Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity Columbia

The idea of changing one’s ethnicity or race may sound quite strange to modern ears, since we live in a world that accustoms us to view ethnicity and (perhaps even more so) race as “givens.” Although it is still common to find “race” defined as a concept characterized by the belief in its immutability, I take an alternative approach drawn especially from Ann Stoler’s argument that “the force of racial discourse is precisely in the double-vision it allows, in the fact that it combines notions of fixity and fluidity in ways that are basic to its dynamic.”¹ Early Christians craft Janus-like arguments about ethnicity/race, as we have seen in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho. Whereas the last chapter calls for rethinking how we define Jewishness in relation to Christianness, this chapter highlights the implications of arguing that intra-Christian polemic exploits the double-sided character of ethnic reasoning.

Christian texts penned against rival Christian views regularly rely on ideas about race/ethnicity/kinship to create boundaries among forms of Christianness. For example, Christian writers such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen depict their own positions about Christianness as fluid because open to all, while caricaturing their rivals as holding rigidly essentialist and elitist notions about who can achieve gnosis or salvation based on their “racial” heritage. Although elaborated differently, their insistence upon fluidity in the face of alleged fixity recalls Justin’s critique of alleged Jewish appeals to descent “according to the flesh” as the basis for salvation. Nonetheless, like Justin, Clement and Origen imagine Christians as members of a new people. We should not mistake their emphases on fluidity for an absence of ethnic reasoning in their own constructions of Christianness. It is not only their Christian rivals who use ethnic reasoning. Furthermore, despite charges to the contrary, those rivals who use ethnoracial language to differentiate among humans portray ethnoracial boundaries as permeable.

Texts classified by modern scholars as “gnostic” have long been recognized as sites for ethnoracial self-definition.² A large number of the texts in the Nag Hammadi Library as well as passages preserved in the writings of heresiologists like Irenaeus use ethnic reasoning to speak about salvation and define “insiders” and “outsiders.” The “saved” are defined variously, including as descendants of Seth and members of the “immovable genea”; in other texts, humanity is divided into three genē (spiritual, soul-endowed, and material), with salvation being linked to the first two groups.

For some scholars, such ethnoracial language is a marker of sectarianism,³ setting them apart from “mainstream” forms of Christianness. In such interpretations, modern assumptions about ethnicity, race, and kinship as innate or fixed combine with a “friendly” reading of the works of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, and Epiphanius to reinforce the theological binary of heresy/orthodoxy. Ethnoracial language is contrasted with universalizing language as sectarian (or “heretical” or “gnostic”⁴) is to “mainstream” or “proto-orthodox.” These scholars largely accept the assertions made by Christian authors such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen when they claim that rival Christians view salvation as coming “from nature” (that is, innate or fixed) and classify a small group of humans as “elect” and “saved by nature” in contrast to all others.⁵

For example, Clement of Alexandria claims that a rival teacher, Theodotos, holds the view that humans come in three types—the “naturally” saved (the “pneumatics,” named for their pneuma or spiritual element); those that have the free will to choose salvation or damnation (the “psychics,” named for their psychē or souls); and those that are “naturally” excluded from salvation (the “hylics,” named for their hylē or materiality): “The pneumatic is saved by nature (physei); the psychic, having free will (autoexousia), has the capacity for faithfulness (pistis) and incorruption or unfaithfulness and corruption according to its choice; the hylic is lost by nature” (Exc. Theod. 56.3).⁶ Origen and Clement characterize some of their Christian rivals as sectarian and heretical not only by labeling them after a teacher—“Valentinians” after Valentinus, rather than “Christians,”—but also by claiming that people like Theodotos understand ethnoracial concepts as rigidly fixed in their views of criteria for salvation.

In order to avoid reinscribing the polemics of early Christian texts and to gain a more adequate reconstruction of the diversity within early forms of Christianness, we must ask not only what is at stake when these men portray the anthropology and self-understanding of their rivals as “fixed,” but also look to see whether and how ethnic reasoning informs their own positions. Reading early Christian texts for their dynamic use of ethnic reasoning avoids an interpretive framework governed by the judgments of the historical winners of these theological debates. By attending to their common rhetorical strategies, we can better understand the process by which early Christians sought to explain salvation and anthropology while fighting with one another to produce authoritative teachings. Paying attention to the way that ethnic reasoning relies on the idea that ethnicity/race is both fixed and fluid offers a way to examine early Christian literature that is still often held apart, such as “gnostic” and “nongnostic.” Indeed, my approach supports challenges to the viability of such distinctions. The view that “gnostics” believed in a form of “soteriological determinism” is one produced by a particular modern interpretation of ancient Christian polemic that uses ethnic reasoning.

I build on the work of scholars who have sought to interrupt the continuity between ancient heresiology and modern interpretations. The crucial importance of investigating these longstanding connections has been most recently and eloquently developed by Karen King.⁷ Luise Schottroff initiated a skepticism about the characterizations of “gnostic” anthropology (and its implications for soteriology) as deterministic.⁸ She set in motion further consideration of the rhetorical and polemical interests of authors like Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, and Epiphanius, all of whom provide extensive negative comments about Christian rivals.⁹ Building on Schottroff’s work, Michael Williams has proposed that the idea that the catchphrase “immovable race (genea),” which appears in five Nag Hammadi texts to designate insiders,¹⁰ can be interpreted as potentially open to all humans—not as a predetermined, elite, and fixed group.¹¹ Elaine Pagels and Harry Attridge similarly interpret the three ethnoracial distinctions of the Tripartite Tractate as referring to groups constituted by their actions rather than by ascription.¹² In my framework, this suggests that “gnostic” and “Valentinian” Christian texts fully engage the fixed/fluid dialectic of ancient ethnoracial discourse,¹³ using ethnic reasoning to speak about the “real” differences between insiders and outsiders while also envisioning the possibility and ideal of ethnoracial mutability to enable outsiders to become insiders.¹⁴ We ought to evaluate this polemical use of ethnic reasoning in light of intra-Christian struggles to secure authority and to categorize Christians into deceptively distinctive categories like “gnostics,” which may distort more than reflect the social and historical character of the varied forms of early Christian communities.

This chapter first examines some of the ways that Clement of Alexandria and Origen use ethnic reasoning and related ideas about kinship to depict their Christian rivals, especially those they classify as followers of the teacher Valentinus, as holding “fixed”—and thus heretical—ideas about anthropology and salvation. I also show how their own perspectives deploy ethnic reasoning by emphasizing its fluidity. The second half of the chapter examines the Gospel of Philip, an early Christian writing that many scholars classify as “Valentinian.” Based on Clement’s and Origen’s critiques, we should expect to find fixity characterizing its teachings about anthropology and salvation. Instead, we find that it also foregrounds fluidity in its ethnic reasoning. The uses of ethnic reasoning in the Gospel of Philip do not support the charges made by Clement and Origen.

Valentinus, Clement, and Origen were all early Christian teachers who spent at least part of their careers in the cosmopolitan urban center of Alexandria in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Valentinus flourished a generation before Clement; after beginning his career in Alexandria, he spent the latter part in Rome (active in the 140s). Like Valentinus, Clement (ca. 150–210) made his name as a Christian teacher in Alexandria. Although Clement has fared better in church historical tradition, there is no evidence that Clement had any more institutional authority than Valentinus for his teaching.¹⁵ Both teachers gained their authority not from a local bishop but from persuading students that they offered the interpretive keys to scripture and Christian life.¹⁶ Origen’s situation was slightly different. Apparently Clement’s student (though never called a “Clementine”), Origen first became a teacher in Alexandria at a time when the episcopacy (the bishop-led church structure) was gaining local power. After a conflict with a bishop, Origen relocated to Caesarea; his position there included public speaking in a church, although he continued to teach.

For this study, I am most interested in how Clement and Origen framed their anthropology and soteriology in the context of other Christian views. If we bear in mind that Clement and Origen were writing as teachers competing for students with other Christian teachers, it becomes easier to discern the polemical aspects of their arguments, including their use of ethnic reasoning. Clement and Origen both emphasized universal access to salvation, and they linked this to a universal human capacity for free will. They further linked this capacity to the idea of God as the creator of humanity. For both, becoming a Christian could be imagined as an ethnoracial transformation accomplished by using one’s free will wisely. This transformation entails becoming a member of God’s people. Clement contrasted this view with what he construes as its alternative: namely, the view that certain humans are “naturally” related to and thus saved by God. Origen similarly condemned the idea that God, as the creator of all humans, would have created some humans as naturally and permanently better than others (a difference in the nature of human souls). Thus, they relied on the argument that rival Christians hold “fixed” ideas about human differences—differences seen to be imposed at creation—and that these Christians correlate these fixed differences with salvation.

None of Clement’s works is a sustained attack against rival Christians.¹⁷ Yet he regularly locates his own views in relation to other Christian opinions, especially in his multivolume work, the Strōmateis.¹⁸ The second book of Clement of Alexandria’s Strōmateis repeatedly emphasizes that humans must actively acquire salvation—it is not a “given.” What is given is the capacity to be faithful or unfaithful. For Clement, faith is the starting point of salvation: “This great change, that a person passes from unfaith to faith and comes to faith through hope and fear, comes from God. This is important: faith appears to us as the first leaning towards salvation; fear, hope, and penitence develop in the wake of faith, in association with self-control and patience, and lead us to love and knowledge” (Strom. 2.31.1). This progression is significant for Clement not only because he distinguishes between levels of Christian advancement (where knowledge, gnōsis, is acquired to reach the highest level), but also because he depicts this cumulative progression in stark contrast to alternative understandings of Christianity.

In particular, Clement condemns Christians who allegedly hold that salvation is based upon an innate connection between humans and God and distinguish between Christians who have faith and Christians who have knowledge. He depicts these views as problematically intertwined. He holds the students of Valentinus up for special criticism: “Valentinus’s followers attribute faith to us in our simplicity, but arrogate knowledge to themselves as saved by their nature. They want it to dwell in them in accordance with the superiority of the exceptional seed sown in them. They claim it is very different from faith, as spirit is from soul” (Strom. 2.10.2, my emphasis). From this passage it seems that Valentinus’s followers distinguish between levels of Christians: those like Clement who have faith and those like Valentinus who have knowledge. But Clement also distinguishes between Christians who have faith and those who go on to gain gnōsis, as 2.31.1 above suggests. So what is Clement’s objection to these Christians? Is it that he claims to have not merely faith but also authentic knowledge? In this passage, Clement alleges that the distinction is that these Christians map these classifications as “fixed” by nature, rather than viewing Christians of “faith” and Christians of “knowledge” as different stages through which any individual can progress.

Clement objects to this alleged spiritual anthropology in two main ways: by appealing to the notion of free will and by insisting on the gap between divine and human natures. These two arguments appear together in the following passage: Clement insists that God “has no natural relation to us, as the founders of the heresies like to think” (Strom. 2.74.1, 4, 75.2) but makes Christians children if one responds correctly: “when a person freely rises to the knowledge of the truth by a process of self-discipline and learning … God calls them to the position of ‘son’ and that is the greatest progress of all” (2.74.2). This passage suggests that adoption is the model of sonship Clement has in mind for Christians.¹⁹

In Clement’s view, God has created the conditions for individuals to act—that is, to respond to divinity. Nonetheless, Clement differentiates among levels of ability to respond:

There is no benefit if the learner is not ready to receive it, or prophecy for that matter, or preaching, if the hearers are not open to persuasion…. So the divine Word has summoned everyone en masse in a loud voice knowing perfectly well those who will not allow themselves to be convinced. Nonetheless, because we have the power to respond positively or negatively, he has made a summons full of righteousness, and demands of each only that of which each is capable. There is one group for whom the capacity accompanies the will; they have developed this by practice; they have purified themselves. There is another, who may not yet have the capacity, but do already have the desire. Desire is the work of the soul, practical action requires the body as well.

The fluidity that this implies does not, however, prevent Clement from using ethnic reasoning to describe the consequences of conversion. He emphasizes that faith and righteous action are the means by which such a transformation occurs. For example:

“You have chosen God today to be your God, and the Lord has chosen you today to be his people” (Deut. 26:17–19). God makes his own the person who is eager to serve true reality and comes as a suppliant. Even if he is only one in number, he is honored on equal terms with the whole people. He is part of the people; he becomes the complement of the people, once he is reestablished out of his previous position, and the whole in fact takes its name from the part. This high birth is shown in excellence of choice and practice.

It is important to note that Clement does not pause to explain his use of high birth or ethnoracial membership (becoming a member of God’s people) as that which can be attained during one’s lifetime—these are presented as unproblematically fluid. Elsewhere, he depicts Christians as a whole as a people that is composed of other peoples; a transformation of religious practices and beliefs leads to an ethnoracial transformation.²² Furthermore, he distinguishes between Christians according to their level of training and understanding, often using procreative or kinship language.²³ Yet, when procreative, kinship, or ethnoracial concepts are linked with rival teachings, they are held up as hallmarks of fixity and determinism, as signs that these Christians teach that salvation comes from “nature,” not “obedience.”

For example, Clement writes that Valentinus, like Basilides (another teacher), thinks that there is “a genos saved by nature (physei … sōzomenon genos)” and that “this different genos (to diaphoron genos) came to us from above in order to abolish death” (Strom. 4.89.4). He disputes this alleged view for how it undermines the view that it was Christ who came to abolish death (4.91.2). Clement also indicates that he and his followers come out looking inferior according to this way of thinking, apparently being excluded from this “saved genos” and reckoned instead in the category of humans known as “psychics,” or soul-endowed. Clement exclaims, “Don’t let those previously mentioned people [that is, Valentinians and Basilidians] call us ‘psychics’ in a negative way” (4.93.1). In this same context—indeed implicitly as a defense—Clement stresses that action, not essence, is what matters, implying that these other Christians would disagree, that his rivals do not consider ethical action integral to salvation:

The perfect person (teleios) must practice love and so gain God’s friendship by fulfilling the commandments from love…. Assuredly sin is an activity (energeia) not an essence (ousia): and therefore it is not the work of God. Sinners are called the enemies of God because they make themselves enemies by the commands which they do not obey, as those who obey become friends: ones (the latter) so-called because of their fellowship, the others (former) because of their estrangement, which is the result of free choice.

In the early third century, Origen also developed his understanding of human anthropology and salvation using the concept of free will. For Origen, as discussed in his On First Principles, ethnoracial distinctions as well as those of status, gender, and health can be explained as the embodied consequences of the better or worse exercise of free will. He states this in contrast to the alleged views of rival Christians, “those from the schools of Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides” (First Princ. 2.9.5). That is, he suggests that these Christians deny the role of free will in favor of a kind of determinism. The state of one’s soul is marked on the body, including by one’s ethnoracial identity. Origen suggests that they appeal to the circumstances of birth, including ethnoracial identities as defined by physical descent, to explain human differences:

The heretics oppose us as follows … [by arguing] that some receive a better [condition] at birth: one, for example, is begotten from Abraham and born according to the promise, another of Isaac and Rebecca—the latter even supplanting his brother at his mother’s breast, and is said to be loved by God before birth. They further argue against us that one is born among the Hebrews, where one is raised in the divine law; another among the Greeks, wise men and competent scientists; another among the Ethiopians who are accustomed to eating human flesh; another among the Scythians where parricide is almost required by law; or among the Tauriens who burn strangers.

Origen suggests that his rivals appeal to scripture and cultural stereotypes to account for differences among humans. Biblical passages provide a precedent for viewing certain individuals or lineages as favored by God due to the circumstances of their birth. The latter examples range beyond scripture and rely upon stereotypes about various ethnoracial groups. The implication here is that one’s ethnoracial affiliation is established at birth and has significantly different effects upon one’s future. “Hebrew” clearly represents the most favorable ethnoracial assignment, with “Greek” playing a close second. According to Origen, his rivals explain these different human conditions in terms of “a diversity in the nature of souls” or else by “accident or chance,” so that “a soul of a bad nature is destined for a bad people (gens), while a soul of a good nature [belongs] to a good one” (2.9.5). Although he does not say so explicitly, Origen depicts these rivals as holding a fixed view about the nature of souls, which he implies correlates with fixed ethnoracial identities, fixed not only in terms of their being determined at birth but also in terms of their relative moral value.

Origen counters that “[God] created all creatures equal and alike…. But since these rational creatures … were endowed with the power of free will, it was this freedom that induced each one by its own voluntary choice either to make progress through the imitation of God or to deteriorate through negligence” (First Princ. 2.9.6). By emphasizing the fluidity of souls (and their embodied forms), Origen appears to offer an opposing view to those of his rivals, one that not only places the responsibility for differences among humans upon the individual (not the condition of their creation) but also allows for mutability between types, including ethnoracial affiliations. Because the most explicit feature of Origen’s point pertains to the mutability of one’s soteriological status, the reader could easily infer that his rivals insist on the fixity of this status. However, it is important to note that Origen does not contest the idea of diagnosing the condition of the soul from the state of the body; this view he shares with many people in the ancient world.²⁵ Rather he tries to set himself apart from rival Christians in terms of the relative fluidity or fixity attributable to the condition of the soul that manifests itself in and on the body.

Origen returns to this topic later in the work, once again framing it in intra-Christian polemical terms:

To those who fabricate “natures” (physeis) and who benefit from this teaching, we must say the following: if they preserve the view that only one lump (of clay) produces the lost and the saved, and that there is also the same creator for the lost and the saved; and if he is good, the one who makes not only the pneumatics but also the earthly (choïkos)—for this follows, then it is surely possible that that which is a vessel of honor now because of its good actions, but does not continue to act this way, in a manner that conforms to the dignity of a vessel of honor, will become in another time (aiōn) a vessel of shame.²⁶

If a good vessel can become bad, then the converse must be equally possible, Origen reasons, expanding his illustration of the ideal goal of this progression in ethnoracial terms: the goal is to become an Israelite, but not just any Israelite—specifically, an Israelite who has entered “into the church of the Lord” (First Princ. 3.1.23). Although this mutability contrasts with the apparently fixed view of ethnoracial membership that Origen attributes to those of the “schools of Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides,” Origen shares with them the view that some genē are better than others:

And perhaps the present Israelites will be deprived of their genos for not having lived worthily of their noble birth, being changed as it were from vessels of honor to vessels of dishonor; while many of the present Egyptians and Idumaeans who have come near Israel will, when they have borne more fruit, “enter into the church of the Lord,” no longer being reckoned as Egyptians or Idumaeans but for the future becoming Israelites.²⁷ Thus according to this view some people by the exercise of their wills make progress from worse to better, while others fall from better to worse.

Origen redefines what it means to be a true Israelite as an ideal culmination of the exercise of free will, a redefinition that disenfranchises “present Israelites” who have not entered “the church of the Lord.” But he does so for the purposes of intra-Christian polemic—the context is not a polemic against “present Israelites.” This is clear from the rhetorical context in which Origen sets his view that humans can improve or diminish their soteriological standing through their own actions in contrast to unnamed Christian others who allegedly invent a teaching about (two or more) fixed human natures. By invoking the categories of “pneumatics” and “earthly,” Origen implies that these are the two human natures specified by these Christian rivals.²⁸

The allegations of Clement and Origen against Christians associated with the Christian teacher Valentinus lead us to expect a fixed differentiation among kinds of humans according to their ability to be saved. But now that texts such as the Tripartite Tractate and the Gospel of Philip have come to light in the Nag Hammadi collection,²⁹ we find that their ethnic reasoning participates in the double-sided character of racial discourse, emphasizing mutability as much as “essences.” The Nag Hammadi Library contains a collection of texts from different time periods, all copied and translated from Greek into Coptic by the middle of the fourth century. So although these texts were composed somewhat earlier, it is difficult to know precisely when; the Tripartite Tractate and the Gospel of Philip are often located in the third century.³⁰

In chapter 2, I discussed the Tripartite Tractate, showing that fluidity among three human genē is central to the text’s soteriology, through an examination of the text’s brief reference to the creation of the first human as “mixed” being (inherently composite), the arrival of the savior, and illustrations of how humans can change their genos in response to the savior. The Tripartite Tractate shares Clement’s idea that humans respond to the logos according to their current capacity, and likewise frames the result of this response ethnoracially. The multiplicity of genē that results from the savior’s appearance is a problem to be resolved ultimately by reunification into one spiritual unity; the ideal destiny of humans is a dissolution of the original human mixture and a transformation into the best of these genē, the pneumatic (which also means dissolution of the human into the spiritual Pleroma, or completeness). This is a universalizing ideal that presupposes the possibility and desirability of transformation, a far cry from the allegations of elitism or determinism of which Christians associated with Valentinus are accused by Clement and Origen (as well as some modern interpreters).

In the Tripartite Tractate, the church does not constitute a single genos, although belief in Christ is portrayed as the means to achieve the ideal of unity:

The context clarifies that this unification involves “the restoration to that which used to be a unity,” through a progression of kinds of teaching tailored to the “form” of the believer.³¹ This unity is not something that individual humans have from the outset—it has to be cultivated by emphasizing the “best” portion of one’s mixed human nature. Describing the membership of the Church as comprising two genē offers the text a way to speak about differences among believers in Christ, much as developmental or educational imagery also accomplishes this for Clement and Origen. But it would be a mistake to assume that this genos language implies that the Tripartite Tractate views these differences as immutable. Instead, it closely resembles the views of both Clement and Origen, who envision a hierarchy of spiritual development that allows them to account for differences among believers but also to model ongoing transformations for the believer.

The combination of fluidity (action) and fixity (essence) in the Tripartite Tractate makes it “difficult to reconcile the teaching of this text with patristic reports of Valentinian soteriology which speak of being ‘saved by nature’ (Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.3.10, 2; Exc. Theod. 56.3)”³² or the rigid “doctrine of natures” alleged by Origen in his On First Principles. I agree with Attridge and Pagels’s assessment that “it is likely that those accounts reflect a misunderstanding (or a caricature) on the part of Church Fathers of Valentinian theology.”³³ Thomassen reasons that “the Valentinians could have responded to those who reproached their predestinationist ‘saved by nature’ view by saying that nature, or essence, is intimately tied to the actions by which it is expressed, so that it is not nature that justifies behavior but in fact behavior that reveals one’s nature.”³⁴ But if actions determine essence for the Tripartite Tractate, then it is not behavior that reveals one’s nature, but behavior that produces one’s nature, as a distillation of one of the three natures inherent in all humans. Even though it is valuable for scholars to make thematic and theological connections across different early Christian texts, the preservation of the category “Valentinian” can serve to reinforce the perception that these texts are sectarian and heterodox in contrast to those of Clement and Origen.

The Gospel of Philip is a collection of short teachings and sayings of Jesus that are not placed within a narrative structure. That is, it is structurally more like the Gospel of Thomas than it is like the canonical narrative gospels.³⁵ Although difficult to interpret given its lack of continuous narrative, many of its small units concern themselves with the transformations entailed in becoming and being an insider, often within the context of ritual practices: “Acquiring rebirth, the Name of God, and resurrection through the baptismal and anointing ceremonies is the beginning of the initiate’s transformative experiences.”³⁶ If anything holds this wide-ranging collection of materials together, it is the theme of progressive transformation. Ethnoracial language is among the wide array of ways of marking differences among humans (and human distinctiveness from other kinds of beings).³⁷

Christianness and salvation are not only portrayed in and through change (the individual must undergo profound transformation to become a Christian, Christ, bridegroom, or perfect) but also through stability or essence. That is, the fluidity of identity that the text communicates in passages about ritual, language, and salvation history is grounded in the notion that there are different kinds of beings (for example, humans versus animals; living versus dead; slave versus free, child versus adult; Christian versus Hebrew; or Roman, Greek, Jew, barbarian, and Christian; God versus “ruling powers”).³⁸

The terms of group identification that appear in the Gospel of Philip, such as “Christian,” “apostle,” “perfect,” “Hebrew,” “Jew,” and “gentile” are not static.³⁹ I mean this in two senses: they have different rhetorical functions in different units,⁴⁰ and most contexts also stress or imply that none of these categories is fixed. Despite the different sources from which the material in the Gospel of Philip is drawn,⁴¹ the passages that employ such terminology function to reinforce persistent themes of progressive transformation accomplished by faith, ritual action, ingestion, and visual perception.

Transformation of one’s mode of existence is a thematic concern that permeates the entire Gospel. The Gospel of Philip uses the juxtaposition between fixed and fluid throughout to exhort its readers to change and to destabilize apparent ontological antitheses while also proclaiming the fundamental reality of both the Pleroma and the ideal form of being.⁴² By juxtaposing materials drawn from a number of early Christian perspectives that articulate available modes of existence and the relationship between them in different ways, the Gospel produces powerful yet unstable readings of the simultaneously fixed and fluid character of humanity.

The non-narrative character of the Gospel of Philip enhances the force of this double-sided perspective, as the opening of the Gospel vividly shows:

The slave only seeks to be free, but does not hope to inherit the estate of his master. But the son is not only a son but lays claim to the inheritance of the father. Those who are heirs to the dead are themselves dead, and they inherit the dead. Those who are heirs to what is living are alive, and they are heirs to both what is living and dead…. If he who is dead inherits what is living he will not die.

This opening sequence to the Gospel introduces differences among humans: Hebrew/proselyte, slave/(free) son, dead/living, gentile/believer, Hebrews/Christians. Contrasts among humans and between humans and other kinds of beings in the Gospel of Philip serve similar rhetorical functions in their respective units—either to exhort the reader to self-transformation or to explain (and classify) the transformations that have occurred (or failed to occur) cosmologically, historically, and individually.

The opening (GosPhil 51.29–52.35) consists of “a series of potentially independent units … each involving one or more pairs of antithetical terms…. These units have been arranged in such a way as to suggest a chain of loosely analogous relationships between each antithesis and the next.”⁴⁴ These pairs do not function merely to state what characterizes the differences between the elements of a given pair. A number of these sayings also comment on the fluidity or permeability between the elements of a given pair. Take, for example, the last unit: “When we were Hebrews we were orphans, with (only) our mother, but when we became Christians we got father and mother” (52.21–24). In this passage, Hebrew/Christian form the antithetical pair, characterized by the absence or presence of a father, respectively. But the phrasing makes clear that a Hebrew can (and has) become a Christian.⁴⁵

“Hebrew” appears as an identity category in four contexts in the Gospel of Philip, always to designate a group that contrasts with that of the implied reader or the ideal of the text. We have encountered two of these contexts already. In the first, a “Hebrew” is one who can create one like her/himself—a sibling—but not a child; that is, the power of the “Hebrew” is limited, although not absent (a “Hebrew” can replicate but not procreate). In the second context, close on its heels, “Hebrew” is defined as one who only has a mother—in contrast to a “Christian.” These two identities are closely linked, however, since Hebrews can be transformed into Christians by acquiring a “father.” Jeffrey Siker interprets this clear instance of fluidity between Hebrew and Christians to mean that, for the Gospel of Philip, “Hebrews” must not be an ethnoracial term, in contrast to “Jew,” which appears twice in the Gospel. In my view, this is untenable and based primarily on the assumption that “race” is itself immutable so an indication of mutability must signal the absence of ideas about race.⁴⁶ As I have shown throughout this book, early Christians and their contemporaries neither viewed race as immutable nor distinguished sharply between religious and ethnoracial identities.

Nonetheless, Siker’s suggestion that “Hebrews” may be functioning as an intra-Christian term has merit. That is, “Hebrews” may serve to define one category of insiders in a way that is simultaneously ethnoracial and religious. The third context aligns “Hebrew” with a negative connotation of “apostle,” indicating that it is being applied to people who might consider themselves or be considered “insiders” and/or “Christians”: “Mary is the virgin whom the forces did not defile. Her existence is anathema to the Hebrews, meaning the apostles and the apostolic persons” (GosPhil 55.28–30). For Siker, this clinches his argument that “Hebrew” functions throughout the Gospel as an intra-Christian term that refers to “non-gnostic Christians.”⁴⁷ The fourth context, discussed below, refers to one who fails to receive “the Lord” at baptism as “still a Hebrew,” suggesting once again that “Hebrew” indicates a person on the “before” side of a transformative process.⁴⁸ If this is the case, then we have an instance of ethnic reasoning being used to internally differentiate members of the Church: instead of psychic and pneumatic genē as in the Tripartite Tractate, here we have “Hebrew” and “Christian.”

While I think it is plausible to interpret “Hebrew” in correlation with what other some other texts designate as the “called” or believing “psychics,” Hebrew/Christian does not encompass all types of believers for the Gospel of Philip. One passage suggests that one can progress from being a Christian to being a Christ (67.21–27), another says that insiders have “become Christ” (61.34–35), and the “perfect” and the “child of the bridal chamber” seem to occupy the pinnacle of the believing register, especially in the latter portion of the Gospel.⁴⁹ One might also read the language as polemical: the Gospel might refute the right of some to call themselves “Christian” by labeling them “Hebrews” instead. While this might seem to confirm Clement’s accusation that “Valentinians” divide Christians into different levels (those who have faith and those who have knowledge), the Gospel nonetheless depicts the boundary between “Hebrew” and “Christian” as porous.

In the final portion of the Gospel, transformation is discussed in terms of becoming one of the perfect, from the state of being imperfect—a change effected primarily through acquiring gnosis, although also variously described in terms of changing one’s genos,⁵⁰ weeding,⁵¹ and being emancipated.⁵² One of the most striking articulations of the double-sided character of the text’s soteriological framework appears near its conclusion:

Human beings mix (share) with human beings, horses mix with horses, donkeys mix with donkeys: members of a species (genos) mix [with] their fellow members. Just so, it is with spirit (pneuma) that spirit mixes, and rational faculty (logos) with rational faculty, and light has intercourse [with light]. If [you (sg.)] become human, it is [human beings] that [will] love you; if you become [spirit], spirit will join with you; [if] you become rational faculty, rational faculty will mix with you; if [you] become light, light will have intercourse with you: if you become the upper (one of those who belong above), the upper will rest upon you. If you become a horse or a donkey or calf or dog or sheep or any of the other animals, wild or domesticated, neither human being nor spirit nor rational faculty nor light will love you; neither the upper nor the inner can repose in you, and you will have no share in them.

One could not hope for a clearer expression of how mutability operates in relation to ideas about fixity. In this excerpt, species distinctions are understood as real and as having soteriological implications—for example, members of animal species have no access to salvation (the domain of the “upper” and the “inner”). Nonetheless, the passage also clearly views the boundaries between species as breachable—one can change one’s genos,⁵³ either to one’s benefit or loss, not unlike Origen’s view of the possibilities entailed in human free will. And like the Tripartite Tractate, the Gospel of Philip links one’s actions with one’s “essence.” Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley offers a complementary reading of this same passage: “The enumerated relationships depend on the addressed person’s achievements, his capacity to transform from the human to other, transcendent levels…. In the quoted passage, it is not a matter of the human being approximating the level of spirit, thought, etc., but of actively becoming these entities.”⁵⁴ Changing one’s genos has important consequences, as this passage indicates, because it means that one becomes able to attract and mix with others of one’s newly acquired genos. Being able to mix with others of one’s genos means being able to produce more members of that genos.

For many passages in the Gospel of Philip, crossing the boundary between two modes of existence is a process with two facets. The individual must receive what is necessary to accomplish the transformation (that is, “the lord”). Reception is not merely a passive action, however, since receptivity is predicated on the individual’s preparation and inclination (that is, “faith”). Salvation can only occur in and through transformations that the individual mindfully seeks or actively undertakes.

Even though the last quarter of the text elaborates this process most fully, the importance of this preparation and its consequences are articulated in a range of ways in earlier passages, including with reference to faith, ethnoracial identity, ritual, visual perception, and salvation. For example:

In this passage, faith is depicted as a necessary prerequisite to being able to “receive the lord.” The consequences of having faith or not are located in ethnoracial terms, yet the phrase “still a Hebrew” for those who do not receive the lord implies that receiving the lord transforms the individual into something other than a Hebrew. While the text may be read here as suggesting that some claim to be what they are not, it distinctly imagines that an individual can be transformed through a combination of his or her efforts and the reception of spiritual substance.

While the previous passage uses the concept of remaining a “Hebrew” to mark a failure in this transformative process, another passage speaks of this process in terms of becoming Christian:

In the passage above, reception appears to happen (or not) in the context of baptism. Other passages in the Gospel value the ritual of anointing (chrism) over that of baptism, as the following passage indicates:

The chrism is superior to the baptism, for it is from the word ‘chrism’ that we are called ‘Christians,’ certainly not because of the word ‘baptism.’ And it is because of the chrism that the ‘Christ’ has his name. For the father anointed the son, and the son anointed the apostles, and the apostles anointed us. The one who has been anointed possesses everything. S/he possesses the resurrection, the light, the cross, the holy spirit. The father gave him this in the bridal chamber; he merely accepted (the gift). The father is in the son and the son in the father. This is [the] kingdom of heaven.

The Gospel of Philip always uses the term “Christian” in a positive sense;⁵⁵ nonetheless, it also exhorts its readers to become “perfect,” a “Christ,” a “child” (of the perfect human being), and a “child of the bridegroom.” The following passage suggests the possibility of further levels of transformation available beyond “Christian”: “If someone does not acquire [the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit], the name too will be taken from them. But if one gets them in the chrism of [ … ] of the force of the cross, which the apostles called right and left. For this person is no longer a Christian but rather is a Christ” (67.21–27).⁵⁶

The Gospel not only calls individuals to prepare themselves for transformation but also speaks about the agents of transformation. Although the “lord,” “holy spirit,” and “anointed one (Christ)” are among the key agents of transformation in the Gospel, humans can also be such agents. We find this in the Gospel’s opening statement: “A Hebrew makes (tamie) another Hebrew, who is called a ‘proselyte.’ But a proselyte does not make another proselyte” (GosPhil 51.29–32).⁵⁷ The meaning of “Hebrew” (and proselyte) in this passage is unclear but, as the opening statement of the Gospel, it anticipates subsequent passages that speak about like producing like and distinguish between creating and begetting, especially the following passage, which distinguishes between those who can make others like themselves and those who cannot: “The heavenly person has many offspring, more than the earthly…. A parent makes (tamie) a child and a young child is powerless to make children. For one who has (recently) been begotten (jpō) cannot beget (children): rather, a child begets siblings, not children.” (58.17–18, 22–26).⁵⁸

The latter portion of the text includes instructions to readers about the roles that humans can play in producing other perfect beings (through love [GosPhil 78.12–24], begetting [81.14–34], and evaluating the soul’s condition in one’s students [81.1–14]). Discerning the Gospel’s interest both in exhorting individuals to change and in addressing agents of transformation, we can explain the prevalence of passages that offer the apparently contrasting views that: (1) one can transform oneself (through faith, gnosis, or what one ingests) or be transformed (by chrism, food); and (2) like produces like. The Gospel of Philip offers a rather Lamarckian notion of identity—that is, you can acquire characteristics during your life that you then pass on, so that, having been transformed, you can produce others like yourself. Transmission can happen in the form of a “kiss” or through the ritual of anointing or chrism, which produces an apostolic lineage.

We do not know the relationship between the Christians who composed the Tripartite Tractate and the Gospel of Philip, let alone with the Christians with whom Clement and Origen were in competition. Nonetheless, these texts are valuable because they show that the categorical assertion of a “doctrine of natures” or of the notion of a genos of “naturally” saved persons belies the fluidity and complexity of available Christian understandings of anthropology and their relation to salvation.

To conclude this section, it is worth turning briefly to evidence preserved by Clement. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, among Clement’s surviving works is a notebook of quotations by and remarks about the Christian teacher Theodotos. The Excerpts of Theodotos offers a site for examining how Clement massaged the thought of other Christians in order to portray and critique a Christian anthropology of salvation as “fixed,” even though we cannot always be certain of when he is citing rival views and when he is stating his own.⁵⁹

Near the opening of this notebook, Clement makes a note that suggests more fluidity than fixity to Theodotos’s teaching. He records the teaching that when Jesus said, upon his death, “Father, I deliver my spirit (pneuma) into your hands” (Luke 23:46), what he meant was that he was delivering the “pneumatic seeds” that he had collected, as was his role in the drama of cosmic rescue and salvation. These pneumatic seeds are the “elect” (Exc. Theod. 1.1–2). Clement then seems to add his own comment to this teaching: “The elect seed we call ‘sparks’ brought to life by the logos, ‘pupil of the eye,’ ‘mustard seed,’ and ‘yeast,’ which unifies by faithfulness the genē that seem to be divided” (Exc. Theod. 1.3). Clement’s comment seems to affirm the idea of pneumatic or elect seeds. The question is whether this pneumatic seed exists in all, or whether it can be gained or lost. Clement’s rendering of this teaching suggests that he characterizes its anthropology of salvation as limiting the pneumatic seed to Theodotos and his followers, who define themselves as having this seed by nature. His presentation of Theodotos’s threefold distinction of humans into pneumatic, psychic, and hylic would seem to support this. But Clement’s notes on Theodotos suggest a more complicated picture, one in fact much closer to his own views.⁶⁰

Throughout the notebook there are a number of passages that suggest a fluid if not also universal understanding of the human capacity for salvation. The distinction between “psychic” and “pneumatic” is not fixed but rather seems to designate the kind of difference that Clement sees between those who have the desire to respond to the logos and those who have the full capacity to respond. Similarly, the pneumatics are portrayed as able to transform the psychics, much as Clement envisions the task of the Christian “Gnostic” to be to instruct and transform (“beget”) other Christians.

The similarities among the Christian views represented by Theodotos, the Tripartite Tractate, the Gospel of Philip, Clement, and Origen do not mean that all early Christians were the same, after all. Rather, it suggests that ethnic reasoning could be used not only to define membership as an insider (being an insider is being a member of a new people, a saved genos, etc.) but also as a polemical device to assert the validity one’s own position in a context of multiple Christian options.⁶¹ Attention to ethnic reasoning across traditional scholarly lines of classification, such as gnostic/nongnostic or heretical/orthodox, reveals that early Christians found the dialectical understanding of ethnicity/race valuable for formulating their various and competing positions about Christianness and the process of becoming a Christian. For those inclined to still give more weight to Clement and Origen because of their retrospective place in church tradition, it is crucial to underscore that Clement and Origen use ethnic reasoning polemically to support their interpretations of scripture and to counter Christian rivals, but they nonetheless rely upon ethnoracial concepts for their own definitions of Christianness.

Texts cannot serve as windows onto ancient social formations, and few scholars believe it is possible to deduce a community solely from a text. That said, when a text frames its discussion as if there were a community behind it—whether by appealing to a collective ritual, a “school,” or a people—it is possible to say that the text rhetorically invokes a social group or groups. We can examine texts for the social ideals they conjure even if we cannot establish precise relations between a text and the social groups it addresses or calls into being. Ethnic reasoning is an effective rhetorical device for those seeking to gain authority for their visions of Christianness in part because they can use it to persuade readers to think of themselves and others using collective categories.

My analysis suggests that early Christians sometimes used ethnic reasoning for polemical purposes, manipulating the fixed/fluid dynamic of ethnoracial discourse to differentiate among forms of Christianness that were, in many cases, quite similar to each other. One of the issues lurking in the intra-Christian arguments about anthropology has to do with the scope and access to salvation—the charge that certain Christians were teaching that some people were intrinsically saved while others are intrinsically excluded seems to pose a direct threat to universalizing proclamations of Christianness. Early Christians not only had to discuss what it means to make universal claims (that is, that salvation is for all humans), but they also had to negotiate rival Christian claims to speak about these universals. Allegations of soteriological fixity were rhetorically powerful because they made the accused seem sectarian in a field of otherwise universalizing claims. Modern scholars have too often understood these allegations as descriptive of rival Christian views and neglected to unpack the contours of universalizing claims.