How to cite this article:M'bwangi, F.M., 2020, 'Paul and identity construction in early Christianity and the Roman Empire', HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 76(4), a5652.

This article was prompted by my fervour to find out how modern and ancient cultures influence Christian conception and the practice of salvation. To address this issue, I decided to do a comparative study of salvation in modern time, with first century practice of the same. On the one hand, I focused on exploring salvation as reflected in the Gospel of Matthew 5.17–20, because most scholars believe that this Gospel addresses a multi-cultural community composed of Gentiles and Judeans. On the other hand, to observe modern practices of salvation, I interviewed a focus group through a questionnaire and telephone calls in 2011 and 2019, respectively, to briefly explore the case of St James Anglican Parish at Kajire Village in Taita-Taveta County, Kenya. The overall goal of the article is to explore how, in pursuit of practising their salvation, the community of Matthew in Antioch had to contest the Roman Empire, accommodate Diaspora Judaism, and identify with the emerging Jesus Movement. Consequently, employing literary analysis and what I call “social identity political theory” (SIPT), I have argued that a culturally conditioned practice of salvation is prone to the promotion of group dominance. To address this problem, Matthew advances an inclusive view of salvation that entails the construction of a superordinate Christian identity, which has the potential to support a Christocentric perspective of salvation.

To the question of why Matthew includes the phrase Πάτερ ἡμῶν (Our Father) in his version of the Lord’s Prayer, scholars guided by different theories answer this question differently. Employing literary criticism ranging from form, source and tradition history to reader–audience response and socio-rhetorical interpretation, scholars contend that Matthew composed the concept Πάτερ ἡμῶν (Our Father) as a crucial segment of his version of the Lord’s Prayer, either to present an opposition between Father who dwells in heaven and the Earth, which is humanity’s dwelling place, or to evoke a community relationship to God in the context of welcoming God’s rule, or to present the Lord’s Prayer as God’s gift for creating order, community and transformation in society. In view of this inconsistent conception of the function of Matthew’s concept ‘Our Father’, the goal of this study is to employ semantic analysis and social identity theory (SIT) to analyse Matthew 6:9 to defend the argument that Matthew employed the concept Πάτερ ἡμῶν in the 1st century CE firstly to reconstruct the Christian identity of his community by identifying with the early Christian community and accommodating Jewish traditions and then to negotiate it by contesting the Roman Empire.Contribution: The interdisciplinary contribution of the study in tandem with the expectations of HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies has been attained through the application of a collective SIT prism of identification, accommodation and contestation to read the social function of Matthew’s concept Πάτερ ἡμῶν in reconstructing and negotiating the identity of his community in 1st century Roman society.