Faithfulness and the interpretation of identity in the New Testament

Abstract

Who were the addressees of the Letter to the Hebrews in the Christian New Testament? This is the question Matthew Marohl attempts to answer in his publication, in the Princeton Theological Monograph Series, titled Faithfulness and the purpose of Hebrews. Marohl teaches the New Testament scripture at the Augusta College. In this book, he uses a sociological tool, namely the categories of social identity theory, to assist him in finding the answer. He argues that the addressees arranged the world into two groups: ‘us’ and ‘them.’ They (the addressees) understood their group, the ‘us,’ to be the ‘faithful’ ones. They understood ‘them’ (a symbolic out-group of ‘all others’) to be the ‘unfaithful’ ones. Faithfulness, then, is the primary identity descriptor for the addressees and plays an essential role throughout the text.