the Hellenistic cities that had their own (Syro-Phoenician/Hellenistic) city law. In being a resident of the wider region of Judea called Galilee, Jesus can be classified in broader regional terms as Judean. Ethnically, he was of a long line of Judahites that could be traced back to David: the earliest evidence we have on Jesus is from Paul, who twice stresses that he was “born from the seed of David” (Romans 1:3) and from “the root of Jesse” of Isaiah 11:10 (Romans 15:12). The fact that as an adult he lived in Galilee does not take away his tribal affiliation, even though Ernst Renan, for example, notoriously argued in his book Vie de Jésus (1863 English translation The Life of Jesus in 1935) that Jesus was fundamentally a Galilean and noted that this was a region of ethnic mixing, so that Jesus’ s “blood” would be difficult to determine. Jesus was additionally a Judahite, in that he was of the tribe of Judah. This is quite different to someone like the apostle Paul, who was originally a Jew living in the Diaspora, in the city of Tarsus. Jesus was both a Jew, in terms of his religious identity (involving law), and also a Judean, in terms of his location: he lived in the land of Judea, which was a land that comprised regions stretching from Idumaea in the south to Galilee in the north and included the old territorial homeland of the Judahites - Judah/Judea - in its center. We can also talk about Judahites as opposed to other tribal groups, in even narrower ethnic terms. We can usefully talk about Diasporan Jews and Judean Jews.
We ourselves can rightly refer to it as a religion, even though in the ancient world the categories of thinking were not the same as ours: Judaism was a kind of philosophy governing life that also involved cultic aspects for its adherents. I am therefore going to resist an either-or approach, and consider Judaism as a philosophical entity - which I have done at length (in Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria ) - that requires adherence to an interpretation of the law of Moses, one to which people can adhere (following a lifestyle) by conversion, and thereby be defined as Jews.
The distinction between a “Jew” and a “Judean” lies here, in that the latter, to me, refers to someone who not only follows the law of the Judeans, but lives in Judea, and not in the Diaspora. People could be included within the Judean ethnic group ( ethnos) by marriage and/or by following Jewish/Judean law.īut Ioudaioi came to refer to much more than this ethnic category, since Judaism travelled far and wide, and there were many converts to Judaism as a kind of sacred philosophy that should be followed, in accordance with the laws of Moses. The Greek word Ioudaios is a rendering of Hebrew Yehudi, or Aramaic Yehuda`i, a term essentially defining the ethnic group descended from the patriarch Judah, who gave his name to their tribal territory, Judah, which was then expanded through conquest in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE and designated in Latin as “Judea.” The Ioudaioi are indeed Judeans. Strictly speaking, “Jew,” in English, is just a contraction (i.e., “Ju”) of the term that in western Europe became dispersed into other tongues via Latin: Judeus.
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It has multiple senses and we have to make a call on how to translate this word. The trouble is that the Greek word Ioudaios is not just one thing or another. Steve Mason, another participant in this forum, suggests the translation of “Judeans” for the Greek term Ioudaioi in Josephus’ s writings. Malina has some support in this translation from a leading scholar of the ancient historian Josephus. Malina would prefer to translate the Greek word Ioudaios, as found in the New Testament, as “Judean” in order to break an association with rabbinic Judaism while preserving the sense that it refers to Judean “customs and behaviors.” Bruce Malina - one of the most respected scholars of the social world of the New Testament – recently posted a provocative paper online: “Was Jesus a Jew? Was Aristotle a Greek-American? Translating Ioudaios.” He argued that it is inappropriate to translate the Greek word Ioudaios by the English word “Jew.” Calling Jesus “a Jew,” Malina says, is inherently misleading because it anachronistically defines Jesus according to a religion based on a rabbinic model of the Babylonian Talmud of the 5th-6th centuries.