106 olE JAKoB FIlTvEDT the agenda of biblical scholars and historians of early church history. They persuasively demonstrate the centrality of ethnic language and concepts of kinship for the construction of identity within the early Jesus movement. I endorse their objection to depicting this as “fictive kinship” 16, since that threatens to undermine the perceived reality of the kinship ties in question. It is certainly also true that every ancient and modern follower of Jesus would have to combine and negotiate his or her identity as being “in Christ” with other aspects of his or her identity, including ethnicity. I thus fully agree with the following statement: “Galatians 3,28 does not eliminate the various measures of identity — Ioudaios, Greek, slave, free, male, female — which characterize those who are ‘in Christ,’ but it places these in a hierar- chical order with the unitary good on the top” 17. Moreover, Buell and Hodge are surely correct in maintaining that notions of ethnicity are “social constructs”. Everyone should concede, and I will take for granted as a shared premise in the following, that all statements about ethnicity involve a considerable amount of interpretation, and that notions of ethnicity are steeped in ideological presuppositions. This should alert us to the rhetorical uses of ethnic language, and it should make us pause before we take claims about the fixity of ethnicity as factual statements. We must assume that ancient claims to physical kinship could often have been ideologically constructed 18. Finally, I agree that it is problematic to treat “Christianity” as “universal” since it is allegedly a “non-ethnic” phenomenon, as opposed to “Judaism” which is “particular” because it is based on ethnicity. Barclay, among others, has convincingly demonstrated that the picture is more complicated 19. However, there are some issues that demand critical discussion. III. Mere Metaphor? Buell’s and Hodge’s argument relies heavily on the assumption that the concept of ethnicity should be derived more or less directly from the use of ethnic terminology. However, as Buell and Hodge 16 As is done, for instance, by BARClAY, “Anomaly or Apostate”, 104. 17 HoDGE, If Sons, 130-131. 18 SECHREST, A Former Jew, 37-41, argues that notions of common ancestry and shared history are always mythic and fictive, and that postulations about shared blood are illusory. 19 J.M.G. BARClAY, “universalism and Particularism. Twin Components of Both Judaism and Early Christianity”, A Vision for the Church. Studies in Honour of J.P.M. Sweet (eds. M. BoCKMuEHl – M.B. THoMPSoN) (Edinburgh 1997) 207-224.