Ethnicity, Religion and the Meaning of Ioudaios in Ancient ‘Judaism’

This article, the third in a three-part series, examines the use of the modern categories of ethnicity and religion in scholarship on the meaning of Ioudaios, and evaluates the debate about its translation into English as ‘Jew’ or ‘Judaean’. Recent contributions by S. Cohen, P. Esler, D. Buell, S. Mason and S. Schwartz are described in detail, with particular attention devoted to their definitions of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’, their methodology and their use of primary evidence. The article defends a polythetic concept of ethnicity as the basic category within which Ioudaios should be understood, but argues that a religious meaning was emerging in ancient ‘Judaism’; it also contends that contemporary concerns favour the translation ‘Jew’ over ‘Judaean’. Parts one and two in the series, which appeared in CBR 9.1 and 10.2, examined the relationship between Ioudaios and related group labels, and explored changing terminology in twentieth-century scholarship on Ioudaios.