Pagan/Gentile/Jew
But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of Mine, to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; Acts 9:15 NASB
Gentiles – Footnotes matter. So often we find information in those tiny print words at the bottom of the page that makes all the difference in the larger text. Paula Fredriksen’s footnote on page 175 of Nanos and Zetterholm’s collection of articles on Paul has this to say:
“‘Pagan,’ a fourth-century Christian neologism, is an anachronistic word choice to translate éthnē. I use it nonetheless to communicate the connectedness of ethnicity with divinity: non-Jews, like Jews, were born into obligations to their gods. The translation ‘gentile’ confusingly effaces that connection.”[1]
Implication: our English translations of the Bible do not help us understand the world of the first century, and in particular, the world that Paul was called to address. We think all non-believers were pagans. Fredriksen helps us see that “pagan” is a loaded term, invented by the Church hundreds of years after the Messiah in order to portray all non-Jewish non-Christians as godless. But this wasn’t the case in the first century. The word “pagan” doesn’t belong in the biblical text, even if it might find a home in Christian theology.
Furthermore, as Fredriksen notes, non-Jews (that is, Gentiles) were, like Jews, automatically connected to their gods. Just like Jews, they were born believers. We might think of this as similar to the vast majority of Catholics today. If you were born in a certain geography to a certain ethnicity, you were Catholic, period. The same, of course, is true of Islam. Birth determines belief. It was no different in Paul’s world. This is what Heschel calls “drift.”
Now that you know the “pagan” has no place in the Bible, what should we think about “Gentile”? Fredriksen also helps us see that “gentile” is merely an ethnic distinction. It is not a religious term. Gentiles were just those people who were not born Jews. They might still worship the God of Israel. They might convert. But most often they worshiped the gods of their birth, and the family, city, and “state” expected them to do so. The situation is much the same today. If a woman born into Islam in Indonesia converts to Christianity, she will be excommunicated from her family, her village, and her society. Her official documents will be challenged. She will be an outsider in her own land. This is precisely the experience of those who “converted” under Paul’s ministry. They were a serious threat to the status-quo, and as such, were viewed as traitors. But they were never non-believers. They just moved from one god to another. They knew what the world of belief was like because it had always been part of their existence. What changed was the way they practiced that belief. Paul’s commission was to people who believed. He did not have to convince them about the divine. He only needed to convince them that Israel’s god was the only god. Apologetics did not begin with Aquinas.
Topical Index: Gentile, pagan, éthnē, Jew, believer, convert, Acts 9:15
[1] Paula Fredriksen, “The Question of Worship: Gods, Pagans, and the Redemption of Israel,” in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Fortress Press, 2015), p. 175, fn. 1.
