Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity Columbia

Unlike the Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Jews, the Christians did not comprise a distinct national or racial group whose history could be written. Even so, this did not stop such writers as Aristides, the anonymous author of the Epistle to Diognetus, and Eusebius from describing Christianity as a triton genos or “third race” distinct from Greeks and barbarians.¹

In the last chapter, we saw that early Christians used ethnic reasoning to portray Christianness as an ethnic identity especially characterized by religious beliefs and practices. But it might still seem obvious that they lacked a fundamental basis for supporting an ethnoracial self-understanding: a past. More than that, they had no unified identity; before legalization, what we tend to group under the heading “Christian” covers a broad range of groups, some of whom did not even call themselves Christians. Amazingly, this historical novelty and lack of unanimity did not prevent some Christ-believers from describing themselves as a people, as this opening citation from Arthur Droge notes. For Droge, this is a problem to be explained. Even though he notices early Christian uses of ethnic/racial language, he classifies Christians as something other than a “national or racial group.” This chapter resolves Droge’s conundrum, arguing that the puzzle of Christian self-description as a “race” or “ethnicity” disappears if we approach histories as mobile constructions that rhetorically produce and recast, rather than describe, collective identities. That mobility includes the choices modern historians make to select materials as “Christian” and give meaning to that concept.

The historical arguments of early Christian authors strikingly echo the strategies and presuppositions of earlier Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian historiographers, as Droge’s careful study demonstrates.² But these arguments also resonate with the ways their contemporaries used the past to reimagine themselves for purposes of the present.³ Christians take a page out of the book of other minority groups to authorize themselves. They especially use strategies of (other) Jews and Roman-period Greeks as they stand relative to Rome: asserting greater antiquity and claiming to be the source of authentic wisdom for other peoples. Christians also borrow from hegemonic groups such as the Romans by claiming both to be the superior descendants of a degenerate, once glorious people and to be a people potentially open to all. Early Christian texts may not have always persuaded ancient readers that Christians constitute a people with an ancient pedigree, but that does not mean that the attempts were disingenuous or merely metaphorical.

Early Christians were not the only ones inventing themselves in the early Roman imperial period. So too were Romans, Greeks, Judeans, Lydians, and Aphrodisians, among others. Unlike the term “Christian,” other names such as Hellene, Egyptian, and Judean were terms that had been in the Greek linguistic repertoire by the Roman imperial period. Nonetheless, it is misleading to think that these terms (or the groups to whom they referred) were stable. Their meanings underwent continual negotiation and revision in antiquity. The past was a crucial site for authorizing the values and practices by which one could claim and demonstrate one’s present identity. But the past itself was contested—how one framed the past conditioned how one measured “Greekness,” “Jewishness,” “Romanness,” etc., and the interrelations of such collective categories in the present. Attention to ethnic reasoning in appeals to the past illuminates the local and imperial political-rhetorical contexts within which early Christians defined themselves.

Early Christian authors create Christians as a people no less than Romans, Lydians, Judeans, and other groups in appealing to the past to depict their identities as coherent, historically continuous, and superior to, if also linked with, other peoples. But the persuasiveness of these constructions depends on their ability to convince readers that they speak of real groups. That is, appeals to the past participate in the double-sided dynamic of ethnoracial discourse—that fixity and fluidity are both conditions for imagining ethnicity/race. By portraying a people as continuous over time, historical ethnographies or mythic tales make ethnicity or race seem fixed. At the same time, historical accounts often display the fluidity of ethnicity/race by suggesting, for example, that one people can be transformed into another (that Romans emerged from the Greeks, Christians from Jews) or that different peoples can emerge from a common ancestor (Jews and Spartans from Abraham, Ilians and Romans from Aeneas). As we shall see, appeals to ancestral ties of kinship are central for Christians, as they had long been for other inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world.⁴

An analysis of early Christian uses of the past raises questions about our own uses of the past. Modern and ancient interpreters often emphasize that what makes early Christians distinct is that they are a “new” phenomenon in the Roman imperial period. How do claims of novelty function in reconstructions of early Christian history? And what bearing do conceptualizations of novelty have upon the identification and interpretation of ethnic reasoning in early Christian texts? The next section takes up these questions since their answers shape any interpretation of early Christian materials.

The remainder of the chapter explores some of the ways that Christians invented a past—and also a destiny—for themselves. Two sections consider a range of early Christian examples. Finally, I situate Christian uses of the past in terms of the Roman imperial context of power relations. I suggest that we can interpret early Christian uses of the past not only as indebted to available historiographic and ethnographic practices but also as participating in contemporary imperial and regional efforts to establish who’s who in the empire.

Being “new” or not is a recurring theme in early Christian writings, as we see in the Epistle to Diognetus’s opening rhetorical question about “why this new race (genos) or practice (epitēdeuma) has come to life at this time, and not formerly” (Ep. Diog. 1.1). How do pronouncements of early Christian novelty function in modern scholarship about early Christians? Most modern interpretations of early Christian texts stress that Christianity was a new phenomenon in antiquity, somehow different from existing socioreligious formations. What are the implications of interpreting Christianity as “new” in the Roman period? Is Christianity to be considered new and different in a relative or essential sense?⁵ Most scholars resist assertions of Christian absolute uniqueness, although essential novelty has been attributed especially to the person and teachings of Jesus, as well as to the gospels as a literary genre and the concept of “eschatology.”⁶

In historical narratives that stress the novelty of early Christians, novelty marks and enacts the possibility of difference. Because “novelty” is a time-linked assertion of difference, it functions minimally in historical reconstructions to mark a point of rupture or change. But the question of novelty is not only about how to situate early Christians in relation to their non-Christian contemporaries but also about how the interpreter situates herself in relation to antiquity.

Broadly speaking, an interpreter can position herself in overall continuity with the historically “new” phenomenon of Christianity or emphasize her own difference (hence novelty) in time and worldview relative to early Christians and the Roman period. These are oversimplications, however. Most of those who might be classified under the first option do not deny historical change, and accept that Christianity has changed over time. And most of those who might be classified in terms of the second option acknowledge that modern interpretations flatten some of the differences between the present and past in making the past meaningful and “knowable” in the present.

Nonetheless, when the modern reader or interpreter positions herself in continuity with that which is defined as “new” in an earlier historical context, a claim to “novelty” may be used in service of creating sameness across time. Christians today, for example, are more likely to accept the idea of historical otherness with regard to Jews and “pagans” than with regard to early Christians precisely because these Jews and pagans are already thought of as “other.” What is “new” and different about Christians in antiquity is thus structured as potentially the “same” between ancient and modern Christians. Because Christians today in all of their diversity see themselves in continuity with the “Christians” of ancient texts (at least Christian Testament texts), any historical narrative about early Christians has the possibility of being read in a broader framework of continuity and sameness.

What are the consequences of this framework for discussing the relationship between “religion” and race/ethnicity for Christians? As I discussed in the previous chapter, modern interpreters have frequently argued that a central feature of early Christians’ novelty was the severing of a connection between ethnicity/race and religion. Many scholars agree that early Christianity should be classified as a “religion,” and that its distinctiveness inheres in its emphasis on belief and its (at least conceptual) break from the conventional embeddedness of religion in society and politics. In his influential study at the beginning of the twentieth century, Adolf Harnack argued that when Christians defined themselves as a genus/genos (notably a “third” genus/genos), they had in mind not an ethnic or racial collective idea but a “religious” one.⁷ Much more recently, Frances Young has explained the ethnic reasoning of early Christian apologists in terms of such a shift. When apologists like Athenagoras “claimed [Christians] to be a people or a race, alongside others to whom rights were given … they initiated the trend that would eventually turn religion into a belief system rather than traditional ethnic customs.”⁸ These arguments make early Christians the precursors of modern ideals about Christianity and about “religion,” even when modern forms of Christianity or religion are not viewed as identical with those of antiquity.

Because the consumers of histories of Christianity are most often themselves Christian, historical reconstructions can be deployed within an interpretive framework of sameness/continuity to spark reform in the present among communities that identify themselves as continuous with the communities of biblical texts.⁹ For these communities, novelty within Christianity is deemed problematic, so innovation is especially effective when framed as a restoration or reform by appeal to the past. Modern debates over women’s leadership and ordination in Christian communities, for example, frequently look to historical interpretation to justify exclusion or inclusion of women’s religious leadership. In other words, Christians today are reinventing their own past to serve the needs of the present. While appearing to be fixed, the past (the content of Christian tradition) is flexible in practice, and able to accommodate a range of interpretations.

The malleability of the past, despite the apparent continuity in “tradition,” means that it should be possible to reimagine the past to serve the present goal of fighting racism without perpetuating Christian anti-Judaism. I am suggesting that this requires grappling with the unacknowledged ways that modern histories of early Christianity have been racialized. The denial of the saliency of race masks its centrality to the framing of Christian history. This is a primary concern of Shawn Kelley’s Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship. Kelley focuses on scholarship about Jesus; we should extend this to include the racialization of interpretive frameworks for reconstructing Christian history.¹⁰

What about an approach to early Christianity that emphasizes a break between the modern interpreter and the ancient Christians? The still influential historical-critical method as well as the more recently popular Foucauldianinspired new historicist approach both insist on a gap between ancients and moderns. These approaches may position Christianity as “new” in its historical context, but tend to emphasize two things: that there is a greater difference between the interpreter and antiquity than between early Christians and their contemporaries, and that the novelty of early Christians can be explained by context rather than uniqueness (such as the uniqueness of Jesus).

Averil Cameron, for example, situates her approach to early Christian rhetoric in sharp contrast to what she calls the “extravagant claims” of Christian novelty made by some “New Testament” critics.¹¹ She implies that contemporary Christian interests inform explanations of how and why Christianity was novel. Her work instead emphasizes the relative novelty of Christians. In order to explain how “this ‘new’ Christianity was able to develop … a means to ensure its place as a rival to and then inheritor of the old elite culture,” Cameron argues that “Christian discourse … made its way in the wider world less by revolutionary novelty than by the procedure of working through the familiar, by appealing from the known to the unknown.”¹² This perspective is widely shared today.

Interpreting Christianity as a concept and set of social groups that emerges in the early Roman imperial period foregrounds the importance of historical context. This approach implies that early Christian rhetorical and material practices were (and must be rendered) intelligible within a specific historical context. Cameron’s approach thus relativizes the novelty of Christianity by framing it as creative adaptation of available epistemologies and rhetorical techniques. Although Cameron does not reveal the contemporary underpinnings for her own interpretive commitments, her emphasis on the continuities between Christians and non-Christians in the Roman period implicitly challenges assumptions of similarities between ancient and modern interpreters.

While this approach avoids the notion of essential difference between early Christians and their contemporaries, it still often preserves a notion that there is some essential essence to peoplehood of which Christians did not partake because they were a historically emergent group in the Roman period. Like Arthur Droge, who asserts that early Christians were not an ethnicity/race/nation like other groups because they have no comparable past, Frances Young seems to share Droge’s distinction between “real” non-Christian peoples with “ethnic cultures” and Christians who claim “that they are an ethnos, a people, despite the evident fact that they have no common ethnic roots.”¹³ In her view, “the problem for Christians was that they were not assimilated into the Jewish ethnos, while apparently abandoning their own ethnic cultures.”¹⁴ Droge and Young take the important step of situating Christian historical ethnographic claims in relation to their contemporaries, but the perception that early Christians lacked the common past necessary to be an ethnos still limits their interpretations of Christian ethnic reasoning.¹⁵

Even when framed with a strong emphasis on a disjuncture between past and present (including within “Christianity”), contemporary questions and interests govern historical reconstructions and framing. On this point, traditional historical critical methods and Foucauldian historiography part company. While a historical critic aims to interpret other times and places on “their own terms” while seeking to remove his own “biases” from the interpretation, Foucault was quite emphatic that genealogical studies begin from questions in the present.¹⁶ But both these frameworks have to contend with the problem of how to proceed from “the known” of the present to “the unknown” of the past in a way that does not do violence to the difference of the past. Modern interpreters can only make sense of ancient texts and perspectives to the extent that we are first able to see them as “known” and knowable in our own terms. Only then can we proceed to argue for how they differ.¹⁷

When the modern reader or interpreter positions herself in discontinuity with the Roman period, including with early Christians, she risks masking the process by which she determined what constitutes the difference of the past. In order to be accountable to the possible implications of one’s own rendering of the past, it is necessary to make this process visible. As I have discussed in both the introduction and chapter 1, I find a fluid/fixed approach to race/ethnicity compelling for making sense of race/ethnicity not only in our time but also for antiquity. This is not because it is the only way to speak about these concepts or because I see modern and ancient ideas as the same. This dynamic approach to race/ethnicity strikes me as more useful than other approaches to race/ethnicity for critiquing racist and ethnocentric mental habits and material practices without denying the rhetorical and material effects that these concepts continue to exert.

For the study of antiquity, this approach allows us to render early Christian discourse “knowable,” but does not require that we make early Christians seem “like us.” By interpreting ancient discourses of collective identity in terms of this fixed/fluid dynamic, we can chart a difference between ancients and moderns that can be used as a resource for contemporary Christians. Because history writing is fundamentally an activity of and for the present, any difference I assert between modern and ancient people does not exhaust the range of ways in which “now” and “then” differ. Other differences will continually interrupt and reveal the provisionality of my own interpretation. If the next generation of scholars occupies a world in which we have moved beyond racism, I would happily consign this focus to irrelevance.

If we adopt an approach to ethnicity/race as fluid despite early Christian reliance on a rhetoric of fixity, it is no longer necessary to sharply differentiate early Christian appeals to being an ethnos from those of any other group. Appeals to the past conform to this fixed/fluid character, because the past is claimed as a site of fixity (where things happened), yet this claim always exposes the fluidity of the past and the instability of its meaning in relation to the present (which of the many things that happened are noticed? What is their significance?). Since inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin during the Roman period did not have one specific way of defining ethnos and genos, the very concept of “common ethnic roots” is slippery, with a variety of different possible meanings. The contents of the “Jewish ethnos” and other “ethnic cultures” as well as any purported “common ethnic roots” are themselves contested and dynamic. Christians were quite conventional in developing historical arguments that served to define themselves as a people; and, like their contemporaries, early Christian claims about being members of an ethnos, laos, or genos are idealizing and ideological, not descriptive.¹⁸ I do not mean, however, that Christian claims to embody a people are “fictive” in contrast to the claims of others. All such claims are “fictive” to the extent that they are constructions, but “real” to the extent that their adherents do not treat them as fiction but reality.

It has become a modern scholarly cliché that ancients valued tradition and disparaged novelty and that early Christians had to defend themselves against charges of abandoning tradition and spreading dangerous innovations.¹⁹ The mid-second-century Christian Theophilus of Antioch states that his three volume work To Autolycus aims to demonstrate that “[the Christian] message is not recent in origin, nor are our writings, as some suppose, mythical and false” (To Autolycus 3.29). If we take change rather than continuity for granted, it is possible to argue that Christians were not unique in being “new” in the sense of historically recent. Romanness, as defined in the late republican and early imperial period, offers a provocative point of comparison. Just as Augustan innovations were clothed in the language of restoration, so too did Christians manage perceptions about their teachings and practices in the language of restoration—of Israel and/ or all humanity.

A rhetoric of restoration accommodates change within an ideal of continuity. This section explores two primary ways that followers of Christ used appeals to the past to portray themselves: as promoting restoration rather than innovation and as living in accordance with their true origins. I examine a variety of early Christian texts that employ such arguments. All of these arguments address pressing issues of how to live in the present and future, and each are formulated using ethnic reasoning: restoration of a people or of the entire human race in its original form. In the subsequent section, I explore a different kind appeal to the past, which emphasizes the positive aspects of novelty by linking them to a rhetoric of realizing one’s potential.

For some early Christians, the best defense is a good offense. In his Apology, the late second-century Christian author Tertullian dismisses accusations of Christian novelty by arguing that it is the Romans who abandon the ancestral customs they claim to venerate:

You are forever praising antiquity and every day you improvise some new way of life…. In fact, as to that very point of ancestral tradition which you think you most faithfully guard, which above all else you have used to designate the Christians as lawbreakers—I mean the passion for worshipping gods…. I will show instead that you despise, neglect, and destroy that tradition, totally against the authority of your ancestors.

To defend Christians, Tertullian suggests that all humans contain the “essence” of Christianness (in the soul), and adapts the history of Israel to explain why it is only recently that God made it possible for this essence to be fully realized—through Christ. This adaptation relies on the idea that the source of true knowledge and true worship, though incipient in all humans, historically belonged to one people (gens)—the Jews (and not the Romans)—but has now become available, through Christ, to all humans. Christians might be historically recent, but their teachings and way of life are in continuity with the God historically linked with the Jews. Tertullian appeals to the greater antiquity of Jews to trump Roman claims to antiquity. By making Christians heirs to this antiquity, he can imply also the superiority of the “new” Christians.²⁰

Late second- and third-century Christian texts in eastern parts of the empire manage perceptions of early Christian novelty less aggressively than Tertullian. The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Clement of Alexandria’s Protreptikos, and Origen’s Against Celsus offer a diverse range of early Christian texts that all employ a rhetoric of restoration to explain how followers of Christ constitute a people with a past, despite their apparently historic novelty.

For the late second- or early third-century Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, followers of Christ are Hebrews. This text explicitly situates Jesus as the Christ, whose primary role is to restore the Hebrew people by restoring its cultic practices. For this text, the pressing problem is a rift among Hebrews as a result of misunderstanding Jesus’s nature and function. By framing Jesus as the second prophet sent to restore the Hebrews rather than as an unauthorized innovator, the Pseudo-Clementine narrative situates followers of Christ as authentic Hebrews.

The narrative appeals to the past both to explain this current rift and to authorize its own solution: that of accepting Jesus as the Christ and replacing sacrifice with baptism. The Recognitions traces the followers of Jesus to Abraham (and all humans to Noah). The two fourth-century versions of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions that survive (in Latin and Syriac) explain ethnoracial distinctions as having first emerged according to the particular virtues, knowledge, and behavior of Noah’s three sons (Rec. 1.30.2–31.2). We learn that the Hebrews constitute one people who can trace themselves to Abraham; he is identified as the progenitor “from whom our race, the Hebrews, who are also called Jews, multiplied” (1.32.1). For this text, this self-description includes the followers of Christ. Instead of presuming that the author of this text must have been Jewish “by birth,” I want to explore briefly how the text characterizes the concept of membership in a genos. Membership entails the notion of belonging to a genealogically continuous people, but this belonging is indexed by state of mind and actions, not simply “birth.” Furthermore, for those not born into membership, it is achievable—at least upon the historical arrival of the second prophet, Jesus.

The Recognitions distinguishes the Hebrew genos from other descendants of Abraham by the conditions of knowledge under which it began.²¹ Once he has learned the “truth” about God and his destiny, Abraham asks for and receives a son—Isaac. Hebrews are the descendants of Abraham via Isaac (Rec. 1.34.1–2; see also 1.33.3). Prior to gaining this true knowledge, Abraham has two sons, Ishmael and Eliezer, “from whom the tribes of Arabs and Persians descended” (Syriac) or “from [Ishmael] the barbarian nations descend, while from [Eliezer] the peoples of the Persians descend” (Latin) (1.33.3). Other groups can thus also claim Abraham as their ancestor but cannot trace a genealogical connection to this “truth.” The text explains the relationship between these different ethnoracial groups as descent-based, where descent is defined by the conditions of Abraham’s knowledge (about divine truths) at their origins. The descendants of Abraham’s other sons do not differ due to a difference in their mothers but because of their relation to “truth” and “custom” (1.33.1; 1.34.1; 1.35.1).²²

Abraham’s own state of knowledge sets in motion ethnoracial distinctions among the peoples associated with his sons. Nonetheless, the text makes clear that the ensuing nations, named ethnoracially and characterized by practices, do not remain static over time. Practices (especially piety) shape and potentially transform them. Offering an extended interpretation of the biblical narrative, the Recognitions argues that the Hebrews, after their extended habitation in Egypt, needed to spend forty years in the desert to remove “the vices that had been added to them in Egypt” (Syriac, 1.35.1). The Latin version is even more explicit about how proximity and habit can transform the self: “by a series of exercises for forty years a renewal by changed custom might destroy the evils that had grown into them from the customs of the Egyptians by usage for a long time” (Latin, 1.35.1). In other words, Hebrews had become transformed by adopting Egyptian practices for generations. In the Recognitions, Moses helps to accomplish this remediation by instituting a temporary corrective measure of sacrifices in God’s name (1.36.1–2). Having established a precedent for change (both negative and positive), the text defines Jesus as the prophet of truth who teaches the Hebrews to stop sacrificing—replacing sacrifice with baptism (1.39.1–2).

If sacrifice was the compromise measure taken to wean Hebrews from their Egyptian habits, then Jesus’s anti-sacrificial teachings are consistent with the original essence of “Hebrewness.” This claim to authentic “Hebrewness” is then deployed to address a larger concern of the Recognitions: healing the split within the Hebrew ethnos that ensues in response to Jesus. Interestingly, the ethnos can be unified not only by Hebrews adopting the correct teaching against sacrifice but by those previously outside the ethnos doing so as well. Thus, the boundaries of Hebrewness are porous. By instruction and action one can become a member.

This interesting text has received the greatest attention from scholars wanting to make sense of the relationship between Jewishness and Christianness in the third and fourth centuries. It is most often classified as an example of “Jewish Christianity” in part because the narrative never uses the term “Christian” and locates the followers of Christ as “Hebrews.” The presence of ethnic language in the narrative has been explained in terms of Jewish influence: “Since Christianity is considered by the author to be the true Judaism, he finds it necessary to explain the discontinuity [between Jews and Christians] with respect to race.”²³ In this view, the presence of arguments that explicitly define followers of Christ as those Hebrews who “restore” the people to its “original” and authentic manifestation is only explicable if it is viewed as a “Jewish” kind of argument. This view implies that “race” would not otherwise be expected to form part of Christian self-definition. This assumption needs to be questioned. What happens if we presume that ethnic reasoning was a regular feature of early Christian self-definition—how might this complicate the way we reconstruct the meaning of “Christian” in relation to “Jew”?

If we turn to consider works by early Christian authors who are more well known today, we also find the rhetoric of restoration in Clement of Alexandria and Origen. In his Protreptikos, a treatise ostensibly written “to the Greeks,” Clement portrays Christianness as the newest but also the most original form of human existence.²⁴ In this text, he emphasizes not the continuity between Christianness and the biblical past identified with the history of Israel (as does the author of the Recognitions) but reaches back to the origins of human creation to explain the antiquity of Christian novelty. He argues that since the recent historical appearance of Christ, original human unity can be restored (for example, see Prot. 1.6.4–5; 9.88.2–3). While the term “Christian” might be new, it actually represents the most ancient form of humanness, including the oldest and truest form of worship. He compares Christians with other peoples who contend for the title of most ancient human race (in this case, Egyptians, Arcadians, and Phrygians):

Not one of these [peoples] existed before our world (kosmos). But we were before the foundation of the world, we … were begotten beforehand by God. We are the rational images formed by God’s Logos, or Reason (logika), and we date from the beginning because of our connection with him, because “in the beginning was the Word.” Since the Logos was from the first, he is the divine beginning of all things, but because he lately took a name—… the Christ—I have called him a new song.

Just as there is one authentic race, so also he thinks there is only one true form of worship. He uses the universalizing claim that Christians are members of a genos that encompasses all humans in order to ground his claim that Christian worship—as he defines it—is the only true form of religion. According to Clement’s argument, the recent historical appearance of Christ offers the opportunity for humanity to be restored and reunited. This argument allows Clement to acknowledge that becoming a Christian entails abandoning ancestral customs but also to argue that this is desirable because they are replaced by something older and truer.

Clement’s younger contemporary Origen also walks a fine line between claiming antiquity for and emphasizing the novelty of Christians. In Against Celsus, Origen responds to a treatise composed a generation earlier by the philosopher Celsus. Origen describes Celsus as having lambasted Christians in ethnoracial terms, implying that Celsus questions their legitimacy both as a philosophy and as a people. Celsus dismisses Christians as either renegade Jews (Against Celsus 3.5) or as a mishmash of troublemakers or idiots who have abandoned their various collective identities: “since the Christians have forsaken their traditional laws (patria) and do not happen to be some one people (hen ti tynchanontas ethnos) like the Jews they are to be criticized for agreeing to the teaching of Jesus” (5.35).²⁵ The accusation that Christians neglect “ancestral customs” (including those of Ioudaioi) locates Christians within both a contemporary ethnoracial (or civic) framework and a historical one. It also implies that Christians engage in dangerously different practices—ones that break with the past.

To counter Celsus’s allegation that Christians abandon ancestral customs—whether customs of Jews or others—Origen appeals to biblical narratives to argue for a historical period of human unity before there was a multiplicity of individual nations with their corresponding ancestral customs. As in Clement’s Protreptikos, this move implies that all ancestral customs are trumped by an earlier historical moment.

Nonetheless, Origen also positions Christians as a historically recent ethnos composed of members of a range of peoples, a collective identity formed in relation to the God of Israel, after the people of Israel largely “failed” to remain obedient to God. In this sense, he concedes but revalues Celsus’s arguments that Christians are very similar to Ioudaioi and also not one singular ethnos but rather a collective one made up of people who have “abandoned” their various ancestral customs. Origen thus locates Christians within a framework of restoration that accounts for their novelty while legitimizing them by linking their new identity to an ancient human unity.

In the Recognitions, the argument that Jesus restores authentic Hebrew practices is located within a larger narrative that stresses the genealogical continuity of the Hebrew people with the ancestor Abraham. As I argued in the last chapter, genealogical appeals are important for ethnic reasoning not because kinship and descent are ubiquitous or necessary aspects of how ethnicity or race were conceptualized in antiquity, but because they offer a central way of communicating a sense of ethnic/racial “fixity,” essence, and continuity. Nonetheless, arguments from kinship were an important means of communicating this fixity in antiquity, so it is not surprising to see Christians using them. Genealogical lists can function as a shortcut for tracing ethnoracial essence over time. Appeal to descent from particular ancestors is among the favored techniques for shaping claims to a common past. Many ancient texts create both a history and a destiny for groups by styling them as descendants of particular individuals.

Followers of Christ regularly defined themselves as descendants of key figures such as Abraham (Paul, Justin, Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions), Seth (Gospel of the Egyptians, Apocryphon of John), Norea (Hypostasis of the Archons), as well as Jesus (Aristides’ Apology, Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho). In such texts, one’s future—specifically one’s access to salvation—depends on membership in the correct descent group.

In appeals to the past, descent and kinship may especially connote continuity, but can also serve to explain discontinuity. Abraham is central for Jews, including followers of Jesus. The author of 1 Maccabees links Jews and Spartans to a common ancestor, Abraham, drawing upon an element of Greek culture that Greeks also value so that “Jews could now partake of it. Indeed, better than partake of it, they could take credit for it. Abraham was ultimately responsible.”²⁶ Here we see how appeal to a purported common ancestor could serve to promote common cause between two or more groups perceived as different in the present. This strategy may serve a range of goals. In the case of 1 Maccabees, the goal may be not simply to position a key ancestor of the Jews as one shared also by Spartans, but also to create a link that would allow Jews to benefit from the favor Spartans received from the Romans.²⁷

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul extends to “gentiles” the possibility of becoming descendants of Abraham, as Jews already are.²⁸ Paul argues that gentiles (or “Greeks”) can acquire the honorable ancestry of other Jews by becoming descendants of Abraham through Christ.²⁹ Simply having Abraham as a common ancestor does not erase the differences between Jews and gentiles, however; placing these two groups under one larger umbrella still allows Paul to rank gentiles (or Greeks) and Jews hierarchically, according to the rhetorical situation. Simultaneously, this genealogical argument allows Paul to redefine Jewishness, suggesting a range of possible ways of understanding what it means to be a Ioudaios.

Alternatively, appeal to a common ancestor might be used as the basis for making an argument about why two or more groups are different now, thereby providing a historical “explanation” for contemporary differences. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, Christian authors devise or use genealogies to trace their roots to ancestors also claimed by Jews (such as Abraham), sometimes with the explicit purposes of differentiating “Christians” from “Jews.”³⁰

This legacy persists in later writings, including Eusebius’s famous Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius relies on the kind of logic articulated by authors like Clement and Origen. In the early fourth century, Eusebius draws on the history of Israel to answer the question of who the Christians are in the first book of his “history” of the Church. While acknowledging that Jesus’s ministry in the flesh was in the recent historical past, and that Christians constitute an “admittedly new ethnos (neon homologoumenōs ethnos)” (Eccl. Hist. 1.4.2), Eusebius stresses that

even if we are clearly new, and this really new name of Christian is recently known among the ethnē, nevertheless our life and method of conduct, in accordance with the precepts of religion, has not been recently invented by us, but from the first creation of humans, so to speak, has been upheld by the natural concepts of the ancient people who were friends of God.

For his proof, Eusebius turns to the Hebrew ethnos, known for its antiquity, and especially the figure of Abraham, “whom the children of the Hebrews boast as their own originator and ancestor” (1.4.5). Eusebius handily appropriates Abraham for Christians, saying, “If the line be traced back from Abraham to the first man, anyone who should describe those who have obtained … righteousness as Christians, in fact, if not in name, would not shoot wide of the truth” (1.4.6). In other words, he concludes this section of the introduction:

At the present moment it is only among the Christians throughout the whole world that the manner of religion that was Abraham’s can actually be found in practice. What objection can there then be to admitting that the life and pious conduct of us, who belong to Christ, and of the God-loving men of old is one and the same? Thus we have demonstrated that the practice of piety handed down by the teachings of Christ is not new or strange but, if one must speak truthfully, is primitive, unique, and true.

Here we can see the sinister supersessionary implications of using a rhetoric of restoration to articulate the distinctiveness of the Christian ethnos. It is precisely because Eusebius defines Christians as an ethnos that his argument is coherent. This example suggests that one difference between ancient and modern Christian anti-Judaism turns on the presence or absence of Christian self-comparison to a people. Eusebius makes Christians a superior people to the Jews, whereas modern Christians have sometimes argued that Christians are superior to Jews because Jews are a people while Christians exceed these boundaries. Yet as we shall see in the next section, the argument that Christians exceed the boundary of a single people was also one that early Christians made using ethnic reasoning. Indeed, by collapsing Christianity with humanity, early Christians could argue that Christians constitute the ideal form of the human race, whereas all other peoples (and their forms of piety) fall short.

Early Christian texts could foreground fixity to negotiate change, either by appealing to restoration of ancient practices or continuity of descent, but they could also highlight ethnic fluidity while nonetheless presupposing a kind of common essence to humanity. Specifically, Christians as different as those who valued Justin Martyr’s First Apology and the Tripartite Tractate could understand Christians as belonging to a people who had realized humanity’s “true” potential. Although such arguments seem to emphasize the value of change, they share in common with the rhetoric of restoration the idea that what is new is actually the fulfillment of an original plan or reality.

In this section as in the last, I consider both more and less well-known second- and third-century Christian texts to show that a broad range of early Christians employed this form of ethnic reasoning. Justin’s First Apology, Clement’s Protreptikos, and Origen’s Against Celsus offer familiar examples, whereas the Sophia of Jesus Christ, Theophilus of Antioch’s To Autolycus, and the Tripartite Tractate serve as less well-known examples. These examples are not exhaustive and do not have some hidden coherence. But this selection does indicate that this form of Christian argument is not limited to one form of early Christian literature or worldview; as such, it reinforces my overall argument that examination of ethnic reasoning can sustain scholarly efforts to resist reinscribing prescriptive distinctions among varieties of early Christians.

Appeals to the past shape one’s claims about the present. For some texts, appeals to the past are used to destabilize one’s apparent identity in the present; things might not be what they appear to be at first glance. In a number of texts produced by followers of Jesus, we find motifs that serve to challenge conventional readings of the past in an effort to reread the significance and meaning of one’s present collective identifications. For example, Paul famously interprets Jesus in light of Adam (1 Cor. 15). Other texts, such as the Sophia of Jesus Christ, Hypostasis of the Archons, and the Apocryphon of John reread Genesis 1–3 to define a people (genea) in relation to a cosmic drama of creation and salvation. Knowing one’s origins, one’s “root,” is necessary for salvation.

The rhetoric of having a “root” nature or essence, like the rhetoric of patrilineages (for example, tracing one’s ancestry back to Abraham), relies on the notion of fixity while the injunction to discover or trace one’s root, or to “awaken,” to be enlightened, to become perfect, or to be reborn all offer different expressions of instability/fluidity/dynamism. Justin Martyr’s concept of the logos spermatikos, a seed of the divine logos implanted in the souls of all humans (2 Apol. 8.1), is probably the best-known early Christian example of how the past could be cited to justify present Christian beliefs and practices as fulfilling the unrealized potential in humans.

In his mid-second-century First Apology, Justin Martyr appeals to the past specifically to explain the present: “In the beginning [God] made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and acting rightly, so that all people are without excuse before God; for they have been born capable of exercising reason and intelligence” (1 Apol. 28.3). The logos is this shared capacity. For Justin, Jesus is the incarnation of the entire logos—so those who follow his teachings follow the Logos in its entirety: “Whatever we say as having been learned from Christ, and the prophets who came before him, are alone true, and older than all the writers who have lived” (23.1). Most broadly, he claims that Christ came “for the conversion (allagē) and restoration (epanagogē) of the human race” (23.2).

Humanity requires conversion and restoration for two main reasons: first, the people who transmitted the truth about the logos, the Jews, went astray—as evidenced by their colonization by Romans in Justin’s day;³¹ and second, although all humans have the logos implanted in them, most peoples have not had access to unsullied teachings about the truth. The teachings that Justin attributes to Jesus both allow “gentiles” to have access to the entire logos³² and offer a way to restore the legacy of the logos that the “Jews” have let slip. This reasoning builds on the assumption that the logos is a fixed essence, and accounts for its unrealized potential in many humans by implying that what varies are the ways people teach about the logos.³³

Justin offers a version of philosophical debates common in the second century in which Greek philosophers, especially Middle Platonists, sought to demonstrate their philosophy as the oldest, the basis for others:

Like Numenius, Justin traces Platonic philosophy back to an ancient oriental theology, but whereas Numenius allow that this primitive theological tradition was handed down by the ‘most famous nations,’ Justin contends that Moses was the exclusive source…. It is nothing other than the revelation of the logos to Moses and the prophets contained in scripture. Christianity is not one, or even the best, philosophy among many; it is the only philosophy insofar as it is the reconstitution of the original, primordial philosophy.³⁴

As for many Christian authors, Justin depicts the process of becoming a Christian as one of rebirth (1 Apol. 61; Dial. 85.7–9). Nonetheless, his view that Christ was the historical incarnation of the preexistent logos allows him to claim that “[Christ] is the logos of which every genos of humans partakes. Those who lived in accordance with logos are Christians, even though they were called godless, such as, among Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and others like them; among the barbarians, Abraham, Ananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, and Elijah and many others …” (1 Apol. 46.2). Thus, for Justin, the novelty of Christianity is tempered by positioning it in relation to the antiquity of the logos. Furthermore, the novelty of individual conversion is moderated by framing it as activating and perfecting the seed of the logos already implanted in one’s soul.

In Justin’s First and Second Apologies, the Jews are the people who have historically transmitted the truth about the logos even though all humans contain its “seed.” In the Sophia of Jesus Christ,³⁵ all humans also seem to contain the “drop” from above, but not everyone understands this. Those that possess the drop and know it understand that they belong to an “unruled” people (genea) (SophJesChr 99.17–19) and activate their membership to ensure that this becomes their destiny.

The Sophia of Jesus Christ is framed around clarifying “the underlying reality of the universe and the plan,” which the disciples are struggling to determine before the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus (91.2–9; 92.3–5). The distinction between those who are saved and those who are not seems to turn on one’s ability to understand that everything will return to its roots: “everything that came from the perishable will perish, since it came from the perishable. But whatever came from the imperishable does not perish but becomes imperishable” (98.1–6). Those that do not learn or understand this difference go “astray” and “die” (98.7–9).

The disciples learn from Jesus that their “roots” are “in the infinities” (SophJesChr 108.20–23) and that Jesus has come to awaken and perfect those who have their origins from “above” yet have been born into this world (106.24–108.23). The disciples ask Jesus about their origins, their destiny, and instructions for how to live: “Mary said to him, ‘Holy Lord, where did your disciples come from and where are they going and (what) should they do here?’” (114.8–12). Jesus’s reply begins with the actions of the cosmic power Sophia, implying that the disciples come from the perfect realm of Sophia, not this imperfect realm that has been created by her imperfect offspring. Although the end of the text does not spell this out, it seems that the destiny of the disciples and all those who “awaken” and come to understand their “root” is the perfect realm of their origin. Jesus instructs the disciples to live in ways that defy the false gods of this imperfect world, and the text concludes by having the disciples imitate Jesus in going to “tell everyone about the God who is above the universe” (118.24–25). In this text, like Justin’s Apologies, we find the rhetoric of restoration firmly intertwined with the notion of a potential to be realized in humans.

Clement’s Protreptikos contains a similar impulse.³⁶ Especially in the latter part of the work, Clement suggests that those who become Christians undergo a transformation that does not simply restore but actually fulfills previously unrealized potential in all humans. The various forms into which humans have been divided have resulted in a fragmentation of truth. But Christ now makes it possible for this fragmentation to be healed. As if to emphasize both the potential in Greek thought as well as the inability of the potential to be realized in “Greek” terms, Clement cites Homer, attributing his words to the logos:

The appearance of Christ has made it possible for the “whole human race … both barbarians and Greeks,” to be (re)unified as the one genos that they actually are (120.2). But this reunification requires the transformation of individual members of various races, notably through the adoption of proper religious attitudes and practices.

Origen also makes use of the argument that Christians fulfill the unrealized potential of humans. This strategy emerges in response to Celsus’s apparent allegation that Christians are unoriginal in their novelty. As Origen writes, “[Celsus] thinks he can criticize our ethical teaching on the grounds that it is commonplace and in comparison with the other philosophers contains no teaching that is impressive or new” (Against Celsus 1.4).³⁷ When Celsus accuses Christians of unoriginality in condemning idolatry, for example, Origen writes, “in this instance also, as in that of other ethical principles … moral ideas have been implanted in humans, and … it was from these that Heraclitus and any other Greek or barbarian conceived the notion of maintaining this doctrine” (1.5). The lack of novelty that Celsus views as a liability of Christian teaching and organization Origen positions as proof of its universality; as he puts it, the truths of Christianity are only possible for humans to accept because they resonate with universal ideas all human share:

By locating this universalism within a historical narrative of human development, Origen can speak of Christians as both a universally true philosophy and a historically recent ethnos that is authorized and legitimized by original human unity. This universalizing argument relies on rather than opposes ethnic reasoning because Origen portrays Christians as the ethnos that embodies these universal truths—an ethnos that humans from all other ethnē can and should join.

By emphasizing the common origins of humanity (via Adam, Noah, or Seth), followers of Jesus—like other Jews—could formulate universalizing visions of the future of their people by imagining a way for the original unity of human to be reunited in the destiny of a single people. Even when genealogies serve to differentiate groups of humans in the present, these universalizing frameworks for human history support claims that Christ comes to reunify humanity, bringing together individuals from “every human race” into a variously named people (for example, “Hebrew,” “Israel,” “Christian,” “seed of Seth,” “immovable genea,” etc.). The mid-second-century Christian Theophilus of Antioch, for example, locates the original ancestors of all humanity in the scriptures. Theophilus writes that humanity is descended from Seth (To Autolycus 2.30) because after six generations, the “seed of Cain” sank “into oblivion” because of his fratricide.³⁸ Nonetheless, he views Christians as descended from a particular people: “the Hebrews … are … our ancestors” (3.20). He links Christians with Hebrews both via shared scriptures and a specific ancestor: Abraham, “our patriarch” (3.24).

A final example offers a different form of Christian argument about realizing one’s potential. In the Tripartite Tractate, preserved in the Nag Hammadi corpus, original unity is identified with divinity: humans intrinsically consist of multiple essences. Nonetheless, the text depicts human salvation as a process whereby humans are ideally transformed (and transform themselves) so that divine unity can ultimately be restored. For this text, salvation is potentially universal, but is imagined as the restoration not of initial human unity but rather of initial divine unity. Humanity changes to become assimilated to and reincorporated into the divine.

As its title suggests, the Tripartite Tractate is divided into three main sections that roughly cover the prehistory of the world, the creation of the humanity, and a third part that comprises a range of topics including anthropology, incarnation, and salvation. The entire work is shaped around the premise that the “church” offers the site for the restoration and reunification of humanity with its divine origins. Belief in Christ is portrayed as the means to achieve the ideal of unity:

For when we confessed the kingdom which is in Christ, [we] escaped from the whole multiplicity of forms and from inequality and change. For the end will receive a unitary existence just as the beginning is unitary, where there is no male and female, nor slave and free, nor circumcision and uncircumcision, neither angel nor human, but Christ is all in all.

But it is crucial to note that this unity is not something that individual humans have from the outset. As the second section of the text makes clear, humans were created with a “mixed” nature; the task is to cultivate the “best” portion of one’s mixed human nature, the part that comes from the perfect kingdom. According to the Tripartite Tractate, “the first human being is a mixed formation, and a mixed creation, a deposit of those of the left and those of the right, and a spiritual word (logos) whose attention is divided between each of the two substances from which it takes its being” (106.19–25). This mixture of “left” with “right” substances and the presence of a third element, the spiritual (pneumatic), mirrors the three levels of cosmological organization discussed in the first part of the text. It also foreshadows the subsequent division of humanity into three genē, distinguished by a prevailing element (pneumatic—from the spirit, psychic—from the soul, or hylic—from matter).⁴⁰ With the arrival of the savior in the world:

Humanity came to be in three essential types [rēte kata ousia], the pneumatic, the psychic, and the hylic…. Each of the three essential types [ousia genos] is known by its fruit…. The pneumatic race [genos], being like light from light, and like spirit from spirit, when its head appeared, it ran toward him immediately…. It suddenly received knowledge in the revelation.

How should we understand these genē? For Einar Thomassen these three genē are “religious qualities, that is to say, ethical and intellectual [ones]” not “genetic composition,”⁴¹ based on the various human responses to the “coming of the Savior” (TriTrac 118.24–28). The coming of the savior induces the division of humanity into three genē “as people actualize the different potentialities of their souls.”⁴² I would sharpen Thomassen’s reading, following Elaine Pagels and Harold Attridge. Instead of distinguishing between “religious” and “genetic” definitions of a genos, they convincingly suggest that these two are combined in the text’s ontology: “the soteriology of this text is … clearly consistent with its basic ontology, for, on every level of being, act determines essence…. The coming into being of three kinds of human being is a response to the coming of the Savior and is a result of different attitudes towards him.”⁴³ That is, for the Tripartite Tractate, “genetic” composition is the result of the “religious” qualities one acts upon—they are inextricably linked. Ethnic membership is defined in terms of religiosity. Each of the three genē is a distillation of the initially mixed components of humans. Those who distill the pneumatic component are on the best track, but because humans intrinsically contain all three elements, one can potentially shift between these genē. The Tripartite Tractate, like some other early Christian texts we have seen (for example, 1 Peter), imagines the ethnoracial consequences of responses to the savior and the adoption of new religious practices.

The universalizing tendency in the texts considered in this section is striking. Early Christians regularly portrayed themselves as the people who embody this universal vision. That is, Christian self-definition as a people was not mutually exclusive with universalism. By locating themselves in a historical narrative whose trajectory moved in an arc from one kind of human (either unified or internally composite) to many kinds of humans, Christians could claim to represent the future reunification or perfection of the entire human race. This argument sought its authority in the past and was especially elaborated in terms of peoplehood.

We now need to examine how both this universalizing tendency and the rhetoric of restoration, with its emphasis on continuity with practices and lineages of the past, formed part of in the fabric of larger Roman-period views and practices of collective identity.

It was not only the Christians who were defining themselves. In both the republican and early imperial periods, the following questions were pressing for many: “Who are the Romans? Are they Barbarians or are they Greeks?” as well as “And we Greeks, who were we? … What place can we expect today and on what basis?”⁴⁴ And to these we should also add questions of regional, local, and civic identities: “Who are the Lydians? Who are the Aphrodisians? Who are the Egyptians?” and so on. Equally important for other inhabitants of the empire was the question “Who are the people of God?” Appeals to the past play a crucial role in the possible answers to these questions of collective identity and difference.

For some authors such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Romans are Greeks by origin, which he “proves” by telling the history that both Greeks and Romans have “forgotten,” a tale of migration, colonization, preservation and loss of ritual practices, morals, and education. As François Hartog observes, this “solution was favoured by a number of Roman intellectuals—at least for a while—and, of course, also by the Greeks.”⁴⁵ Hartog carefully attends to how the same claim (Romans are Greeks) might have had significantly different meaning when articulated by a Roman intellectual like Cato and a Greek intellectual like Dionysius. Hartog comments on Cato’s history of Rome:

In Cato, who was the first to choose to write a history in Latin, it [the claim that Romans are Greeks] may have served as a symbolic instrument of emancipation, which made it possible to escape from the Greeks-Barbarian dichotomy, or rather to subvert it, “You Greeks, you classify us among the Barbarians, but we are certainly not Barbarians as our ancestors were Greek.”⁴⁶

While Dionysius drew heavily upon Cato, Hartog notes that the context for Dionysius’s assertion of the continuity between Romans and Greeks is very different. Not only is he writing in Greek “for a Greek readership,” but in his day, at “the beginning of the Augustan period, no Greek can have still believed that the Romans were purely and simply to be classified as Barbarians. After all, at this very moment Strabo was recognizing the Roman’s historic mission to take over from the Greeks in the task of civilizing the oikoumenē.”⁴⁷ Hartog convincingly suggests that Dionysius uses the claim that Romans are Greeks primarily for the purposes of answering questions about Greek self-definition and meaning in the Roman dominated world:

The meaning of “The Romans are Greeks” now surely became “We Greeks are also, in a way, Romans. We are their parents, or rather their grandparents, so their empire is, in a way, also ours.” In short, genealogy is used to legitimate not only the indisputable existence of this Graeco-Roman empire, which, with the advent of Augustus, established itself even more firmly, but also the place that Greek figures of note claimed within it: “their” place, fully acknowledged.⁴⁸

As Hartog shows in the different cases of Cato and Dionysius, very different motivations may explain an emphasis on genealogical continuity. And when genealogical connections are made between or among groups perceived as different in the present, they serve a range of possible functions. Cato’s goal may be to authorize Romans in the face of powerful Greek taxonomies. Dionysius may have hoped to secure a place for “Greeks” in the present Roman Empire by appealing to their common stock at a moment when Romanness could be defined as the fulfillment of the potential of Greekness, a definition implying that contemporary “Greeks” fall short by contrast as a degenerate trajectory of a shared past with Romans.⁴⁹

Other authors, like Dionysius’s contemporary Virgil, preferred a different answer to the question of Romanness: for Virgil, Romans are neither Greek nor barbarian. Rather, using a “Greek” historical framework, Virgil constructed a third option for Romans:

The thesis of Rome’s Trojan origin, magnified by Virgil, was to break away from that view and set up Rome as a third group, from the “very start.” This was all the more acceptable given that, as Thucydides had pointed out, the dichotomy between Greeks and Barbarians had, at that point, not been introduced. The Trojans may not have been Greeks, but they certainly were not Barbarians either.⁵⁰

the old division, long since obsolete, between the Greeks and the Barbarians must now be replaced with one that is all-encompassing and more relevant: between Romans and non-Romans. For the Romans are not simply one “race” (genos) among others, but the one that counterbalances the rest. Their name, overspilling the boundaries of a city, designates a “common race”: the genos of Roman citizens.⁵¹

Early Christians produced variations on the “Roman question.” For example, centuries after the “Roman question” has been most fiercely debated, Eusebius revives it to frame his exposition of the newly legalized Christians: “Anyone might naturally want to know who we are … Are we Greeks or barbarians? Or what can there be intermediate to these?” (Preparation for the Gospel 1.2.1).⁵² In Eusebius’s day, this question is no longer a pressing one for Romans, although it remains a shorthand way to speak about all humans. By positioning Christians in the place of Romans, Eusebius may be inviting reflections about the relationship between Romanness and Christianness. While he does not explicitly equate Christians with Romans by this substitution, his framing invites this equivalence.

Most often, Christians either worked from another powerful and totalizing taxonomy: Ioudaios/ethnē (“Jew”/“gentile”) or combined it with the Greek ones. Hartog’s point about motivation is significant here. For a text like Luke-Acts, the followers of Jesus are situated primarily in relation to the Jew/gentile taxonomy, though the text defines them as a third option. Virgil’s Aeneid is indebted to an overarching Greek framework but resists locating Romans precisely in terms of either Greek or barbarian; similarly, the author of Luke-Acts clearly situates Christians in terms of the past of Israel while creating a narrative distinction between “Christians,” “Jews,” and “gentiles.”⁵³ But the rhetoric of Luke-Acts may even more closely resemble that of Aelius Aristides in its universalizing vision. Furthermore, as many have noted, the two-part work shifts its geopolitical and theological center from Jerusalem to Rome, permitting an interpretation of the destiny of the Christians as somehow connected with Romanness.

Attempts to define Romans in relation to the longstanding dichotomous convention Greek/barbarian provide a useful point of reference for rethinking Christian texts that position Christians as a third option, even when Jew/gentile replaces Greek/barbarian as the salient antinomy. The same Christian author can define Christians in more than one way: as “true Jews” (or Israelites or Hebrews), as a distinct third option, or—as Aelius Aristides does for the Romans—the common genos that counterbalances the rest.

While Dionysius offered one possible answer to the question of who Greeks are in the empire by way of addressing the question of who the Romans are, his was not the only contribution to the question of Greekness in the early imperial period. An important study by Antony Spawforth sheds light on one way that Greekness was negotiated in a provincial context.⁵⁴ Some inhabitants of Asia Minor in the early Roman imperial period used ethnic reasoning to negotiate the meaning of “Greek” in relation to “Lydian” identity. In this example, differences are managed in order to allow individuals to identify as Lydians, Greeks, and sometimes also Sardians simultaneously. Without collapsing the differences between these categories, genealogies serve in part to define Sardians and Lydians as “true” Greeks—indeed, as the ancestors of the Greeks.

Although we should not presume that being Greek prior to the Roman period was a transparent, unambiguous identity,⁵⁵ Greek self-definition underwent a major shift during the first two centuries C.E. This shift was partly a response to Roman policies in the provinces as well as to Roman perceptions and idealizations of Greekness (perceptions and idealizations that contributed to Roman self-definition). Roman policy and literature redefined Greekness in relation to a particular territory (Achaia) and time period (classical), a move that served Roman interests and to which Roman-period “Greeks” had to respond.⁵⁶ Rome also reclassified residents of its provinces, so that some “Greeks” no longer counted as such for Roman political purposes (notably in Egypt and Asia Minor).

Inhabitants of Asia Minor had long had an ambivalent relation to Greekness. “Lydians” were among the regional groups that had been characterized in various relations to Greekness. In some classical Greek sources⁵⁷ Lydians are stereotyped as “barbarian,” and Strabo also considered them non-Greek.⁵⁸ Nonetheless, they were also sufficiently associated with Greekness by Strabo’s day to have been subject to “ethnic downgrading” by Romans (from Greek to barbarous “Lydian”).⁵⁹ More complex still, this Roman demotion failed to translate fully into policy since the Lydian cities of Sardis and Thyatira “appear as members of the koinon ‘of the Hellenes who live in Asia’” under Augustus and “gained admission into the Panhellenium” under Hadrian.⁶⁰

Spawforth convincingly argues that Lydians, among others, managed this complexity by positioning themselves in relation to Greekness: they “offered themselves as heirs, as living embodiments, of the prestigious brand of Hellenism so admired by their philhellene Roman rulers.”⁶¹ They accomplished this in a range of ways, especially including modes of speech, but also through genealogical practices that linked their regional identities to Achaia. Instead of merely asserting their authentic Greekness, however, the Lydians defined themselves both as a distinct ethnic group and as Hellenes; moreover, the citizens of Sardis were able to assert themselves as simultaneously Sardians, Lydians, and Greeks. The association of key ancestors with all three groups supported these multiple claims.

Here we find civic and ethnic identities blurring: “The names of the citizen tribes of the Sardian polis … all consciously invoke Lydian history, myth, or geography.”⁶² More significantly, two of these names link the Sardians/Lydians to larger collectives. Specifically, “‘Pelopis,’ after Pelops, [is the] eponym of the Peloponnese and founder of the Olympian games … [and] ‘Asias,’ after Asies … [is the] eponym—after a Lydian tradition known to Herodotus—of continental Asia.”⁶³ By the second century C.E., these tribe names inform “the official titulary that Sardis adopted under Hadrian: ‘first mother city of Asia and all Lydia and Hellas.’” As Spawforth notes, the claim to be the “mother city of Hellas” depends on the “Lydian origins of Pelops” and positions the Peloponnese, equated with Hellas, as a Lydian colony.⁶⁴

These genealogical claims fulfill a range of functions. Locally, they serve to bolster civic (Sardian) claims to be the first city of the region and province by positioning Greeks, as defined in Roman territorial terms, as the descendants of the Sardians. While perhaps useful for negotiations with Rome, this claim may have been primarily directed at intercity and regional rivalries of Roman period Asia Minor.⁶⁵ Linked genealogies also allow one to claim more than one ethnicity (Lydian, Hellene), highlighting the situational and strategic character of identification.⁶⁶ This multiplicity is one manifestation of the fluidity of ancient notions of ethnicity.

From this example, we can take away a few valuable lessons for the study of early Christian self-definition. Appeals to the past exceed literary forms. They also played out in domains of epigraphy, civic organization, and cultic practices. It also suggests that early Christians raised or based in the eastern part of the Roman Empire may have negotiated collective identities first and foremost with respect to local/regional identities and Helleneness, and less directly with Romanness. It is worth noting that definitions of Romanness are not explicitly on the table in this Lydian/Hellene/Sardian context. They may be implicitly so, to the extent that inhabitants of Asia Minor were dealing with Roman perceptions of Greekness.

Of course, “Greeks” and “Romans” were not the only ones trying to claim and negotiate collective identities in the empire. Claims of historical ties between peoples, especially when these peoples are perceived to be different in the present, were used in a range of contexts. In the first century B.C.E., for example, Diodorus of Sicily skeptically recounts a claim he attributes to fourth-century B.C.E. Hecataeus of Abdera about Egyptians—that Athenians and Judaeans descend from Egyptians.⁶⁷ Diodorus reports: “The Egyptians say that … a great number of colonies were spread from Egypt all over the world,” including “Babylon,” where they established priesthoods and astrology, and “practically the oldest city in Greece, Argos” (Diod. 1.28.1, 2). Furthermore, Egyptians allegedly claim “that the ethnos of the Colchi in Pontus and that of the Ioudaioi in between Arabia and Syria, were founded as colonies by certain emigrants from their country; and this is the reason why it is a long-established custom among these genē to circumcise their male children” (1.28.2–3). “Even the Athenians, they say, are colonists from Saïs in Egypt,” offering such proofs as etymology for the city’s name, political organization, alleged Egyptian background of early Athenian kings, appearance, manners (ēthē), and religious practices (specifically, the veneration of Demeter and “swearing by Isis”) (1.28.4–29.4).

Diodorus’s source, Hecataeus of Abdera, used the “Greek ethnological method,” which “tried to understand the common past of mankind historically,”⁶⁸ including by attributing Greek ancestry to “barbarians.” Many non-Greeks also accepted Greek interpretations of their national origins or some of the basic premises of Greek historiography and adapted them to produce their own origin stories (as is the case of linking Romans with Greek history via Aeneas and the Trojans).⁶⁹ Some non-Greeks tailor Greek claims of antiquity and cultural superiority to offer competing unifying historical narratives of humanity: in addition to Hecataeus, Xanthus renders Lydians as the progenitors of the Greeks, and a number of Jewish authors similarly reconstruct cultural history to make Jews the predecessors of the “best” of Greek culture.⁷⁰ As in debates over the Roman question, when asking whether to forge alliances, seek support, justify colonization, or authorize power, motivation matters.

Celsus accuses Christians of unoriginality. In some respects he is absolutely right. Not only does Christian teaching resemble elements of contemporary philosophy, but even Origen’s strategy of defending what is distinctive and historically recent about Christian teaching and practice with reference to an original human unity is indebted to both biblical and classical Greek models. Early Christians used biblical sources (and traditions of biblical interpretation) as well as what Elias Bickerman called the “Greek ethnological method” of imagining human history in universalizing terms (and traditions of its interpretation) to define themselves. From both biblical and “Greek” explanations about human history (and their respective adaptations and interpretations by Judaeans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans among others), Christians learned ways of classifying human groups in historic relation to one another that emphasized an original unity (“universal history”) while also explaining differences among human groups despite original unity. By producing variations on this totalizing framework, Christians explained their recent historical emergence, asserted their superiority, and articulated universalizing ideals (that the diverse, particular communities were/should be a unified ekklēsia and that humanity ought to be reunified in and as the “Christian” people, or whichever descriptive is used to define this people).

Were early Christians simply borrowing the frameworks of their “others,” asserting that they had a place within these stories? And if so, why invent on someone else’s terms? These questions, while provocative, are misleading because they assert a self/other divide that may be the outcome of ethnoracial historical discourses rather than its starting point. Although early Christians are generally interpreted as the “others” to Jews, Greeks, Romans, etc., it is important to remember that the individuals who began to think about themselves as members of a category “Christian” were not in fact “others” to all from the outset.⁷¹ Those we retrospectively include under the umbrella of “early Christian” invent themselves and their “others,” as well as their possible interrelations, through a process of negotiating the flexible discourses that were already part of the sociopolitical and rhetorical-imaginative contexts they inhabited.

Irad Malkin gives a modern example that illuminates both the flexibility of ethnoracial discourses and the strategic uses of a minority group using the dominant group’s “master narrative.” Both Jewish Israeli intellectuals and Palestinian Arabs have used biblical narratives of Israelite occupation of Canaan in order to re-present Jewish and Palestinian identities, respectively, as “Canaanite,” with drastically different degrees of success. In linking modern Jewish Israelis with Canaanites, the goal was “to convince the native Arab populations (and the Jews themselves) of their common regional heritage so as to live happily together.”⁷² In contrast, identifying Palestinians as the descendants of biblical Canaanites “provides a natural right to Palestine, standing in the same relation to modern Jews as the Canaanites did in antiquity to the Hebrews. It is used here not to integrate but to distinguish and create a hierarchy between peoples in relation to the same land.”⁷³ While identifying today’s Israelites with Canaanites of the past has failed to win broad support (especially in the face of a more successful alternative Zionist narrative), equating Palestinians with Canaanites has become popular since the 1980s. These two adaptations of the same biblical narrative, suggests Malkin, have had such different receptions because of their relative persuasive power to insiders and outsiders in light of the contemporary political situation.

Even if the interpretive identification of modern Jewish Israelis with ancient Canaanites might seem surprising, it is unsurprising to find Jewish Israelis drawing on an ethnic myth produced within their sacred literature. But what about the Palestinian Arabs? Malkin notes, “Just as the ancient Romans appropriated the Trojan side of the Greek myth of Troy to account for (and validate) their national origins, the Palestinian ‘Canaanites’ use the Hebrew myth of the Old Testament. In both cases, myths of origines gentium depend on a notion of a ‘full’ story adopted from the Other.”⁷⁴

Malkin cites the Palestinian use of the broad contours of Jewish history as an instance of a people accepting “the Other’s view of themselves,” albeit for the purposes of promoting pro-Palestinian political goals. “Peoples often accept the Other’s view of themselves. Sometimes, reacting against it, they retain the discourse but change the roles. Such adoptions, which emphasize a connection and a distinction at the same time, are particularly significant … when one party convinces the Other that to be valid and credible that Other’s past must be interdependent with its own.”⁷⁵ What Malkin calls attention to is not merely the hegemony of particular ways of thinking about the past but also the mobility of ethnoracial discourses. The asymmetrical distributions of cultural, material, and political power may indeed account in part for the macronarrative that at least some members of a non-dominant group use to define the group, but they do not predetermine the way such a narrative is interpreted and used.

Instead of thinking of ethnographic histories as narratives wielded by those with political and/or cultural power to which nondominant groups must either capitulate (assimilate) or subvert (resist), I suggest we think of the process as rather more complex. The emergence of a successful political and cultural power requires the consolidation of persuasive self-representations (for example, Virgil’s Aeneid and its indebtedness to a “Greek” historical framework). Nonetheless, hegemonic narratives always presuppose excluded alternatives and these latter not only remain resources for contestation and resistance but also underscore the contingency of power and the possibilities for new definitions.

Origin stories about a nondominant group that appropriate the discourses and conceptual apparatus of the culturally and/or politically dominant may serve as a means of subversion, not simply an indication of subordination or assimilation.⁷⁶ But these polarities only represent the extreme ends of the spectrum of possibilities. Such appropriations may more frequently serve to produce new definitions of minority and majority groups that strengthen the coherency, comprehensibility, or even the possibility of a given minority group in a changing sociocultural and political landscape.

Early Christians adapted available “master narratives.” But we should not interpret these adaptations as evidence that early Christians were merely derivative or intentionally deceptive. Rather, by imagining early Christians as comparable to other groups in seeking to negotiate their collective identities with reference to the past we gain further appreciation for how and why early Christians found ethnic reasoning important for self-definition. Christian appeals to the past share with non-Christian appeals an attempt to authorize a collective identity in the present by devising a common past.

Some early Christians undertook to define Christianness partly in and through historical narratives that both claim illustrious and ancient origins of the (apparently new) Christian people and locate Christianness in relation to other ethnoracial groups and their associated glories or reputed shortcomings. The double-sided character of ethnoracial discourse benefited early Christians in their attempts to define Christianness as an authentic identity that was nonetheless newly emerging in the sociocultural landscape of Roman Empire. Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the authors of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, and the Tripartite Tractate all build arguments that account for historical change either as the preservation, restoration, or perfection of authentic truth(s) of the past or as the corruption and confusion of such truth(s). In appeals to the past, the teachings (or texts) and ways of life associated with particular ethnoracial groups are the vehicles of this preservation or corruption. By adapting literary and rhetorical techniques employed by authors seeking to legitimize, define, or locate particular ethnoracial groups in historicizing terms, early Christians could portray themselves as a people with a respected pedigree (emphasizing stability over time) with historical ties to other peoples (notably “Hebrews” but also Greeks and various “barbarians”). Moreover, they could also position Christians as a distinct people because they embody the best preservation or perfection of the truth(s) (thereby accounting for change and ethnoracial difference).

By means of historical narratives and cosmological narratives, early Christians sought to offer compelling stories of who they are (their “essence”) by speaking about their collective origins and the transmission of truth. At the same time, early Christians implicitly or explicitly undergirded their claims for the essence of Christianness by presupposing the malleability of identity: ethnoracial groups and/or individuals devolve or evolve in relation to the criteria for Christianness. The next two chapters elaborate this complicated dynamic and illuminate its implications for how we reimagine both the relations between Christianness and Jewishness and the relations among varieties of Christianity.