Diaspora in the New Testament

Diaspora in critical studies of the New Testament is evolving as a varied scholarly conversation. Some scholars talk about diaspora in relation to the history of Jewish dispersion from Judea, be it at the time of Babylon or beyond. Others talk about diaspora in the writings of the Christian Testament, exploring the presence and far-reaching significance of Hellenistic Judaism. In this case, to study diaspora is to fundamentally talk about Judaism as the chief symbolic world and foundational identity operative in the writings of the New Testament. Other scholars talk about diaspora at the level of semantics, focusing on the language and symbolic worlds created by deploying Greek terminology such as the noun, diaspora, or the verb, diaspeirō. Still other scholars explore the meaning of diaspora in the Christian Testament from the perspective of the experience of displacement, disenfranchisement, and difference. In these conversations, scholars seek to distill the ways diaspora is storied as a life experience of not just individuals, but kinship groups and peoples with multiple land attachments, including their homeland and host lands. It is a story of dispersed peoples, migrants, strangers, and foreigners who are forced to navigate matters of travel, borders, boundaries, accommodation, resistance, double consciousness, and empire. In its Greek noun form, diaspora means the condition of living as a scattered or dispersed collective group spread widely across a region or regions. Yet diaspora has grown to mean more than simply a state of being spread across a vast territory or having to live “elsewhere” while connected and committed to an original homeland. Diaspora also conveys the experience of managing multiple land and kinship group identities. It is a state or discourse of a people that engages matters related to space, place, time, culture, etiquette, and experiences of being a collective group in lands beyond the lands of their kinspeople or origin.