Christian universalism and race/ethnicity/peoplehood are usually understood to belong on opposing sides, especially in interpretations of texts such as Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This verse is often used to reconstruct an inclusive and egalitarian impulse in the Jesus movement and early Christian communities.1 In such reconstructions, universalism is defined over and against race/ethnicity/peoplehood as that which transcends these categories. I am arguing instead that saying that Christianity is open to all was not mutually exclusive with defining Christians as members of an ethnic or racial group. In many early Christian texts, defining Christians as members of a people reinforces rather than conflicts with assertions of Christian universalism.
This chapter draws together elements of early Christian arguments that we have seen in earlier chapters, especially appeals to the mutability of ethnicity, to show how early Christians used ethnic reasoning to construct universalizing arguments. Approaching race and ethnicity as characterized by a double-sided discourse of fixity and fluidity allows us to see how universalizing arguments can in fact be dependent upon—have embedded within them—ideas of race and ethnicity. By construing Christianness as having an “essence” (a fixed content) that can be acquired, early Christians could define conversion as both the transformation of one’s ethnicity and the restoration of one’s true identity. And by portraying this transformation as available to all, Christians universalized this ethnoracial transformation.
I have shown throughout this book that many early Christians defined themselves as members of a people, often distinguishing themselves by their religious practices. For example, Clement of Alexandria affirms this by quoting an earlier Christian source, the Preaching of Peter, “Do not worship … as the Hellenes … neither worship as the Jews. But we, who worship [God] in a new way, in the third way (genei), are Christian” (Strom. 6.39.4, 41.2, 6).2 Hellene, Jew, and Christian are functionally equivalent categories of “peoples,” where peoplehood is marked by modes of worship and attitudes toward “the one Lord.”
Ethnic reasoning allowed Christians not only to describe themselves as a people, but also to depict the process of becoming a Christian as one of crossing a boundary from membership in one race to another. Clement explains the above quotation by stating that: “Accordingly then, those from the Hellenic training and also from the law who accept faith are gathered into the one genos of the saved people (laos): not that the three peoples are separated by time, so that one might suppose [they have] three different natures, but trained in different covenants of the one Lord” (Strom. 6.42.2). Clement elaborates the tripartite division contained in the Preaching of Peter but shifts the emphasis from what indexes their differences (how they worship) to what they share: a common ground in “the one Lord.”3 Clement does not use this common ground to dissolve all the differences among Hellenes, Jews, and Christians. Rather, he uses this common ground to define Christians as a distinct people constituted out of former members of the Hellenes and Jews. Christians are the genos of the saved. Members of the first two peoples remain distinct because of their religious practices but are eligible through “training” in a different covenant to become members of the third people, “the one genos” saved by faith.4 Thus what we might conceive of as a religious process, conversion, could be simultaneously imagined as a process of ethnic transformation.
For Clement, transformation from one category to another is neither a movement from one religious identity to another nor one from an ethnoracial identity to a religious one. “Religion” and “ethnicity” or “race” are mutually constituting here, not oppositional. Christianness is potentially universal not because Christians do not constitute a people, but rather because Clement attributes to the Christian people two key attributes: superiority as the “one saved genos” and accessibility via “faith.”
If ethnicity is understood as mutable, then it is possible to argue not only that one can change ethnicity but that one should. Some Christians equate the Christian genos with the human race as a whole, rendering it a potentially universal category. For Clement, transformation in the direction of Hellene or Jew to Christian is privileged. The text does not encourage the reader to ask whether it is possible to imagine a Christian becoming a Hellene or a Jew, nor does it address whether Greekness (“Helleneness”) and Judeanness might be equally accessible through transformation of one’s mode of practice and attitudes. The universalizing potential of the category “Christian” instead implicitly positions Hellene and Jew as finite and inferior.
This chapter is divided into two major sections. In the first half, I explore the three main ways in which early Christians make universalizing claims, illustrating how ethnic reasoning contributes to each. In the second half, I turn to consider the implications of ethnic reasoning for how we interpret early and modern claims about Christian universalism and for how we interpret the concept of conversion.
Three Aspects of Christian Universalism
In analyses of early Christianity, “universalism” usually includes three main ideas: the ability for anyone to become a Christian (regardless of background), the aspiration to win over all humans as members, and the ideal that Christianity consists of a unified set of beliefs and practices. Early Christians make such claims. All three aspects of universalism could be expressed using ethnic reasoning.
Universal Access to Membership
Early Christians could use ethnic reasoning to indicate the openness of membership by emphasizing both the fundamental connections among apparently different groups of humans and the possibility of crossing ethnoracial boundaries. These arguments belong to a kind of ethnic discourse that Jonathan Hall has dubbed “aggregative” because they serve to bring ethnic groups together.5 In addition to the example from Clement given above, in the previous chapter we have already seen a good example of this from Origen’s On First Principles: “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.” (3.1.23).
In this example, actions (coming near Israel, bearing fruit, and entering into the church of the Lord) effect an ethnic transformation. In chapter 1, I showed that religion could function to emphasize the potential fluidity of ethnoracial affiliation. Looking at the matter from a slightly different angle, we can say that because of this perceived fluidity, early Christians and their contemporaries could imagine a change in religiosity as an ethnoracial transformation. This approach challenges conventional ways of thinking about religious conversion.
Studies of conversion usually either tacitly or explicitly define this transformative concept as mutually exclusive with ethnicity and race because they are viewed as “fixed.” If ethnicity/race are understood as only “fixed” (for example, by birth), then it is impossible to imagine their connection to conversion. But as we have seen in Judith, 1 Peter (chapter 1), Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho (chapter 3), Origen’s On First Principles, and the Tripartite Tractate (chapter 4), conversion can be imagined in terms of change from one ethnos/genos/laos to another, effected through a change in one’s religious beliefs and practices, which may also entail the acquisition of new ancestors (such as Abraham). As Justin says, by changing religious attitudes and practices, people of “of various colors (poikilos) and appearances (polyeidos) from every human genos” become members of another people (Dial. 134.5). While it might remain useful to speak about conversion as religious transformation, we cannot impose a rigid distinction between conversion and other kinds of social transformations. Religious, civic, and ethnoracial communities were closely interconnected, including in conceptualizations of Christianness.
Aspirations of Universal Scope
By viewing ethnicity or race as subject to change, Christians could also assert that if anyone can change to become a member of the Christian race, then all ought to. We have seen a good example of this in Justin’s Apologies in chapter 2. In the Apologies, Justin links all humans, implying that all share an essence that gives us the capacity to become members of this new people equated with Christians. He claims that all humans have a “seed” of the logos—which he equates with Christ—implanted in us (2 Apol. 8.1).
Even though all humans have a “logos seed” and are thus potentially Christian, one must nonetheless activate this potential through specific training, resulting in proper actions and beliefs. He claims that Christ came “for the conversion (allagē) and restoration (epanagogē) of the human race” (1 Apol. 23.2). In Justin’s view, humanity requires conversion and restoration for two main reasons: first, he asserts that the people who had transmitted the truth about the logos, the Jews, went astray; and second, although all humans have the logos implanted in them, most peoples have not had access to unsullied teachings about the truth. So although the logos is a fixed and universal essence, it has not been fully realized in most humans.
This logic implies that Christians are the true form of humanity, while all other ethnic/racial differences correlate with degrees of imperfect knowledge of the logos.
Justin’s view that Christ was the historical incarnation of the preexistent logos allows him to claim that “[Christ] is the logos of which every human genos partakes. Those who lived in accordance with the 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). Conversion is not only framed as the activation and perfection of the logos seed already in one’s soul; it also transforms people from their imperfect, particular ethnicity to the one unifying, universal one—Christian. Openness of membership and ideally universal scope were thus comprehensible in ethnic terms, not just in contrast to them.
Another second-century source, the Acts of Andrew, illustrates how the double-sided dynamic of ethnicity/race as fixed and fluid informed early Christian portrayals of conversion, including as potentially and ideally universal.6 The character of Andrew in the Acts of Andrew employs kinship and ethnoracial language to refer to those who share his views and way of life, or those whom he is exhorting to do so: insiders are members of a happy or blessed (makarion) genos (33.4 [1]), a saved (sōzomenon) genos (50.5 [18]), and his siblings and children. Membership in this happy, saved genos is attained by remembering one’s true nature (the fixed element) upon hearing Andrew’s words and by responding by adopting an ascetic ethos (the fluid element).
Andrew defines himself as an apostle whose job is not to teach but to “remind everyone who is akin (sungenēs) to these words” (AA 47.1–3 [15]). This phrasing appeals to the notion of a primordial, preexistent essence in each person that Andrew’s presence helps to activate, rather than a new identity that Andrew helps his listeners to create. But Andrew’s speeches make clear that action is required, even for those who are related to him and his teachings. Kinship with Andrew is demonstrated by the transformations that occur in a recipient of Andrew’s words. Individuals are reckoned as members of the saved genos if they recognize their “own nature” and act upon it. The fluidity obvious in conversion is thus rhetorically tempered by an appeal to the underlying “nature” and kinship between Andrew’s followers and himself.7 Similarly, Andrew depicts the character of this happy, saved genos as one of immutability, immovability, rest, and stability.8 Nonetheless, it is only through change that one can achieve this immovable state. In the Acts of Andrew, this required change includes the rejection of sexual contact. As Andrew puts it, the soul requires training and discipline in order to accomplish this goal. While conversion is framed in terms of remembering one’s kinship with Andrew and his teaching, we should bear in mind that the ascetic ideal he promotes is one that would have been countercultural in this social and historical context. For most listeners, Andrew’s exhortation to “stand fast” presupposes a prior significant departure from prevailing social norms, especially regarding sexual behavior.
Andrew’s conversations with one of his followers, Maximilla, exemplify the transformative power of his teaching, while kinship imagery affirms their fundamental connection. Maximilla seeks Andrew’s advice about how to handle herself in relation to her husband, Aegeates, who is not only pressuring her to have sex with him but also threatening to torture or kill Andrew if she refuses. Andrew urges her to stand firm in her resolve to “resist the whole allure of sexual intercourse, because you wish to be separated from a polluted and foul way of life.” This encouragement suggests that the gap between insiders and outsiders is wide—no less than the extremes of a pure versus a polluted way of life. So he urges her to “endure all [Aegeates’] torments … and you will see him wholly paralyzed and wasting away from you and from all your kin” (AA 37.15–17 [5], my emphasis).9 Since appeals to kinship pervade this narrative, we need to ask about whether some people are necessarily excluded from kinship with Andrew. That is, does this kinship language connote a non-universal vision of Christianity? What is the scope of the concept of genos, whether qualified as “happy” (makarion) (33.4 [1]) or “redeemed” (sōzomenos) in the Acts of Andrew? Does it refer to a limited group of humans who are, by nature, akin to Andrew?
Although some characters in the Acts of Andrew are portrayed negatively, such as Aegeates, it is by no means clear that any humans are intrinsically unable to become members of the saved genos. The saved genos is rather constituted by those who successfully “struggle against many pleasures” and reject the false friendship offered by the devil. Membership seems contingent on learning the “plan of salvation” and acting in accordance with it. While clearly not equivalent with the entire human genos, because some humans remain ensnared by false friendship with evil, the saved genos is potentially available to all humans.10 Andrew’s concluding speech suggests this, as he links his own apostolic actions to cosmic struggles that have ramifications far beyond the purview of the present:
[The devil] carried on his work for so long that humanity forgot to recognize it, whereas he (the devil) knew: that is, on account of his gift he [was not seen to be an enemy]. But when the mystery of grace was lighted up, and the counsel of (eternal) rest was made known and the light of the word appeared and it was proved that the redeemed race (sōzomenos genos) had to struggle against many pleasures, then enemy himself was scorned, and … he began to plot against us with hatred and enmity and arrogance. And this he practices: not to leave us alone until he thinks to separate us (from God). For then indeed the one who is a stranger (allotrios) to us was without care; and he pretended to offer us a friendship such as was worthy of him. And he had no fear that we whom he had led astray should revolt from him. However the possession of the plan of salvation, which enlightened us (like a light), has [made his enmity] not stronger [but clearer…. Since therefore, siblings, we know the future, let us awake from sleep, not being discontented, not cutting a fine figure, nor bearing in our souls his marks which are not our own, but being lifted up wholly in the whole world, let us await with joy the end and take flight from him.
(AA 50.1–15, 18–23 [18])
Genesis 2–3 and personified evil offer the primary points of reference for this cosmic framework. Andrew’s earlier conversation with Maximilla about the effects of her resistance to Aegeates especially elaborates the allusions to Genesis:
And I rightly see in you Eve repenting and in myself Adam being converted: for what she suffered in ignorance my words are now setting right again in your soul, because you are converted (epistrephousa): and what the mind suffered which was brought down with her and was estranged from itself, I put right with you who know that you yourself are being drawn up. For you yourself who did not suffer the same things have healed her affliction; and I by taking refuge with God have perfected his (Adam’s) imperfection: and where she disobeyed, you have been obedient; and where he acquiesced, there I flee; and where they let themselves be deceived, there we have known. For it is ordained that everyone should correct his own fall.
(AA 37.20–29 [5])
This passage, especially the last sentence, reinforces the reading that all humans must transform themselves to gain salvation, but also that everyone potentially can. Both the passage above referring to the correction of Adam and Eve and the passage from the conclusion about the activity of the devil suggest that each human has the capacity to be misled or to gain salvation. It also suggests that individual actions contribute to the redemption of humanity as a whole. Thus, even a text that may initially appear to offer a non-universalizing vision of salvation and Christian membership actually uses ethnic reasoning and kinship imagery to define conversion as an ideal for all humans.
Universalism as Unification of Christianity
The third aspect of early Christian universalism is often referred to as its impulse toward catholicity. The idea that Christianity was or sought to be a unified whole from the outset is a powerful ideal invoked not only by modern but also by early Christians. Keith Hopkins rightly cautions us against taking such claims at face value:
The frequent claim that scattered Christian communities constituted a single church was not a description of reality in the first two centuries C.E., but a blatant yet forceful denial of reality. What was amazing was the persistence and power of the ideal in the face of its unachievability, even in the fourth century.11
In other words, although many early Christians claim to speak on behalf of all Christians, such universalizing claims are idealizing, not descriptive. Most scholars and many others who have watched recent cable or public television productions on Christian origins now operate within a consensus that diversity and difference characterize the groups that we collectively study under the heading early Christianity. Those aspects of Christianity that are asserted as universally true (such as Jesus’s resurrection) were themselves only produced through internal struggles and debates.12 Early Christians used ethnic reasoning as one means by which to undertake these struggles for authoritative meaning, practices, and identities.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, race and ethnicity became battleground concepts for rivalries among Christians before legalization. Some Christians accused other Christians of formulating exclusive, fixed ideas of membership—membership in an elect, limited group—in contrast to other Christians whose membership criteria were unlimited and open. So-called gnostics were said to speak of themselves as belonging to a “naturally” elect or saved race which gave them access to special spiritual knowledge and power. Many modern scholars have missed the fact that antignostic Christians also defined themselves as belonging to a people, race, or ethnicity—one that can be joined. Importantly, “gnostic” texts also indicate that individuals can acquire membership, so their understandings of people-hood are far more fluid than their rivals let on. That is, one way to assert universalism on behalf of one’s particular preferred version of Christianity is to “racialize” rival forms, construing them as exclusive and limited. The presence of this logic in early Christian texts indicates a kind of prehistory to modern racial thinking, where particularity and “race” appear to be linked even while the racialized logic embedded in universal claims is masked.
The second-century visionary text the Shepherd of Hermas offers another kind of example of how ethnic reasoning could function to assert the ideal of unity among Christians. The narrative uses ethnic reasoning both to depict Christianity as a universal phenomenon drawn from a broad range of different peoples and to manage diversity among Christians. In Hermas, the believing community is imagined as a single people whose differences should be eradicated upon joining and forming this community; color symbolism functions in the text to reinforce the ideal of uniformity among members.13 Since Hermas views differences among insiders as a problem, it does not necessarily offer a comforting model for contemporary Christians.
Complex ethnoracial language suffuses the longest unit of the third (and final) portion of Hermas (the Similitudes). Although the dating and compositional history of this prophetic and visionary text has been debated, “no other noncanonical writing was as popular before the fourth century.”14 Near the end of this long work, our protagonist Hermas receives a vision of a gigantic tower being built on a very large rock in a plain: “[The angel] showed me a great plain surrounded by twelve mountains; each mountain had a different appearance” (Herm. Sim. 9.1.4). The twelve mountains encircling the plain provide most of the stones for the tower Hermas watches being built. This tower is interpreted both as the church and as a people, the “race of the righteous (to genos tōn dikaiōn)” (9.17.5).
Hermas’s angelic guide tells him that the mountains represent “the tribes (phylai) that inhabit the whole world” (9.17.1). Hermas then asks why the mountain (and thus, the peoples) differ from one another. His guide replies, “‘Listen,’ he said, ‘these twelve tribes (phylai) that inhabit the whole world are twelve peoples (ethnē), but they are various in understanding and thinking. As you saw the various mountains, so they are, and such are the differences of mind and way of thinking among the peoples (ethnē)’” (9.17.2). Although the mountains are glossed as peoples, the text never links any specific group with a specific mountain, leaving it to the reader to make any such connections.
In Hermas, these differences are indicated by climate, fauna, and the variety and quality of vegetation on the mountain, and also by color. The mountains are described in a roughly hierarchical fashion, with color-coded designations reserved for the extremes.15 Prior to becoming part of the tower, the stones quarried from these mountains are said to be of many different colors (9.4.5), even though the text only specifies an overall color for the first and twelfth mountains: “The first was black as pitch, the second was bare without vegetation, and the third was full of thorns and thistles …”(9.1.5), “and the twelfth mountain was all white, and its appearance was joyful, and the mountain was in itself very beautiful” (9.1.10). The color imagery in this context not only seems to carry some value judgment about the quality of the mountains but also serves to emphasize the magnitude and wonder of the building project. As we soon learn, most stones—regardless of their source—become “bright with a single color,” white, once they are placed into the growing tower.
The tower stuns Hermas: “it was built as if it were all one stone, without a single joint in it, and the stone appeared as if it had been hewn out of a rock; it seemed to me to be a single stone” (9.9.7). This oneness is especially conveyed by the transformation of the stones into one color.16 The angel explains this transformation in terms of response to God: “all the ethnē that dwell under heaven, when they heard and believed, were called after the name of God. So when they received the seal they had one understanding and one mind, and their faith became one, and their love one” (9.17.3–4).
For this text, Christianity is universal because its membership consists of people from the whole world, represented by the twelve mountains. Furthermore, the unity of Christianity is conveyed by the resulting tower—a single, uniform, monochrome edifice. But despite this vision of the tower as a unified whole, composed from all manner of people/stones, it turns out that this is not entirely the case. A few stones do not change color when placed in the tower and have to be removed:
Stones of different colors were brought from all the mountains, hewn out by the men and given to the virgins. The virgins carried them through the gate and turned them over for the building of the tower. When the multicolored stones were put into the building, they all became white, and changed their various colors. But some stones that the men had supplied for the building did not become bright, but stayed as they were …
(Herm. Sim. 9.4.4–6)
This lack of transformation is immediately explained as a result of incorrect procedure: the unchanging stones were not handed over to the virgins nor brought through the gate (9.4.6). The correct procedure is to place the stones “by the side of the tower, that the virgins may bring them in through the gate and give them over for the building. For if … they are not brought in by the hands of these virgins through the gate they cannot change their colors” (9.4.8). These dozen virgins are interpreted as “holy spirits” and “the powers of the son of God” (9.13.2). Proper conversion entails passing through their hands, which the angel also describes in baptismal terms: “if you receive only the name but do not receive clothing from them, you will gain nothing” (9.13.2). The intended effect of baptism is then described in language consistent with the tower: “all the stones … that you saw contributing to the tower’s construction, which were given by their [the virgins’] hands and remained in the tower, had been clothed in the power of these virgins. This is why you see the tower having become one solid stone with the [foundation] rock” (9.13.4–5).
But even following the correct procedure still does not guarantee a unified whole. After the stones have turned gleaming white in the tower, they are tested. Some prove “rotten” (Herm. Sim. 9.5.2), either cracking or becoming discolored.17 These imperfect stones are removed from the tower and replaced (9.6.6–7).18 The problem of difference within Christianity now commands our attention, not the question of how Christianity is a unity produced from a prior diversity.
Color imagery in this context functions to highlight tensions in the universalizing vision between a unifying ideal for the tower/church and the differences among members.19 As the discolored and cracked stones indicate, any stone that fails to gleam whitely spells trouble. The individual Christians for whom the rejected stones stand are identifiable both as members of lawless genē and as individual consecrated Christians who have given themselves over to vices.20 Those who do not maintain harmony with the new whole “were cast out from the race of the righteous (tou genous tōn dikaiōn) and became again what they had been before, only worse” (Herm. Sim. 9.17.5).
To understand why some stones are cast out of the righteous race after having joined it, Hermas queries his instructor about the character of each mountain-nation. Remember that, until this point, the mountains have been described as the plurality of peoples from which the tower is built. But this time the mountains represent rival forms of Christianness, with the connection left unclear as to how these actually relate to the various peoples from whom the church is constituted. The angel explains the mountains now as various types of insiders—both good kinds and bad:21 “From the first mountain, the black one, are such believers as these: apostates and blasphemers against the Lord, and betrayers of the servants of God. For these there is no repentance, but there is death, and for this case they also are black, for their race (genos) is lawless” (9.19.1). Each mountain is described in turn, with the twelfth mountain producing the most pure believers—once again, only the first and twelfth mountain are associated with a specific color. There is no question that whiteness is contrasted with blackness in this text as good to bad, even though whiteness and blackness cannot be presumed to carry the same freight that they have acquired in modern definitions of race.22
What makes the interpretation of the mountains so challenging is that they are multivalent, standing both for the many peoples from which the church is built and for the many kinds of believers of which the church consists, on a spectrum from unacceptable to perfect. The text uses the mountains to grapple with two distinct issues: that of the diversity of the backgrounds of those who join the movement and internal diversity among Christians. Not only does the text speak of the mountains as different peoples who together constitute the church, but it also describes Christians as constituting a race (of the righteous) and classifies Christians in racialized language, according to the quality of their allegiance and beliefs.
While the text seems to leave open the possibility of membership in the church/tower for most “tribes,” it focuses more on the problem of what happens once one is a member, not upon entrance requirements for membership per se. Except for the few stones initially excluded on procedural grounds, it is only once each stone has become part of the tower that the problems begin. In this vision, universality is equated with uniformity—all its elements should be white stones that fit seamlessly together. Any internal differences can threaten the integrity of the whole.
What is left unexplained, however, is the extent to which the reader ought to draw any causal connections between one’s pre-Christian ethnicity and one’s likely success or failure at becoming the best kind of Christian.23 The text does not make any explicit correlation between the levels of interpretation of the mountains as pre-Christian peoples and as types of Christians, in contrast to some modern interpretations of Christian origins that correlate between “racial type” and “heresy” or “orthodoxy.”24
Nonetheless, the narrative does hint that certain people are “naturally” suited to membership in the “righteous genos” by virtue of their origins. This perspective is introduced when the angel tells Hermas about the stones quarried as replacements for the rejected ones. Until this point in the narrative, we have only encountered stones quarried from the twelve mountains or from the mysterious “certain deep place” that represents biblical ancestors (the first and second generations of “righteous men” [andres dikaioi]), prophets of God, and the prophets and teachers of “the proclamation of the son of God” (Herm. Sim. 9.15.4).25 Now we learn that the replacement stones are quarried from the plain in which the tower is being constructed. Hermas asks about the origins of these stones. As it turns out, “the stones that are taken from the plain … are the roots (rizai) of the white mountain [the twelfth one]” (9.30.1). Construed as the origins of the most positively valued mountain, these stones are not at risk of turning “black” once they are in the tower, as some of the stones quarried from other sources might; instead, the stones from the plain “have been found to be white, both past and future believers, for they are of the same genos. Blessed is this genos, because it is innocent” (9.30.3). The text seems to suggest that some people, by genos, are “naturally” part of this tower. Even if one translates genos here as “kind” or “type,” this explanation is still in the mode of ethnic reasoning, since it creates a historical lineage for some Christians and seems to rely on the notion of inherent, heritable characteristics, especially as they bear upon religious worthiness.26
This portion of Hermas thus contains two ways of thinking about race/ethnicity: Christianness is either incipient (or fixed: genos of the stones from the plains) or created (or fluid: through the transformation of ethnos from other mountains). Although both elements of the double-sided character of ethnic reasoning are present in Hermas, an emphasis on mutability predominates. The bulk of the unit stresses the creation of the Christian genos out of a diverse array of other ethnē, phylai, and genē by means of transformation; even the stones from the plain must be incorporated into the tower by the correct procedure (via the virgins).
The “root” stones are not incorporated into the tower until after it is well under construction. The assertion that there is a genos of believers that extends to a time before Christ, no matter how paradoxical that might seem,27 could form part of a defense against accusations that Christianity is a new (and therefore illegitimate) phenomenon. But rhetorically, the explanation of these latecomers as genealogically linked to the white mountain may instead function to authorize some of the newest members of the righteous genos whose credentials (especially if they hold leadership positions in the community) may be perceived as needing support.
The Shepherd of Hermas clearly illustrates how universalizing claims serve intra-Christian functions. When it comes to envisioning membership in the righteous genos, internal differences are viewed as a problem. While universalism need not be defined in terms of homogeneity,28 in Hermas the universal ideal is characterized by uniformity. For example, the third mountain is associated with believers who are “rich and mixed up with various affairs of business” (9.22.1). As a result, they “do not cleave to the servants of God but are choked by their work and go astray” (9.22.2). For these believers, attitudes toward wealth and perhaps ethics put them in tension with the values promulgated by the text for the community. In contrast, the description for insiders from the fifth mountain uses language common to antignostic polemic; the believers of this mountain are “slow to learn and arrogant (authadēs), … wishing to know everything (panta ginōskein) and yet they know nothing at all (ouden holōs ginōskousi). Because of this arrogance of theirs, they lack knowledge (synesis—this term functions as a pun here, because it also means “union”); blind folly (aphrosynē mōra) has entered into them” (9.22.1–2). The description continues by ridiculing these believers for exalting themselves as wise teachers when they are in fact senseless. By claiming the vantage point of the true universal church, the narrative marginalizes rival Christians (who might also claim to speak for all Christians) as rotten members who must be cast out of the righteous race or “repent” by conforming to the teachings and practices that represent the text’s point of view. This suggests a historical context of lively intra-Christian competition.29
My basic argument so far is that early Christian texts do not support the view that Christian universalism is antithetical to Christian self-definition as a people. Whether presenting Christianity as a movement open to all, ideal for all humans, or ideally unified and uniform, early Christians used ideas about the fluidity and fixity of ethnicity and race to formulate these claims. When speaking about the movement’s openness, early Christians like Justin and the authors of the Acts of Andrew and the Shepherd of Hermas emphasize the fluidity of ethnicity/race by depicting conversion as changing one’s ethnicity especially through new beliefs, way of life, ritual practices, and the acquisition of new ancestors. When speaking about Christianity as a group ideally encompassing all humans and internally unified, Christians tend instead to articulate a fixed aspect of ethnicity/race in relation to its potential fluidity. By claiming that humans share some universal characteristic, like Justin’s notion of a logos seed in all humans, or a shared common ancestor (like Adam or Noah), followers of Jesus could formulate universalizing visions of the future of their people by imagining a way for the original unity of humanity to be reunited in the destiny of a single people. The Shepherd of Hermas stresses that the Christian community ought to be a monolithic, seamless whole—signs of variation or internal fluidity are grounds for exclusion.
Prismatic Considerations: Implications of Ethnic Reasoning for Christian Universalism
Universal claims are neither intrinsically liberating nor oppressive, but can serve both possible ends, depending upon who is making them, in what contexts, and to what ends. Regina Schwartz has sagely noted that “Universalism comes in different shapes, as an ideal of genuine toleration, as an effort to protect universal human rights, and as a kind of imperialism that insists that we are all one and that demands an obliteration of difference.”30 Universalism can easily entail idealization of certain aspects of humanity over and against an “other” defined as separate or less than human; racism lurks “both on the side of the universal and the particular.”31
In this half of the chapter, I explore two major implications of seeing that early Christians used ethnic reasoning to make universalizing claims: first, we need to interpret both ancient and modern Christian universalizing claims in their particular contexts; and second, as suggested in the first half of the chapter, we need to take a closer look at the concept of “conversion,” especially for how scholars have defined and used it to reconstruct early Christians in relation to their contemporaries.
The Importance of Context
Universal claims are always particular. They are made in specific contexts and represent specific interests in the name of all. What is interesting about universal claims is how they are developed, whom they serve, and with what implications. But this is not merely a question of what early Christians attempt, but also what we in the present make of their attempts, and how we value universalism and engage our own kinds of universal claims. Attention to context requires that we locate early Christians and their modern interpreters (Christian or not) as participants in their larger social and political landscapes. When early Christians claim that their distinctiveness is the ideal culmination of humanity, they are not unique—Romans and Greeks regularly make such claims as well. To support these points, we will take a brief look first at Roman universalization strategies and then at two examples of how geographical context informs early Christian universalizing claims.
Romanness as Humanitas Early Christian authors write during the ongoing formulation and enactment of an imperial project that made extensive use of universalizing rhetoric.32 One of the key terms in this project of Roman universalization is humanitas. As Greg Woolf has described it, “humanitas encapsulated what it meant to be a Roman.” This broad concept, often translated as “civilization,” could function simultaneously as a universal ideal and a marker of difference, even among “Romans.” This double function is characterized by the view that elite men best embodied humanitas even while “it encapsulated a set of ideals to which all men might aspire.”33
Romans attribute the invention of humanitas to the Greeks. While positioning “Greek culture as the first stages of a universal process,” Romans claim that they are the legitimate heirs and bearers of this process (marked by humanitas), whereas Greeks have become degenerate.34 To define Romanness in terms of humanitas, then, requires arguments somewhat analogous to those some early Christians formulate to define themselves as distinct from Ioudaioi while claiming as their own the scriptures that most Christians shared with them. Without needing to claim any direct Christian dependency upon Roman arguments, it is striking how some Christian claims seem to echo this logic in positioning Christians in relation to Jews.
Also important for our purposes, religio is one of the building blocks for the construction, display, and negotiation of Romanness.35 During the early Roman imperial period, associations between cultic practices and peoplehood undergo a shift. Although religious practices continue to be correlated with race/ethnicity/civic membership throughout the imperial period, Augustan cultic innovations lay the groundwork for a universalizing rhetoric that serves to hold together the diverse and regionally operated cults, especially ruler cults.36 As Aelius Aristides glowingly declares about Roman rule in the middle of the second century:
Indeed, the poets say that before the rule of Zeus everything was filled with faction, uproar, and disorder, but that when Zeus came to rule, everything was put in order…. So too, in view of the situation before you [that is, before Antoninus Pius] and under you, one would suppose that before your empire everything was in confusion, topsy-turvy, and completely disorganized, but that when you took charge, the confusion and faction ceased and there entered in universal order and a glorious light in life and government and the laws came to the fore and the altars of the gods were believed in.
(Or. 26.103, my emphasis)37
Aristides here emphasizes the universal order established by the empire in its political structure, laws, and religious practices. A little earlier in the speech, he praises Romans for encompassing the “whole world in their government, either as citizens or as those who are governed [see Or. 26.58–61]. Rome had brought the nations together; the inhabited world had become like one city [see Or. 26.36].”38
Aristides’ political vision of one city expanding to rule the entire world foregrounds civic membership—not ethnoracial membership. But the spread of Rome’s power blurred the lines between civic identity and ethnoracial identity, and religious practices helped to mark and redefine both citizenship and ethnic belonging. Christians likewise capitalize on this blurriness, refracting imperial discourse by avowing their citizenship in a different city (heavenly Jerusalem), under a different ruler, and by construing themselves as a people. In both civic and ethnic self-conceptions, religious practices serve as a primary vehicle for performing membership.
When early Christians employ universalizing ethnic reasoning, they can be understood as attempting to negotiate alternative universalizing discourses, especially with respect to ideas about Romanness produced in and through the Roman imperial cult.39
In chapter 2, I suggested that we can learn valuable insights from examining how cities, provinces, and other local groups defined themselves in relation to Roman imperial power and Roman understandings of identity. We can extend these insights to understanding universal claims. In redefining Greekness in the imperial period, some “Greeks” developed universalizing arguments that preserved Greekness as the apex of humanity. These claims relied on the assertion that specific cultural forms associated with Greeks, paideia and philosophy, were quintessentially “Greek.”40 Nonetheless, “Greekness,” like Christianness or other collective identities, still had to be claimed and negotiated in local, particular contexts.41 Comparing two Christian contemporaries, Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Alexandria, helps to highlight the significance of context for Christian self-definition and the place of ethnic reasoning in universalizing claims. While Tertullian negotiates Christianness especially in relation to Romanness, Clement’s context calls for a closer comparison between Christians and “Greeks.”42
Tertullian in Carthage and Clement in Alexandria Clement and Tertullian were active at the turn of the second and third centuries C.E., and were both prolific Christian authors who lived in very different cultural and political contexts—Clement settled in Alexandria, the largest city in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which was run semi-independently (though officially controlled by a provincial Roman administrator); its elites spoke Greek. Tertullian lived in Carthage, a large provincial capital in North Africa, in the Western part of the empire. Carthage was run as a Roman province more directly than Alexandria. The lingua franca in Carthage was Latin.
Clement argues for the universal character of Christianity by depicting it as both distinct from but the logical culmination of both Jewishness and Greekness. Clement refers scarcely at all to Romans, instead implicitly positioning Christians as the superior people, characterized by their distinctive religiosity and formed from “Greeks and barbarians,” “Greeks and Jews,” or “Jews and gentiles.” Tertullian, on the other hand, argues that Christians are the best representatives of the Romans—that is, model citizens—in large part because of the way of life produced by their religious practices. He claims that Christians get denounced by Romans as a “third race” (Jews, Romans, Christians) and vehemently rejects this classification, insisting that Christians are not a distinct people because of their religious practices.
Despite these important differences, both Clement and Tertullian use ethnic reasoning. Both need to locate Christianness in relation to existing ways of explaining human differences. Tertullian inhabits a context in which the imperial interests of defining Romanness require him to frame his definition of Christianness explicitly in relation to Romanness. Clement, in contrast, can ignore the category of “Roman,” and writes as if he is addressing “Greeks” or gentile Christians.43 He favors the longstanding totalizing distinctions between Jew/gentile and Greek/barbarian to recast these pairs as a collective whole that together comprise both the source of all Christians and that which is not-Christian.44
We have already examined a number of examples from Clement’s writing in which he explicitly designates Christians as a genos, laos, or ethnos (see above, as well as chapter 2), so I shall focus here on Tertullian’s views. Tertullian argues strenuously against the identification of Christians as a third (tertium) genus. He implies that it is non-Christians who label Christians as a third type of human (tertium genus): “We are indeed said to be the ‘third type’ of humanity” (Ad Nationes 1.8). Tertullian refutes this designation in part by insisting upon a contrast between religion (religio) and people (natio), challenging the application of the term genus to those who follow a set of religious practices. Tertullian tries to detach religious from ethnic affiliation so that Christian “religious” distinctiveness cannot be interpreted as ethnic/racial/national distinctiveness. Whether or not he accurately represents the way non-Christians speak about Christians, Tertullian indicates that at least some readers would have understood that the boundaries between natio, genus, and religio were blurrier than Tertullian wants to claim here.
For Tertullian, distinctiveness as a natio would put Christians at a disadvantage—Christians could be singled out as a group apart, and thus be more vulnerable to persecution. His rhetorical strategy is to position Christians as the best representatives of the Roman Empire, the followers of the God who makes possible the success of the empire—they are not a distinct natio but the true natio. His solution relies on ethnic reasoning. He aims to define Christians as members of a natio, but one that aligns with and potentially encompasses Romanitas. This is a radical move, insofar as it politicizes Christianity even while appearing to downplay differences between Christianness and Romanness.
Were Christians recognized by non-Christians as an “ethnicity”? Tertullian suggests that “third genus” is a term used for Christians by non-Christians (see especially De Scorpiace 10), at least in Carthage. Specifically, he implies that Christians were being called a genus or natio on the basis of religious difference. Tertullian finds this problematic; it is not clear that others did. Indeed, we have seen that other early Christians, especially those writing in Greek, including Athenagoras, Aristides, and Clement, all portray religiosity as constitutive of ethnicity, including for Christians.45 If local Roman citizens expected their adoption of the religious practices of Rome to mark them off from others as specifically Roman, then the religious distinctiveness of Christians would very likely have had a political connotation that Tertullian wishes to minimize, if not remove.
The administrative and cultural differences between Carthage and Alexandria help to account for some of the differences between Clement and Tertullian. As a colony, Carthage contained a small group of elites who were Roman citizens, as well as many other non-Romans, elites and non-elites alike. It was in such communities that Romans encouraged and more systematically established Roman religious cult practices outside of Rome itself. Religious activity offered a means for Roman citizens of this and other colonies to reaffirm their Roman status in contrast to their noncitizen peers.46 Non-Roman inhabitants of a Roman colony would have had to work out the significance of their religious practices in light of the highly stratified and politicized standard set by those engaged in “creative imitation of Rome itself.”47
In Alexandria, the relation between religion and imperial control was expressed differently, although we still see a close connection between ethnicity and religious practices.48 “Hellenism” became the marker used by those classed in this category as a means to provide “their own social gradations with the total group.”49 Clement writes for people who have surrounded themselves with things Greek, who speak Greek, who are at least passingly familiar with Homer, Euripides, and the veneration of Greek deities, and who are quite keenly aware of Alexandria’s fashionable culture. “Greek” social customs, religious practices, and pedagogy are presumed to be the standard against which Clement’s audience will measure his teachings.50
One significance of these examples is that that classicists and ancient historians interested in ethnicity and cultural identity can no longer exclude early Christianity a priori from consideration—it is not feasible to continue to accept a definition of Christianity as a new kind of religion, detached from traditional social and political cultures and centered on belief. Instead, early Christians, like their contemporaries, viewed their religiosity as complexly interconnected with other facets of cultural identity, including ethnicity/race, political identity, and ethics.
A number of pre-Constantinian Christians used culturally available understandings of ethnic, national, and civic belonging to legitimize particular versions of Christianness as the universal and most authentic manifestation of humanity. We may recognize that pre-Constantinian (and indeed many post-Constantinian) Christian claims to be universally representative of all Christians are patently untrue, but we need also to explore how we reconstruct the social structures and practices entailed in the specific universal claims that appear across early Christian writings. For the period before Christianity was legalized, Christian universal claims are intelligible in light of the ways that a range of “minority groups” in the Roman world negotiated their relation to the imperial power structure. Nonetheless, we can see that pre-Constantinian sources contain precisely the kind of double-edged rhetoric of openness and restrictiveness that could be used for oppressive ends once Christianity gained political and social power.
Modern Contexts for Universalizing Claims about Early Christians In the modern period, universalizing claims about early Christians also have different connotations according to the context of use. In the hands of modern scholars and Christians, universal claims can function in a range of ways: to reinforce a sense of contemporary Christian unity, to call attention to and problematize contemporary Christian plurality, and to mobilize “Christian” values in contrast to “secular” or nationalist claims in service of supranational goals.
Assertions that Christianity has had from its beginnings a universalizing, racially inclusive mandate have been central both to mainstream academic scholars and to marginalized voices seeking social, political, and religious reform. For mainstream scholars, race has served as the primary criteria by which one can classify Christianity as a special kind of religion, not linked to race.51 Marginalized voices, by contrast, have often shown how Christianity participates (tacitly or explicitly) in racism, and call for reforms that will allow Christianity to achieve its original racially inclusive ideal.52
The mainstream approach makes race an out-of-bounds topic for Christianness—something that does not properly belong to its domain. Marginalized voices, by contrast, make race central, with a view toward intra-Christian critique and reform. I am challenging both of these interpretive streams by arguing that early Christians used ethnic reasoning to develop universalizing claims about Christianness. My goals are more compatible with the approaches to Christian universalism taken by marginalized voices because I support a conceptualization of universalism that emphasizes the value of differences—not their obliteration.53
Unfortunately, most modern universalizing claims about Christian origins also depend on ideas about race to reconstruct earliest Christianity as universal in explicit contrast to Judaism, as in this example:
Christianity was originally just one among many sects of Judaism that flourished in the first century C.E. It differed most from those other sects in its universalism, which contrasted sharply with the separatist nationalism that dominated Jewish sectarianism after the Maccabean revolt.54
Separatist nationalism evokes an identity with closed borders (however defined), and universalism one with flexibility. My approach challenges the view that early Christian universalism was formulated by declaring Judaism the religion of a people and Christianity not. I am not saying that both Christianity and Judaism were distinct racial groups. Instead, in at least the first three centuries C.E., self-definition in terms of ethnic reasoning was valuable for all of those who sought to secure the meanings of Jewishness and Christianness, including claiming that their identity was open to all and best for all.
Reading early and modern Christian communities and texts as embedded in particular contexts allows us to examine universal claims on a case by case basis for the type of universal vision employed. We can evaluate in which cases universalism seems to foster obliteration of difference, and in which cases it might provide a context for engagement that does not erase difference and instead provides a “common forum in which to negotiate a shared agenda and to foster the possibility of dialogue.”55
Rethinking Conversion
A dynamic approach to race/ethnicity helps to show why and how early Christians used ethnic reasoning to help depict conversion as possible and ideal for all. It also suggests that conversion is a socially embedded process intertwined with other forms of cultural identity and not simply a private matter of faith or conscience. We need to view conversion as a social process that entails the crossing of social boundaries. These boundaries may be understood as religious but also as ethnic and racial.
The ability to convert to Christianity might seem to be a hallmark of its universal character. At least since the early modern period, however, the conversion of certain groups and individuals, notably Jews and colonial subjects, has been a matter of considerable anxiety for Christians. Golden Age Spain as well as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and its African and Asian colonies have been geopolitical contexts in which Christianity’s universalism has run up against the suspicion that not all people can join this universal ideal.56 The explanation for this anxiety is sometimes expressed in terms of intent and motivation (conversion can only occur when truly intended), but this seemingly reasonable concern has also competed with the racist view that some people may be constitutionally less likely to have this purity of intent in their conversion.
But even defining conversion in terms of intent is problematic because it casts conversion as a personal and private process rather than as a socially and politically mediated one. This individualized and belief-centered understanding of conversion has also informed interpretations of early Christian conversion. In his influential study of ancient conversion, Arthur Darby Nock imagines conversion as an intensely individual experience, encompassing a complete change of one’s orientations and commitments. Nock limits this phenomenon to Christianity, Judaism, and philosophical schools, with individual cases allowed for mystery cults. As a result, he excludes most forms of ancient religiosity. Underlying this division are not only assumptions about the “core” of religiosity (that would be present in conversion) but also about how to classify religions. Nock largely interprets Christianity against the backdrop of the two-part definition discussed in chapter 1. That is, Nock views most ancient religions as characterized by practice, not belief, and as interwoven with their social contexts (including civic and ethnic identifications). The assumption of the primacy of practice and context reinforces Nock’s view that people did not “convert” to traditional religions, even when they adopted the veneration of new deities or became members of a new cult. He calls such changes “adhesion,” not conversion.57
Nock’s approach to conversion has been challenged and revised in important ways in the last few decades. Thomas Finn, for example, has convincingly argued that practices, especially initiation rituals like baptism and anointing, are central to early Christian conversion. Conversion was not simply a matter of interior conviction, but was accomplished through a process of instruction and action.58 This insight obviously corrects Nock’s overemphasis on belief and individual conviction. Finn makes two other important arguments: that conversion should not be theorized as a one-time change, and that conversion could occur within the same religious cult or community (as increased commitment, spiritual development, or a higher level of initiation).59 These two related points further revise Nock’s framework because they include traditional religious piety and cults in the scope of conversion and help us to explain the attention given in a number of groups to ongoing perfection and change even after becoming an insider.
Wayne Meeks and John Curran have also contributed to the critique of Nock’s model by questioning both his emphasis on the individual and the strength of commitment presupposed. Meeks suggests that conversion to Christianity needs to be considered in terms of social factors, not simply individual ones.60 Almost twenty years later, John Curran still considers “this social context of conversion … one of the most overlooked dimensions of the whole subject” in interpretations of early Christianity.61 Building on Meeks, Curran argues that political factors as well as the social dynamics of the Roman “familia and clientela” structured the conditions of conversion and its effects.62 Both seek to temper an understanding of conversion as primarily or essentially a personal matter of faith that entails a total transformation of one’s worldview and life. Certainly, the apocryphal acts and the martyr narratives seem rhetorically preoccupied with depicting the familial and civic hue and cry against converts—especially well-born female ones such as Thekla and Perpetua. Curran suggests that concerns expressed in early Christian texts about the strength of commitment to Christianity should lead us to question a model of conversion as an interior, personal decision to commit to a different way of life—in chapter 1, we have seen just such a concern registered about wavering Christians in the Acts of the Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne.
To insist on the centrality of social context in interpreting the meaning and effects of conversion does not require viewing doctrinal or theological factors as irrelevant. But it does suggest that concerns over doctrine and theology may reflect the interests of competing teachers and would-be authority figures as much as the interests of converts. Attending to the social context of conversion allows us to see ethnic reasoning as one of a cluster of strategies for imagining what it means to become and be a Christian.63 For example, Maximilla’s struggle with her husband Aegeates in the Acts of Andrew is clearly interpreted as a consequence of having joined the makarion genos—the text portrays conversion as an act with both individual and social consequences.
These valuable revisions to Nock’s model resituate Christianness in important ways relative to other ancient forms of identification by emphasizing practice, process, context, and variability of kinds of membership. The shift in analysis of conversion that Curran and Meeks advocate—from a focus on personal belief to a focus on social context—belongs to a larger trend in rethinking definitions of “religion” and especially how “religion” is defined in relation to other dimensions of human life. Meeks anticipates, for example, Gauri Viswanathan’s call for the “need to historicize conversion not only as spiritual but also a political activity.”64
Why … does history throw up so many instances of conversion movements accompanying the fight against racism, sexism, and colonialism? What might be the link between the struggles for basic rights and the adoptions of religions characterized as minority religions? … What possibilities for alternative politics of identity might be offered by conversion as a gesture that crosses fixed boundaries between communities and identities?65
In her study of conversion in modern England and India, Viswanathan illuminates the modern conceptual frameworks that inform both the study of conversion in antiquity and the modern period. She notes, following Talal Asad, that the structuring of “religion” as marginal to secular society in modernity—that is, as primarily about belief and as the domain of the individual, in contrast to “secular society” and “rational institutionality”—long occluded the constitutive role of “religion” to the “secular.” Although there is no oppositional construct “secular society” placed against “religion” in antiquity, early Christianity has frequently been invested with the attributes of “modern” religion, especially as characterized by individualized belief.
While Meeks, Curran, and Viswanathan helpfully encourage us to think of conversion as a sociopolitical process, ethnicity is still usually defined as incompatible with conversion, because the former is viewed as fixed whereas religious identity is seen as potentially fluid. A dynamic approach to ethnicity/race allows us to see that the boundaries between communities and identities are not fixed, although it may be rhetorically, politically, and theologically useful to present them as fixed. Moreover, this approach also allows us to inquire into the contexts where it may be rhetorically, politically, and theologically useful to present conversion as incommensurate with ethnicity or race.
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, arguments about conversion to Christianity were an especially volatile site for imagining the relationship between religious and racial identities for both Jews and Christians, as Sander Gilman has shown. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was offered by Christians and by some Jews as the dominant model for trying to “remedy” Jewish difference. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of “scientific” biologized explanations for Jewish difference, “conversion was no longer seen as a viable alternative.”66 But theory contravened social practice:
The Jews of Europe were converting…. Indeed, the highest rate of conversion among German-speaking Jews seemed to be in Freud’s Vienna. At exactly the moment when it was felt that Jewish integration into the Aryan world was impossible, the reality was that there was a sense that this biological integration was occurring and that the hope of the mid-nineteenth-century assimilationists … would be realized. The greater the potential reality became, the more intensely the theoretical possibility was denied.67
This example shows how a “fixed” definition of “race” was invoked in a specific historical context to combat a much more fluid social reality.
In the study of antiquity, debates about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism continue to be waged partly in terms of conversion. Specifically, the ongoing debates about whether or not Jews actively sought converts are partly about how to understand the relationship between religion and ethnicity/race. While this debate is far too broad-ranging to discuss here,68 what is important for our purposes is how conversion gets defined in relationship to ethnicity.
Shaye Cohen represents an important and influential perspective in suggesting that for conversion to Judaism to be possible (let alone the notion of an active Jewish mission), belonging has to be imagined in something other than “ethnic” terms. Cohen has advanced the argument that during the last few centuries before the common era, Judaism shifted from being primarily an “ethnic” identity to a “cultural” or religious identity.69 These terms are primarily meant to indicate a shift to the possibility of conversion to Judaism. As such, they calcify an understanding of ethnicity as one that precludes conversion; only if identity is defined in “cultural” terms is conversion thought to be possible. Cohen puts this view very clearly:
Ethnic (or ethno-geographic) identity is immutable…. However, in the century following the Hasmonean rebellion two new meanings of “Judaeans” emerge: Judaeans are all those, of whatever ethnic or geographic origins, who worship the God whose temple is in Jerusalem (a religious definition), or who have become citizens of the state established by the Judaeans (a political definition). In contrast with ethnic identity, religious and political identities are mutable: gentiles can abandon their false gods and accept the true God, and non-Judaeans can become citizens of the Judaean state.70
I find convincing his argument that Judaean self-definition changed during the Hasmonean period, partly through adapting Greek concepts of politeia (or citizenship). But characterizing this change as a shift from immutable to mutable conceptualizations of membership too sharply distinguishes between ethnicity and religion/political identity and ignores the double-sided character of identity discourses and practices in all periods (even if fixity is foregrounded at some moments and fluidity privileged at others).71
This kind of framework is also troubling for how early Christian/Jewish relations can be interpreted in its light. John North, for example, follows the position that there was a significant Jewish effort to convert gentiles during the second and third centuries C.E., which posed a source of competition for Christians in their own mission.72 Like Cohen, this characterization of Jewish/Christian competition relies on a sharp distinction between religion and ethnicity: as North puts it, “the Jews … have become a religion not an ethnic group.”73 It is as members of a religion, not an ethnicity, that Jews are seen to compete with Christians. This position not only defines ethnicity over and against religion but also implies that ethnic membership cannot be imagined in universalizing terms.
To nuance this position, Joshua Levinson offers a helpful analysis of early rabbinical views, arguing for two dominant paradigms for identity in rabbinical texts: genealogical and covenantal. Both construct Jewishness as what he calls a “fictive ethnicity.” These paradigms have different emphases. In the genealogical, “inside and outside are established according to biological descent”; in the covenantal, “identity is established by the acceptance of a certain institutionalized belief system.”74 Levinson does not cast the former as “ethnic” and the latter as “religious”; instead, both paradigms help to constitute ethnicity, sometimes in conflict and other times intertwined.75 Although the genealogical paradigm foregrounds fixity by appeal to descent, Levinson shrewdly notes that:
Both paradigms present identity as belated rather than indigenous. Whether the decisive moment is the revelation at Sinai or the birth of the twelve tribes, identity is achieved only through a detergent process, by the natural body purging itself of foreign elements. This belatedness, which stresses the acquired nature of identity, would seem to indicate a certain anxiety concerning the inconstancy of identity, which undermines the very distinctions [between insider and outsider] these texts work so hard to construct.76
In other words, both genealogical and covenantal arguments about identity look to the past for authorization while nonetheless incorporating fluidity/transformation into the past.
Even though non-rabbinical forms of Judaism flourished alongside emerging rabbinical ones in the first few centuries C.E., Levinson’s analysis of rabbinical negotiations of identity offer an important point of comparison with the self-understandings classified as early Christian. Neither rabbinical nor early Christian texts speak with a single voice; nonetheless, emerging Christians also deploy something like these two paradigms, defining membership genealogically as well as covenantally, thereby producing their own versions of ethnicity. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Clement defines membership in the saved genos as the result of training in a specific “covenant of the Lord.”
Early Christians drew on two kinds of biblical traditions that craft universalizing claims about how the people of Israel is both distinct and yet related to other peoples. One variety stresses “universal siblinghood,” as available in readings of Genesis, generally appealing to genealogies in the process (tracing siblinghood to Adam or Noah). The second tradition is covenantal in that it emphasizes an attachment to Yahweh as that which defines membership in Israel, such as in Isaiah.77 Without needing to hypothesize about specific historical connections between Justin Martyr and rabbis, it is clear that the Dialogue with Trypho engages both genealogical arguments and “covenantal” ones to assert that crossing the boundary to become a Christian is simultaneously an ethnic and religious move.
It is not surprising to find Christians using ethnic reasoning to depict conversion as possible and ideal for all. As we saw in much of chapter 2, a rhetoric of restoration and realizing one’s potential portrays conversion in terms of regaining or achieving one’s true humanity. However, that is not to say that all treatments of conversion use ethnic reasoning or imply ethnoracial change. Imagery for conversion in antiquity ranges widely, including: enslavement (to God), freedom, enfranchisement (as citizen of heaven), purification, enlightenment, resurrection, and rebirth.78 All contain the idea of transformation from one status or mode of existence to another even if not all connote ethnoracial transformation.
Conclusion
Early Christian universalizing claims can be fruitfully understood in terms of local attempts to negotiate and construct collective identities in a complex socio-rhetorical landscape. In depicting Christianness as the universal ideal of humanity, early Christians often do so by speaking of Christians as a people distinct from other kinds of peoples. This produces a tension: Christianness is depicted as distinct from other forms of identity yet also asserted as the ideal or most authentic form of humanness.79 Some early Christian authors try to grapple with this paradox by reasoning that what makes Christianness appear distinct is that most people are deluded into taking as real the current kinds of categorical distinctions by race or people. Nonetheless, these same Christians depend upon such preexisting ideas about human difference to imagine Christians as a people of which all ethnic groups are potentially and ideally members.
My focus has been upon early Christian collective self-definition in ethnic/racial terms. Gay Byron has shown that ethnic and color differences were used by a number of early Christians, both before and after legalization, to speak about individuals and groups who embody both Christian inclusion (for example, the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–40 and the Ethiopian Moses in the Apophthegmata patrum) and exclusion (for example, the young black man in the Life of Melania the Younger).80 I am convinced by Byron’s interpretation of the divisive and often damaging effects of what she calls “ethno-political rhetorics” in both ancient texts and modern interpretations. For Byron, the negative and positive rhetorical functions of ethnic and color difference in early Christian texts put the lie to assertions of early Christian universalism: “No longer can one claim that the early Christians were oriented around a universalist worldview.”81 To the extent that she means that no longer can one claim that early Christians understood themselves solely in terms of the transcendence of ethnic and color differences, I am in complete agreement. But I do not think this demonstrates an absence of early Christian universalizing. Instead, I have argued that early Christians often developed universalizing arguments using ethnic reasoning, defining themselves as an ethnic or racial whole composed of, in Justin’s words, humans “of every race.” Nonetheless, even if some early Christians promote a universalist worldview, appeals to ethnic differences have functioned in Christian discourse to demarcate the limits of authentic Christianness.
Rereading early Christian universalizing arguments provides us with a critical opportunity to reflect on the effects of interpretive frameworks that have largely construed early Christian efforts at self-definition, especially universalizing claims, in sharp contrast to ethnoracial self-definition. I see a few implications for contemporary Christian communities and those who study race and ethnicity. For those especially interested in race and ethnicity, I am making a twofold argument: on the one hand, even though race and ethnicity are modern concepts, features of these concepts have prehistories worth taking seriously. On the other hand, we need more studies of how interpretations of early Christianity are racialized in the modern period. I also hope to encourage more nuanced examinations of how universal claims in contemporary forms of Christianity may covertly encode racism and ethnocentrism. This understanding needs to take place in the context of recent history—not just of Christianity and its interpretation, but also of the ways that concepts of race and ethnicity have been intertwined with analyses and material practices of “religion.”
