Posted on: October 10th, 2017 Elvis or the Beatles? Paul’s Cosmic Anthropology
For years I have said, in various contexts and to various audiences, that for the New Testament writers, there are only two kinds of humans: Jews and Gentiles. This, for them (being good first century Jews), is how humanity is carved up. (Yes, one can “slice & dice” it at a finer level: in addition to Jew & Gentile, you also have other political demographic types such as Barbarian & Scythians, etc.—see Col 3:11.)
If this sounds to you like a scene from Quinton Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman’s character interviews John Travolta’s character with questions like “Are you an Elvis person or a Beatles person?” (although, technically, she never asks him this question), then you are onto something.
Nowhere is this division of the human race into two fundamental types, Jew and Gentile (or sometimes stated as “Jew and Greek”) more apparent than in Gal 2:15-16:
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
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