3 - ‘You who were called the uncircumcision by the circumcision’: Jews, Gentiles and covenantal ethnocentrism (Ephesians 2.11–13)

Summary

Introduction

In our epistle, the Gentiles are ‘others’ with a special position. The question for us is: what was it about them that prompted the author of this epistle to show such immense interest in them? Do the author's statements, which say much about the Gentiles, tell us also about the Jews, including some of their basic convictions? How should we then read the statements about the Gentiles or Israel? What questions should we ask?

This chapter will examine how Jews regarded the Gentiles in terms of their covenant status and indeed, also, how they perceived themselves. My thesis is that the estrangement between Jew and Gentile can be explained best by the hypothesis that the Gentiles were perceived by the Jews through the ‘grid’ of covenantal ethnocentrism in which identification between the Jewish ethnic group and the Jews' religious identity is far too close (thus covenantal ethnocentricity is understood as the functioning of a certain stream of Judaism as a ‘closed-ethnic religion’); and this has made the Gentile inclusion impossible in a straightforward manner unless the notion of (God's) Israel is drastically redefined (see below my discussion of the ‘holy ones’ in ch. 5, section 5.2). I suggest that ‘covenantal ethnocentrism’ may therefore serve as a descriptive term for Ephesians' understanding of the functioning of a kind of Judaism.