This project began as a tangent in my doctoral research on the Gospel of Mark
but quickly grew to occupy most of my research focus. While looking for a way
to think about Jewishness and the texts now contained in the New Testament
that did not essentialize Jewishness or embed Christianity’s distinctiveness in its
methodology, I came across Andreas Wimmers’s Ethnic Boundary Making Paradigm: Institutions, Power, Networks (2013), which outlines a sociological model
that explains changes in the form and function of ethnicity through the interplay of macro-level phenomena and micro-level behaviors. This model promised
a more rigorous conceptualization, but also required more time than I scheduled.
The result was a 2019 dissertation titled “The Gospel of Mark within Judaism” that
included three chapters on Jewishness and one on Mark. The current volume is a
restructured and largely rewritten version of the three dissertation chapters that
introduce the methodology and use it to think about Jewishness during the Hasmonean and Early Roman periods (now chapters 1, 3, and 4). I have also added a
new chapter on the Seleucid period (chapter 2).