Identity and imagined realities.

Accepting differences in identities as a principle of social organization has had a rough road to travel through human history. The charge of cultural relativism is the most recent slur against the values of a society composed of distinct communities centered around personal and shared differences. What remains unaccounted for in a society bonded by supposed commonality is the loose pieces that don't fit the imagined overall unity. In fact, unity of race, gender, religion, nationality are all largely imagined realities rather than factual. The question arises, by what process is such a unity imagined? And, what characterizes the societies that so imagine themselves into existence?

Societies that imagine corporate identity, as nations or religions often do, pay more attention to the whole and give less regard to the individuals who form the whole. The imagined unity takes control of the whole, reducing it to an identity that "we" possess and "they" don't. In reality, such identity typically reflects the control mechanism that cements the corporate body into a virtual monolith. The trouble is that real differences fall by the wayside. The call for law and order in such a system often reflects only a conceit of the dominant.

We witness this conceit in religious bodies today that devise constructs for a church, synagogue, or mosque that insiders claim are divinely ordained and thus unchangeable by human agency. Such claims often fly in the face even of earlier realities within the religious body but are conveniently forgotten in the interest of a preferred order that befits those in control.

Articles in the current issue of BTB exemplify the processes whereby social groups in the Bible have imagined their identities and thereby established functional but limited norms for legitimacy.

Barbara Sivertsen's study, New Testament Genealogies and the Families of Mary and Joseph uses established anthropological practices in examining the distinct genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. The commanding social importance of establishing a definable lineage is here balanced by the fact that the resulting canonized lineages have puzzled scholars through the centuries.

David A. Reed, in "Saving Judas"--A Social Scientific Approach to Judas's Suicide in Matthew 27: 3-10, combines the gospel account of Judas' death by hanging with a set of contemporaneous reflections on such a death as expiatory. The questions this study raises may include a further examination of how honor and shame govern social ethics within particular social groups.

Mario I. Aguilar explores the social significance of "tribute to Caesar" in The Archaeology of Memory and the Issue of Colonialism: Mimesis and the Controversial Tribute to Caesar in Matthew 12:13-17. Aguilar reflects on memory as a "device that catalyzes emotions, senses, participation, pain, joy, togetherness and ultimately community," whereby "groups of people construct the present and indeed the future in relation to their memories of the past, with peaceful or violent outcomes."

Dietmar Neufeld lends insights to the social meanings of clothing and body ornamentation, in Under the Cover of Clothing: Scripted Clothing Performances in the Apocalypse of John. Neufeld builds on the recognition of the body as a social construct that "permits individuals and communities to invest its various parts with significance in alignment with their social systems and values."

Variety in the identities of individuals and groups remains the reality within human existence. The systems that derive from various forms of human identity can be more or less restrictive in their demands upon individuals and groups within their reach. The commanding reality is that the range of human differences does not fit neatly into any particular system, despite claims to the contrary. Biblical theologians must be more aware than others that attempts to reduce such differences to a canonical uniformity are simply not supported within the Bible, which conspicuously reflects variety of social identities more than unity of norms.