Legitimation in the Letter to the Hebrews: The Construction and Maintenance of a Symbolic Universe

Abstract

Going Outside the Camp: The Sociological Function of the Levitical Critique in the Epistle to the Hebrews, by Richard W. Johnson. JSNTSup 209. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Pp. 177. $95.00. Legitimation in the Letter to the Hebrews: The Construction and Maintenance of a Symbolic Universe, by Iutisone Salevao. JSNTSup 219. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 448. $145.00. A relatively small number of book-length studies have taken an avowedly sociological approach to Hebrews in the few decades since critical scholars began adopting social-scientific methods and models for studying the NT. Two new monographs attempt to fill this gap. One employs Mary Douglas's group-grid model to analyze the author's critique of the Levitical system, while the other draws on the insights of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in the field of sociology of knowledge. Both works throw into relief the promise as well as the pitfalls attending the appropriation of the social sciences to shed light on the NT and the world that produced it. Richard W. Johnson seeks to elucidate the sociological function of the Levitical critique in Heb 7:1-10:18, to flesh out the type of implied or projected by the critique, and to note the differences between this ideal and the first-century Hellenistic Judaism from which the author and audience emerged. He aligns himself with the mode of inquiry exemplified by Douglas, whose paradigm relating the character of a given to the cosmology of that focuses special attention on the function of ritual and attempts to understand why some societies deemphasize or reject ritualism. This feature of the group-grid model laid out in chapter one makes it particularly well suited for studying the cultic section and eliciting indirect information on the larger purpose and cultural background of the letter. Notwithstanding the limitations of any study relying on literary sources and the degree to which Johnson compounds the problem by looking almost exclusively at Philo and Josephus (with brief glances at Paul, Luke-Acts, and rabbinic literature), the description in ch. 2 of Hellenistic Judaism in the first century as a strong-group, strong-grid within the larger Greco-Roman world should meet with few objections. The clear boundaries marking out Jews as a distinct subculture over against Gentiles (strong group) can be seen in the writings of pagans familiar with Judaism such as Tacitus, Plutarch, and Diodorus Siculus. Defining characteristics include aniconic monotheism, devotion to the temple, and above all adherence to the laws of Torah, such as observance of the Sabbath, feasts, dietary laws, circumcision, and endogamy. Temple and Torah likewise function as grid markers by means of which interactions between Jew and Jew are regulated. Johnson's thumbnail sketch of a stratified Jewish in this period will strike few observers as overdrawn. By contrast, the implicitly described ideal society found in Hebrews and analyzed in ch. 3 is weaker in terms of both group and grid than first-century Judaism. Johnson classifies Hebrews as a weak group because the author's use of boundary imagery, while pervasive, is almost always in reference to boundaries that are transgressed. Such emphatic boundary-crossing (e.g., 4:11; 6:19-20; 9:12, 24; 13:11-14) implies that the community is open to interaction with outsiders (p. 75). It is undeniable that the author makes extensive use of boundary crossing language, and it is highly probably that the implied is open to outsiders. The latter, however, does not follow inexorably from the former because the boundary markers in Hebrews identified by Johnson are not really of the sort that separate outsider from insider as do those separating Jew from Gentile detailed by Johnson in ch. 2. Simply, from the prevalence of such generic boundary language it does not follow that the implied by Hebrews lacks a strong sense of group identity. …