The Greek Word Christians Have Been Getting Wrong for Centuries

And why fixing it is harder than it sounds

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So — “How should the term Ἰουδαῖος (Jew/Jews) be translated?”

The above question was asked of a Jewish New Testament scholar who was doing a live stream online. During the Q/A time, live streams like this normally feature scholars giving rapid responses to audience questions.

It was the kind of question that could not be dealt with quickly, given its historical weight. The question cut to the core of the kind of work that the Jewish New Testament scholar had been doing for their whole life.

Jewish scholars who teach at Christian seminaries are often tasked with having to introduce future ministers to the issues with the way that Jews are discussed in the New Testament.

Those scholars also have researched Christian sermons in order to give those future ministers practical examples of the kind of statements about first century Judaism that invite problematic or inaccurate conclusions.

Jewish New Testament scholars also have to think about the best terminology to describe the complex relationship between the ethnic, religious, and geographic aspects of what it means to be Jewish.

I can only imagine that this scholar was thinking of all of the recent scholarly debates on this topic when they sighed, knowing that they would have to give a brief response to a problem that has led to almost two millennia of intense debate.

This question of translation, therefore, is very important not only to Jewish scholars, but also to Christians who wish to use terminology that does not further perpetuate anti-Jewish stereotypes.

Introducing the Debate

The term Ἰουδαῖος and its plural Ἰουδαῖοι have traditionally been translated “Jew/Jews”. This translation has recently been at the center of much scholarly debate because the term could be used as an ethnic, regional, or religious marker.

Given these possibilities, the discussion has moved on to consider whether the word should be translated as “Jew” or “Judean” in its wider New Testament context.

The most straightforward meaning of the term is “Judean”, signifying that it is a term that refers to someone who resides in the Roman province of Judea. In the minds of some scholars, that settles the matter entirely.

As you might have guessed at this point in the article, things are never quite as simple as they seem in these debates. One has to look not only at the literal sense of the word, but also at how it is used.

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I See Judeans Everywhere

One of the complicating factors that stokes the flames of this debate is the fact that those who live quite a distance away from the province of Judea (in other parts of the Roman empire and even outside of it) can still be called Ἰουδαῖοι.

Indeed, any of the typical identity markers in the New Testament, such as adherence to Torah or circumcision, for example, could lead to one being referred to as a Ἰουδαῖος. This is why many have chosen to translate this as “Jew”.

However, this may be a conflation of a modern idea of what it means to be a part of a religion, i.e., everyone who does these things is a part of this particular shared ancient Jewish religious category.

The text could also note that to act this way is to be a “Judean”, as in following the customs of one who lives in Judea. There could be people who followed those customs throughout the Roman Empire.

In this way, “Judean” can be a confusing translation for modern readers because it sounds like a regional distinction, but these “Judeans” may not have any ties to the province, which is so important in the New Testament.

But modern readers will have to adjust how they approach this issue if you choose to translate this term as anything other than “Jew,” because it will be a pretty big change.

This issue raises many questions about what it means to be Jewish and whether that can be boiled down to some shared customs and practices. It also explores whether it grants priority to those with geographical proximity to Jerusalem.

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Anti-Jewish Ethical Concerns

The debate also centers on some ethical concerns that have arisen from translating the term Ἰουδαῖος as “Jew”. The way in which anti-Jewish individuals have used the term may bring about cause for concern.

For example, some of the most problematic New Testament texts are from the gospel of John, where Ἰουδαῖοι are said to be children of the devil (c.f. John 8:44, for example). Given the prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiment in our world today, a translator could choose not to render that term “Jews”.

This is a legitimate reason not to translate the term as it has traditionally been translated. However, this also begs a pertinent question about ancient identities that is once again difficult to answer.

Are Judeans truly the only ones who are a part of a shared cultural heritage and tradition? It is pretty hard to figure out where the boundary marker would be drawn without some of the traditions.

These ethical concerns would make it seem like eliminating the word “Jew/Jews” from the New Testament altogether. Yet, this term did refer to a people group at the very least, if not members of a religious community (even though that idea is anachronistic).

Given important recent conversations about Judeophobia in the New Testament, it is hard to imagine that translating “Judean” wouldn’t muddy the waters in the discussion beyond what is necessary.

Those who wish to make the conversation about the New Testament’s role in anti-Jewish rhetoric today go away might be thrilled to see that the translation “Judean” has let them off the hook for all the problematic verses.

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Does Religion Exist in the Ancient World?

All right, this is an uncomfortable conversation for me to have, seeing as I am studying ancient religions. But recent scholarly debate has called into question how helpful a term like religion is when approaching the ancient world.

Can you spot “religion” when you see it? For those who think that I am being deliberately unclear here, let me give you an example of something from the Second Temple Judaism that could serve as illustrative.

The late Second Temple period includes several tombs in Alexandria and Judea that were traditionally labeled as “Jewish tombs”. These tombs feature inscriptions in both Greek and Hebrew.

If you try to figure out which religion the person followed from a modern perspective, however, that would be a bit of an issue. Were they a Jewish person who also acknowledged the Greek pantheon, as some scholars have suggested?

Or were they a Greek person who had a particular affinity for the culture and practices of the Jews and decided to include some Hebrew on their tombstone? How would you be able to tell such a thing?

For those tombs found in the late first century, there were scholars who suggested that the presence of both Greek and Hebrew on an epitaph must have meant that the person was actually a Christian.

You can see how quickly discussions like this can become complicated. Should these tombs be relabeled somehow to acknowledge that the word “Jewish” in “Jewish tomb” is not to be used in the sense of a modern religion?

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What is a good solution?

I don’t know. The solution that many translators have settled on is to use “Jew/Jews” unless the term clearly refers to the location where the person comes from, at which point they use the term “Judean”.

Other scholars have advocated for just using “Judean” everywhere and avoiding the conversation about the New Testament’s anti-Jewish language.

One solution that occurs to me is that they could add a footnote to the occurrences in the New Testament and note the ambiguity that is present in the term itself. That could be a helpful way of pointing towards the debate.

There are some cases in which it is not helpful to translate a term because translation sometimes introduces certainty to a term that was originally ambiguous. This may be an example of such a term.

Of course, if you didn’t translate a given word, then people reading a translation would definitely complain about this. But it would also discourage the conflation of an occurrence of a term in the New Testament with the English word that translates it.

One important thing this discussion brings up is for Christians to acknowledge and think through the anti-Jewish verses that are present in the New Testament. Denying the problem is not something that is helpful.

As I have written about in my recent article on the Pharisees, the New Testament presents a particular perspective on the Jewish leaders and one that is accepted uncritically in many churches.

This, as well as some readings in the Protestant tradition and a lack of research, has led to a picture where a liberative Jesus confronts the legalistic and problematic Pharisees in order to free the common people from the yoke of the law.

That framework is something that needs to be abandoned. It doesn’t do justice to the complexities of first-century Judea, and it certainly does not lead to good characterization of Jewish people today.

The New Testament, as an anthology of texts, has a number of different opinions on the topic of whether the Torah should be observed and which Jewish traditions should or should not be practiced.

This is not something that a translation can solve, but even adding a footnote to some of the discussions in the New Testament (such as those that we mentioned in the gospel of John) would be a good start in terms of getting people to think differently about what the text is saying.

Conclusion

This translation debate gets into a lot of interesting assumptions, including how we think that the idea of who is a “Jew” and who is not a “Jew” is something that can be said to be reasonably clear.

How we think about the things that identify people as Jewish and whether that identity can be deemed ethnic, religious, locative, or otherwise, is instructive in how we will insist that these terms can be translated.

It also speaks to the difficulty of translating the New Testament and the impossibility of imposing a unifying framework upon the text that allows for us to show how a term is used in the text.

Those texts that use Ἰουδαῖος negatively create a unique issue because they force the translator to look at the term beyond just its sense as a neutral descriptor (as a first-century author usually uses it).

On the other hand, the idea that a New Testament author, such as the author who wrote the gospel of John, could use the term pejoratively could show that they lived in a time when it was acceptable to say such things.

The anti-Jewish nature of some of the writings of the early church fathers is definitely something to navigate for contemporary Christians and is an unfortunate attempt to distance oneself from a tradition that should have been viewed as formative.

Given all of these complex issues, it is easy to see how these discussions could change the way that we think about the New Testament and even what we are willing to say about these words and ancient religion in general.