Introduction

“Why this new race [genos]?” is a question posed by an early Christian about Christians.¹ The very presence of this question challenges conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between Christian origins and race/ethnicity. Most people—Christian or not—do not think of Christianity as necessarily linked with race or ethnicity. Indeed, most historical reconstructions published in the last twenty years depict earliest Christianity as an inclusive movement that rejected ethnic or racial specificity as a condition of religious identity. “Christianity swept racial distinctions aside,” proclaims classicist Frank Snowden Jr.² Similarly, Anthony Smith, writing for anthropologists as well as historians, states that earliest Christianity “helped to … transcend existing ethnic divisions.”³ Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether asserts that “class, ethnicity, and gender are … specifically singled out as the divisions overcome by redemption in Christ.”⁴ And in his recent study of early Christianity, Guy Stroumsa baldly states: “Ethnic terms were deeply irrelevant for the Christians.”⁵ These four examples are typical in making the rejection of race or ethnicity a defining feature of earliest Christianity.

But if early Christians defined themselves in terms of being able to transcend ethnicity or race, then what is an early Christian text doing defining Christians in terms of a genos? Genos is a term widely used for Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, and Ioudaioi—groups often interpreted as ethnic groups or their ancient equivalents. How does this square with the widespread evidence that early Christians also made universalizing claims about Christianness—that anyone could become a Christian? The central argument of this book is that early Christian texts used culturally available understandings of human difference, which we can analyze in terms of our modern concepts of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” to shape what we have come to call a religious tradition and to portray particular forms of Christianness as universal and authoritative.

Whether translated as “race,” “ethnicity,” “people,” “lineage,” “kind,” “class,” or “sex,” genos is a term that ancient readers would have understood to signal a group classification. While it has a broad range of possible meanings in Greek,⁶ it frequently demarcates groups whose members apparently share certain characteristics (which can include ancestors, rights of inheritance, knowledge, ritual practices, and ways of life, among other things). Christians also referred to themselves using other language that their contemporaries would have understood as positioning Christians as comparable to groups such as Jews, Greeks, and Romans: the terms ethnos, laos, politeia (Greek), and genus and natio (Latin) pepper early Christian texts.

While the vocabulary of peoplehood and human difference offers an important entry point for examining early Christian self-definition, even more important than the presence of specific terms are the rhetorical situations in which early Christian texts use ideas about peoplehood to communicate and persuade readers about Christianness. “Ethnic reasoning” refers to the modes of persuasion that may or may not include the use of a specific vocabulary of peoplehood.⁷ Early Christians used ethnic reasoning to legitimize various forms of Christianness as the universal, most authentic manifestation of humanity, and it offered Christians both a way to define themselves relative to “outsiders” and to compete with other “insiders” to assert the superiority of their varying visions of Christianness.

Four Strategic Uses of Ethnic Reasoning for Early Christians

Early Christians found ethnic reasoning useful in their projects of self-definition for many reasons. This book explores four especially significant reasons for and applications of ethnic reasoning. First, race/ethnicity was often deemed to be produced and indicated by religious practices. Early Christians adapted existing understandings of what ethnicity and race are and how they relate to religiosity by reinterpreting the language of people-hood readily available to them in the biblical texts they shared with (other) Jews, as well as political and civic language used broadly to speak about citizenship and peoplehood in the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, early Christians were consistent with the views of their contemporaries when they emphasize a close link between religious practices, cult membership or participation, and ethnoracial identity. Ethnic reasoning offered Christians one way to negotiate their identities in the imperial landscape.

Second, although ancient authors frequently refer to membership in a genos, ethnos, laos, and phylon as a matter of one’s birth and descent (that is, as fixed or ascribed), such membership was nonetheless seen to be mutable. Early Christians capitalized on this dynamic character of ethnicity/ race as being both fixed and fluid in a range of ways. The common description of conversion as rebirth illustrates one central way in which Christians depicted Christianness simultaneously in terms of “essence” and transformation.

Third, this juxtaposition of fluidity and fixity enabled early Christians to use ethnic reasoning to make universalizing claims, arguing that everyone can, and thus ought to, become a Christian. By conceptualizing race as both mutable and “real,” early Christians could define Christianness both as a distinct category in contrast to other peoples (including Jews, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, etc.) and also as inclusive, since it is a category formed out of individuals from a range of different races.⁸

Finally, early Christians also used ethnic reasoning polemically, especially to compete with one another. In the first few centuries of the common era, Christianity was a work-in-progress with no official form; those whom we study as early Christians actually make up a broad range of different groups, practices, and beliefs. Either by condemning the religious practices and beliefs of rival Christians to encapsulate Christianness (point one, above), by accusing rival Christians of overstating the “fixity” of one’s identity and thus limiting the possibilities for transformation (point two), or by construing rival Christian groups as particular rather than universal (point three), early Christians wielded ethnic reasoning both to authorize their own visions of Christianness and to caricature and exclude competing alternatives. Christians could tailor each of these arguments to criticize non-Christian groups as well.

Using ethnicity and race as analytical categories reveals a multivalent set of rhetorical strategies for early Christian self-definition that cuts across and interrupts conventional classifications of early Christian literature. Attention to ethnic reasoning requires us to consider apologetic treatises in relation to martyrdom narratives, writings of “church Fathers” in the same breath as Nag Hammadi treatises, apocryphal acts with pedagogical treatises, and so on. But in addition to breaching the generic classifications of literature, attention to ethnic reasoning helps to provide alternative historical explanations for the relationship among varieties of early Christians and between Christians and non-Christians.

To reconceptualize early Christian self-definition in terms of ethnic reasoning sheds new light on Christian-Jewish, Christian-imperial, Christianlocal, and intra-Christian relations. In the case of Christian-Jewish relations, attention to ethnic reasoning resists the impulse to reconstruct Christianness over and against Jewishness and resists periodizations that mark an early and decisive split between Christianity and Judaism.⁹ And since ethnic reasoning also resonates with non-Jewish cultural practices of self-definition, it offers an analytic point of entry that requires attention to both Jewish and non-Jewish frames of reference, not to one at the expense of the other, and to both as being integrally part of Christian self-definition, not as its “background.”¹⁰

Viewing Christian strategies of self-definition in relation to the power of the Roman Empire is also vital for evaluating the possible meanings and ramifications of ethnic reasoning. As formulations of those not in power, pre-Constantinian Christian texts that employ ethnic reasoning can be read as attempts to consolidate and mobilize geographically, theologically, and organizationally disparate groups under one banner—figured as a people, “the Christians.” Conceptually, early Christians share some strategies in common with local populations in the empire who also seek to define and negotiate their collective identities in relation to a larger imperial “whole.” Early Christians in specific cities or regions (for example, Sardis or Asia Minor), like Lydians, sometimes define themselves in relation to a larger whole: for Christians, this larger whole could be “Christians” conceived as a translocal phenomenon in relation to and encompassing “Greeks,” the Roman Empire, or the human race; for Lydians, this larger whole could be Asia Minor or Greeks.¹¹ Yet, also like the Lydians, early Christians most frequently claim an identity that remains distinctive and coherent in relation to a larger whole. Not all Christians took the same approach. Some Christians devised a discourse of peoplehood that functioned to construct a sense of a unified community and claim political legitimacy despite and sometimes in response to persistent local differences, while other Christians invoked ethnic reasoning to define Christianness as particular and distinct from other communal identities, including other forms of Christianness.

One way to consider the question of the relation between ethnicity, race, and Christianness is to chart the range of ethnic groups who joined the emerging forms of Christianity and to explore how ethnic identities would have affected the character and development of particular Christian communities across the Mediterranean basin. I am not attempting this kind of analysis. Christianity did develop in regionally specific ways, and the heterogeneity of its adherents is clear from the evidence for Christian communities scattered across the Roman Empire and beyond. Such studies complement my own insofar as they illuminate the ways that Christianness comes into being in local, particularized forms,¹² even as some Christian writers craft textual idealizations of Christianness as universal. But I am not trying to link particular, local forms of Christianness to any preexisting ethnic or civic identities. I argue that specific contexts in which early Christians define themselves matter not because, for example, Galatians were inescapably shaped by their “Celtic” heritage (and thus produced corresponding forms of Christianness).¹³ Instead, a consideration of the particular social, political, and historical conditions of Galatia can illuminate the significance of early Christian uses of certain rhetorical strategies of ethnoracial self-definition—the same strategies used in Alexandria, Carthage, or Rome might resonate quite differently.

Rethinking the Apparent Fixity and Particularity of Race and Ethnicity: Questions of Definition

We have failed to recognize the importance and functions of ethnic reasoning in early Christian self-definition largely because of how dominant modern ideas about race, ethnicity, and religion inform our approaches to and presuppositions about the meanings of those three terms (including their possible relationships). We cannot avoid reckoning with modern ideas about race, ethnicity, and religion, so the problem is not that modern ideas are distorting historical analysis, since we can only interpret the past from the vantage point of the present. As long we continue to read texts from antiquity, it is necessary to tackle the interpretive and ethical challenges of making our readings intelligible to modern readers and persuasive within the parameters of the ancient text. These tasks are intertwined, of course, to the extent that our ability to measure of the persuasiveness of a reading for its context cannot be separated from our present assessment of the historical context. Noting some of the ways in which race and ethnicity currently inform interpretations of early Christianity will clarify why I take a different approach.

There is no single way that all people think or speak about race and ethnicity today. Most of us are familiar with the perception that race and ethnicity are “given.” Whether defined in terms of biology, our family background, cultural inheritance, and so on, race and ethnicity are often spoken of as attributes about which we have no say, something we are born with. At the same time, most are also probably familiar with the view that race and ethnicity are social constructions, meaning that they exist and have real significance in our lives because the societies in which we live organize and classify humans into “races” and “ethnicities.” This classification process is social and cultural. Even if race and ethnicity seem to point to “real” and fixed human differences, changes in how races and ethnicities are defined over time indicates that they are in fact social creations and not eternal realities.

In contrast, most people speak about religious identity as voluntary, even when many of us experience religion as “given,” either as part of our racial or ethnic identities or minimally as an involuntary part of our upbringing. This perception of voluntariness is reinforced by widespread perceptions that it is possible to convert from one religion to another, on the basis of strongly held personal views. This is despite the fact that in Northern Ireland, the terms “Catholic” and “Protestant” have functioned as seemingly fixed affiliations for many in speaking about political divisions. Furthermore, most of us can also think of recent and ongoing conflicts where religion and ethnicity are treated as fundamentally intertwined—such as among Albanians, Serbs, and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia or between Palestinians (primarily equated with Muslim, despite the presence of Palestinian Christians) and Israelis (primarily equated with Jews, although there are non-Jewish Israeli citizens, including Palestinians).

In many interpretations of early Christianity, race and ethnicity continue to be treated as if they connote a fixed or given facet of identity, while religion is primarily viewed as voluntary. When these assumptions are unquestioned, race and ethnicity appear to be in tension with Christianity because Christianity is understood to be not only a “religion” but also a category open to all people and gained through conversion. Universalism and conversion both imply a fluidity that race and ethnicity seem to lack (when viewed as “fixed”). An understanding of race and ethnicity as concepts that are fluid and subject to change even when they are depicted as fixed allows for a different interpretation of the relationship between race/ethnicity and religion in early Christian texts and imagination.

An Alternative View

As I shall discuss in more detail (especially in chapter 1), instead of viewing race or ethnicity as ascribed or fixed, I suggest that we view each as concepts to which fixity is attributed but that are nevertheless malleable. I draw this approach especially from anthropologist 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.”¹⁴ What Stoler argues about race is more widely accepted as applicable to ethnicity. While appeals to ethnicity and especially race as fixed are indeed a common feature of modern ways of thinking and often correlated with oppressive policies and practices, both ethnicity and race also always entail fluidity. What do I mean by this? Simply that these concepts are always unstable—they are not always defined in the same ways in all contexts, and considerable energy and anxiety have been expended to “secure” stable meanings for race/ethnicity in colonial and racist regimes. Certainly some fundamental “essence” such as blood, flesh, or seed is often asserted as the basis for reckoning membership in an ethnoracial group and is traceable through means such as genealogy and kinship. But ideas about race and ethnicity gain persuasive power by being subject to revision while purporting to speak about fundamental essences.

The fluidity of race and ethnicity may be revealed in change over time, in the active competition over the meaning of race/ethnicity in a particular moment, or in specific arguments about the fluidity of the two terms. In the introduction to a collection of essays on ancient perceptions of Greek ethnicity, Irad Malkin notes that most sociologists and anthropologists, and now also many classicists and ancient historians, reject the notion that there is any fundamental essence to ethnicity in favor of the view that ethnicity is a contingent, social construction.¹⁵ Stoler identifies a similar trend in contemporary historical studies of race, a trend she calls an “attack on immutability.”¹⁶ Stoler and Malkin want to resituate scholarly discussions away from the question of whether or not race/ethnicity is fixed or mutable to analyses of how discourses of race and ethnicity rely upon the notion of fixity or primordiality even while they are also always under negotiation and flux.¹⁷

Gerd Baumann also develops this view, arguing that two discourses coexist in the practice of ethnicity as well as religion: the first being an essentializing discourse that emphasizes ethnicity or religion as having some inherent, eternal core (fixity); and the second a “processual” discourse that emphasizes change and transformation of cultural phenomena (fluidity). Members of ethnic and religious groups (particularly those who hold less cultural power), as well as the media, are more likely to assert a fixed (also known as “primordialist”) view of ethnicity or religion, while academics and members of “unmarked” or dominant ethnic groups are more likely to espouse the view that ethnicity and religion are either mutable or strategic (which correlates with what is known as the “instrumentalist” or processual view).¹⁸

But instead of offering these two discourses as mutually exclusive, Baumann shares with Stoler and Malkin the view that they regularly function together as a “dual discursive construction.” He gives a hypothetical example of a person wishing to “strengthen the sense of solidarity and unity among a group of followers.” To do so,

The leader needs to preach an essentialist theory of culture: “Our group will act and will be, and deep down has always been, united in its thinking and identity.” Yet employing this essentialist rhetoric is in fact a creative act. The rhetoric is essentialist, yet the activity is processual. Culture is said … to be rooted in an unchangeable past, yet the leader can hope to create it because he or she knows culture to be malleable and pliable, open to change…. What the culture-forging leader preaches is the essentialist theory; what he or she practices is the processual theory.¹⁹

These two positions function together to reinforce the notion of ethnicity as ascribed even as the very terms by which this ascription is defined are changed. This insight removes both the need to explain away claims for the reality of ethnic or racial identities as false consciousness and the need to “prove” their reality by biological or physiological means.

Baumann distinguishes between ethnicity and religion, depicting them as two parallel cultural constructions that offer competing strategies for making claims to individual and collective rights in the nation-state.²⁰ Nevertheless, he also notes that they can intersect in a number of ways, ranging from a state-imposed equation of religious and ethnic boundaries (Bosnian Muslims) to a rhetorical definition of one as the other (he views the sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland as a case of national and ethnic conflicts being translated into a religious register).²¹

While aimed at studies of modern cultures, these suggestions are valuable for historical studies as well. He rightly contends that we can accomplish a more subtle understanding of what religion, ethnicity, and nationality can mean in a given context and how these categories converge and diverge in people’s lives by deliberately researching against the grain of reifying discourses and across the social cleavages said reifying discourses seek to produce and maintain.²²

Approaching race/ethnicity, as well as religion, as characterized by a double-sided discourse of fixity and fluidity allows us to revise prevailing interpretations of the significance of race/ethnicity for early Christians. Many early Christian texts depict Christians as members of a people, like Jews. “Race” does not mark the dividing line between Jews and Christians. Christians depicted Christianness as having an “essence” (a fixed content) that can be acquired. Christians could define conversion as both the transformation of one’s ethnicity and the restoration of one’s true identity. By portraying this transformation as available to all, Christians universalized this ethnoracial transformation. Instead of positioning Christianness as not-race, or aracial, many early Christian texts defined their version of Christianity as a race or ethnicity, sometimes in opposition to other rival articulations of Christianness, and sometimes in contrast to non-Christian groups and cultures (including, but not limited, to those defined as “Jews”).

It is fair to say that the majority opinion about ethnicity among anthropologists and sociologists, as well as by other scholars who draw upon their work, is that ethnicity entails claims of common kinship or descent from a common group or ancestor. That is, such claims are generally viewed as a necessary criterion of ethnicity—if we find these claims, we might have “ethnicity”; if we do not, then we do not have ethnicity.²³ If we use this definition of ethnicity, then we find that early Christians do largely conform to it, insofar as many wrote about Christians as united by common ties of kinship to a range of figures—God, Christ, Abraham, Seth—and to other groups, such as the Hebrews or Israelites.

Without minimizing the prevalence of ancient appeals to kinship and descent in formulating claims of collective identity, I depart somewhat from this limited definition of ethnicity. Following Stoler, I define the necessary criterion of ethnicity/race as the dynamic interplay between fixity and fluidity. Appeals to kinship and descent are one significant way in which the “reality” and “essence” (or fixity) of ethnicity/race is articulated. Just as “blood” is a powerful symbol for the relationship implied by the concept “kinship” in our culture, but is not in fact its essence, so too are “kinship” and “descent” symbols for the fixity or enduringness implied by the concept of “ethnicity.”²⁴ When kinship and descent participate in the fluid aspect of ethnicity, insofar as descent and kin relations shift and can be redrawn (discursively or ritually) to exclude and include individuals and groups, these signs of fluidity are often accounted for by asserting that ethnic claims of descent and kinship are “fictive” rather than “real.” But this distinction falsely implies that there is an intrinsic content to kinship or descent, when in fact these are analytical categories created by scholars to account for a diverse range of social organizations, practices, and cultural symbols.²⁵

Most definitions of ethnicity acknowledge that other factors (language, religion, place, foodways) may be claimed by a given community as more central than kinship or descent. Nonetheless, when kinship and descent are privileged as necessary to ethnicity, these other factors are dismissed as mere “markers” or attributes of ethnicity, rather than being ethnicity’s constitutive elements.

Foregrounding fixity/fluidity, rather than some specific content like kinship and descent, risks making ethnicity/race indistinguishable from other cultural categories, such as religion and citizenship, since both of these could also be said to share this dynamic of fixity and fluidity. I invite the reader to explore rather than predetermine their interrelationships.

Implications of Viewing Race and Ethnicity as “Fixed”

The almost unanimous view that early Christians defined themselves over and against ethnic or racial specificity (that is, as a movement open to all humans regardless of ethnicity and race) relies on an understanding of race/ethnicity as ascribed or fixed. Race and ethnicity are positioned as irrelevant to early Christian self-definition because they seem to contrast with universalism. In this way of thinking, racially or ethnically specific forms of Christianity may exist, but these variations are viewed either as incidental (not affecting a perceived underlying essence of Christianity) or as problematic (obstructing the achievement of a Christian ideal to dissolve racially or ethnically linked forms of religion and society). This interpretation of the relationship of race/ethnicity to Christianity was especially elaborated in modern historical contexts in light of arguments that race/ethnicity are natural, biological traits.

The contemporary resistance to thinking about early Christian self-definition in terms of race is partly a response to the legacy of modern notions of race as they emerged in Romanticism and scientific racism. The interpretation of Christian origins formulated by the nineteenth-century French philologist Ernest Renan illustrates the kind of legacy that scholars concerned with promoting civil rights, such as Snowden and Reuther, have sought to challenge. Renan’s 1863 Life of Jesus was hugely popular. It went through more than sixty-one editions in French, was translated into English and German, and was widely commented on within a year of its publication.²⁶ His work has been credited with introducing “racial categories into theological discussion.” For Renan, Jesus was an Aryan Jew, and his main rivals, the Pharisees, were Semitic Jews.²⁷ This racial mapping allows Renan to portray Christianity as arising naturally out of Judaism, while his category “Aryan Jew” also permits him to write that Christianity “over time rid itself of nearly everything it took from the race, so that those who consider Christianity to be the Aryan religion par excellence are in many respects correct.”²⁸

By the end of the nineteenth century, Renan’s attempt to align Christians with a particular race was largely undone—at least in the academy—and was replaced by a widespread view of Christianness as emphatically not a race. In the study of Christianity, and especially Christian origins, this shift has translated into an emphasis upon defining the difference between Christianity and Judaism as that of an ideally universal religion versus a religion of a particular people.

This legacy has been both positive and negative. On the positive side, at least since the early nineteenth century, the notion of Christian origins as racially inclusive and egalitarian has supported opposition to Christian and non-Christian practices that sanction differential treatment on the basis of “race.” Especially in North America, certain biblical passages have been crucial in formulating the transcendence of racial difference as an original Christian ideal, especially within the African American biblical interpretation, to combat white Christian racism. “God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation one who fears [God], and works righteousness, is accepted with [God]” (Acts 10:34–35); “For [God] has made of one blood all the nations of the world to dwell on the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26); and “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) are three of the most well-known New Testament passages cited to challenge racist forms of Christianity.²⁹ The interpretation of these New Testament passages as indicative of explicitly nonracialized Christian origins depends on a historical model of Christian history that moves from “pure” origins to less pure realizations of Christianity over time. When Christian practices and structures contribute to racist and ethnocentric oppression, this outcome has often been interpreted as a failure to realize the universalistic and egalitarian ideals inherent in earliest Christianity.³⁰ This argument presupposes a sharp distinction between universalism and ethnic/racial particularity. While important for antiracist interventions, especially the North American civil rights efforts, defining Christianness in contrast to race has not solved the problems of modern racism. This construction of universalism also paradoxically perpetuates anti-Judaism in the name of antiracism.

Appeals to earliest Christianity’s universalism have also had a negative legacy, because claims that earliest Christianity transcended ethnoracial distinctions have often been formulated over and against a definition of Jewishness. “Ethnicity” in particular continues to surface as a crucial explanation for differences between Jews and Christians, both in the Roman period and in the present. The authors of a recent book on the religions of the Roman Empire, for example, state bluntly: “Christianity lacked the ethnic links of Judaism.”³¹ That is, modern understandings of ethnicity as inherent and immutable have been used especially to differentiate early Christians from other Jews. In Christian interpretations, this kind of distinction most often conveys a negative view of Judaism because Christianity’s universalism is defined as an improvement on the exclusive particularity of Judaism.³²

I live in a country that is still deeply racist, and one in which anti-Judaism also persists, as the controversy over Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of Christ has made clear. Furthermore, violence and genocide perpetrated along ethnic lines escalated in the latter part of the twentieth century in many parts of the world (for example, in Rwanda and Burundi as well as the former Yugoslavia). My desire to formulate an interpretive framework that resists both racism and anti-Judaism leads me to favor a view of race and ethnicity not typically used to interpret early Christian self-definition. I am trying to accomplish two things simultaneously: first, to join current efforts to dismantle racist logic in the present, especially as it plays out in American deployments of white supremacy, by offering a reading of Christian origins in which alternative constructions and contestations of race and ethnicity are at play; and second, to join efforts to dismantle Christian anti-Judaism by calling into question readings that naturalize the differences between Christianness and Jewishness along an axis of ethnic/nonethnic, where ethnicity is defined as a given, biological category. These goals form part of my larger feminist commitment to the notion that racism and anti-Judaism are produced and sustained in relation to other webs of oppression, especially sexism, heterosexism, and classism.

I am convinced that interpretive frameworks that implicitly or explicitly make race or ethnicity a primary site of difference between Jewishness and Christianness in the ancient world will continue to produce a harmful modern paradox. If Christianness gets defined as ideally nonracial or nonethnic, in contrast to Jewishness, then even critiques within Christianity about the tradition’s failure to realize this ideal may unintentionally reinforce a form of racially inflected Christian anti-Judaism. In other words, definitions of Christianity’s racially inclusive ideal will perpetuate a racially loaded form of anti-Judaism if the implied point of contrast to Christianity’s inclusiveness is Jewishness.³³ Furthermore, this model risks sustaining white privilege by positioning Christianity as intrinsically separate from ethnicity/race and by offering a problematic loophole for whites to avoid examining the ways that racism has infused dominant forms of Christian theology and practice.³⁴

To help remove this paradox, I reread of a range of early Christian texts that understand Christianness as always implicated in broader cultural struggles over forms of affiliation and identification. Instead of presuming that ethnicity and race are fixed aspects of identity, I approach these concepts as dynamic and characterized by an interaction of appeals to fluidity and fixity. This is not the last word, but is intended to open up new lines of conversation and debate among historians and those interested in these contemporary issues. I find a double-sided conceptualization of race and ethnicity compelling not only for our time but also for antiquity. This is not because it is the only way to speak about these concepts, or because I see modern and ancient ideas as the same. This approach allows us to render early Christian discourse “knowable,” but does not require that we collapse historical differences.

My argument is twofold: it is necessary to explain why and how early Christians used notions of peoplehood to define themselves as well as to scrutinize our current habits of thought and assumptions about race, ethnicity, and religion in writing history. Our understandings of race and ethnicity have their own modern histories that require both investigation and exorcism.

The Use of “Race” in This Study

Those who feel comfortable speaking about race and ethnicity with regards to early Christianity usually insist that early Christianity was defined in opposition to these categories. Others, however, insist that “race” is an inappropriate category to use for early Christian history. Especially since the publication of Martin Bernal’s first volume of Black Athena in 1987, “race” has fallen out of favor as an analytical category for classical antiquity.³⁵ The arguments against using race rely on a definition of race as clear, immutable, grounded in biology, and especially indicated by skin color. Thus defined, race (in contrast to “ethnicity”) is deemed irrelevant for antiquity because it is anachronistic. Since this particular formulation does not appear in surviving ancient Mediterranean texts, so the logic goes, one should not import “race” into the study of antiquity. These scholars insist that modern biological definitions of race are just that—modern—and imply that “race” as a category cannot be defined in any other manner. As a result, they advocate that “we should strive to see that it is eliminated from both public and private usage.”³⁶ In contrast, these scholars tend to view “ethnicity” as a suitable category for analysis of Mediterranean antiquity.³⁷

At stake in these objections and this solution are at least three things: the view that “ethnicity” is sufficiently distinct from “race” and consequently that the former can serve as a relevant category for historical analysis while the latter ought to be dismissed; concern about avoiding a historical method that makes the past conform to the terms of the present; and concern over the noxiousness of “race” because of its relationship to racism.³⁸ We can see these points clearly in a 2001 issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies devoted to race as an analytical category for medieval history. In his concluding essay to the issue, William Chester Jordan expresses skepticism about the usefulness of the term: “I cannot prove,” he writes, “but I do not believe that readers will sufficiently shed their modern notions of race simply because scholars redefine the concept against the modern grain, so that medieval race can encompass change and independent nonbiological markers.”³⁹ Jordan suggests that race can only be thought of as an “allegedly fixed category” whereas ethnicity is preferable because it “can be (not always is, but can be) understood as a process.”⁴⁰ He is certainly not alone in this view about the differences between race and ethnicity.⁴¹ Jordan does not say that scholars cannot redefine race, but he questions whether readers will take up such alternative interpretations of race. He makes an important point about the pernicious effects of associating race in particular with immutability—a problem he thinks ethnicity can potentially avoid.

In the rest of this section, I respond to these concerns with three main points. First, I am not convinced by the way that most scholars differentiate “race” from “ethnicity” to justify the exclusion of “race” for historical analysis. While this book intentionally uses the terms interchangeably, this is not because I think they are necessarily synonymous;⁴² rather, I am provoking attention to their inexactness—both in the contemporary moment and in their relationship to ancient categories of cultural difference. “Ethnicity” is also a modern category, so its appropriateness for the interpretation of early Christianity (or medieval history) is no more or less obvious than “race.” Second, we need to reconsider the charge of anachronism in light of broader questions about how we write history. “Race,” “ethnicity,” and “religion” are all modern categories. The question of the viability of using these categories to speak about ancient self-understandings is partly about how to formulate an interpretive framework that accounts for historical difference while still being intelligible to the interpreter. But it is also about how to define these concepts now by asserting a difference between the present and the past. We can place modern categories into conversation with ancient ones without effacing their differences, even while we must also acknowledge that we can only understand those differences through the lens of our present. Third, while I share the concern to avoid perpetuating the noxious effects of racism, I do not think we avoid them by avoiding the term “race.” In an era of genocidal “ethnic cleansing” in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, ethnocentrism has proven as noxious as racism. Furthermore, replacing race with ethnicity has obscured the racist aspects of using ethnicity to distinguish Jews from Christians.

One of the most familiar arguments about the irrelevance of “race” to early Christians was made famous by Frank Snowden Jr., who argued that by making differentiations among humans that we might call “racial,” ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean nonetheless differed radically from modern Americans and Europeans in that they did not attach a value judgment to skin color. Although she does not use the term “race” herself for antiquity, Gay Byron has posed a significant challenge to Snowden’s thesis, as well as to historical reconstructions of Christianity as a religion in which “race” was irrelevant, by demonstrating a broad range of early Christian texts that employ “blackness” or “Ethiopians” in loaded ways.⁴³ Byron does not argue that there is no difference between modern racism and the rhetoric she interprets in early Christian texts, but her work rules out the comforting idea that there was a “golden age” of early Christianity in terms of the ways that ancient understandings of human difference functioned. She examines how blackness as well as persons classified as “Ethiopian” and “Egyptian” are woven into early Christian language—both positively (to indicate the universality of Christianity, that it includes even the “exotic” other from the ends of the earth) and negatively (to indicate the problematic “other” within). Snowden’s and Byron’s work offer good examples of how modern concerns about the formulation and deployment of race influence the topics the historians address. This book complements Byron’s by examining a different set of rhetorical practices. I show how Christians conceptualized themselves not only as a group formed out of members of other peoples, but also as a people themselves.

Even if one is sympathetic to the view that it might be difficult to get readers to “shed their modern notions of race” to entertain the possibility that “medieval race can encompass change and independent nonbiological markers,” it is vital to remember that this difficulty exists partly because today many people think of race as something that people in the past used to think about as fixed. Narratives about the history of race generally reinforce this perception. Such histories of race frequently seek to identify the historical “origins” of the concept. Even though agreed upon as a modern concept, there is very little consensus about precisely when and where “race” began. In an argument that scholars and students of early Christianity will find quite familiar, Ann Stoler notes that these quests for the origins of race serve authorizing functions for the present more than they secure knowledge about “race.” Even more applicable to this study is Stoler’s point that, regardless of when and where they identify the beginning of “race,” these narratives depict race as initially invested with fixity. As she explains, “this adherence to the notion of fixity rests on the assumption that fixity was rooted in a commonly shared biological model of race, that some notion of ‘immutability’ was crucial to it, and that race was a concept unproblematically conceived as ‘natural.’”⁴⁴ Histories of race often narrate the change over time in understandings of race from “fixed” to “constructed.” This narrative arc positions the interpreter among those who have come to recognize the spuriousness of race’s fixity while construing fixity as a fundamental feature of race in the past.

Stoler’s research on the colonial Dutch Indies demonstrates that the notion that race is mutable is not, however, the result of twentieth-century challenges to scientific racism. In the colonies, she argues:

Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch customs, a sense of ‘belonging’ in a Dutch cultural milieu, a ‘distance’ and disaffiliation with things Javanese, as well as appropriate domestic arrangements, parenting styles and moral environment made up the ethnography of race. Each of these, to different degrees, and with strategic priority, were crucial to defining in law and everyday practice who was to have access to what privileges and who was to be considered European.⁴⁵

That is, even when racial classifications are presented as “fixed,” the range of colonial practices and institutions established to manage these allegedly fixed differences as well as the “slippage” in how individuals are classified minimally suggest that race was perceived to be fluid even if this fluidity was denied. Stoler persuasively suggests that “the porousness we assign to the contemporary concept of race may be a fluidity fundamental to the concept itself and not a hallmark of our postmodern moment.”⁴⁶

A number of scholars support Stoler’s alternative approach to race by noting ways that “race” has, in the past, been viewed as mutable: “Lamarckian notions that acquired traits could be inheritable, and that human variation was responsive to environmental conditions were as much a part of nineteenth-century racial thinking and practice as those focused more squarely on the immutability and permanence of traits.”⁴⁷ As Peter Harrison puts it: “In our present age, in which a Darwinian view of the influence of heredity and environment is taken for granted, we tend to forget that, prior to the nineteenth century, belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was widespread.” This logic, often called “Lamarckian,” after Darwin’s famous rival, also extended to religion. One could also acquire and transmit good or false religiosity: “The most common hereditary religious affliction was idolatry.”⁴⁸

Harrison’s work not only supports the perception of race as mutable but also complicates distinctions made between race, ethnicity, and religion. In early modern Britain and Europe, questions about human diversity (prompted especially by the “discovery” of the Americas, colonization, trade, and slavery) were discussed by Europeans as questions of religious diversity; in turn, religious diversity could be used to explain or correlated with racial difference.⁴⁹ For seventeenth-century Europeans interested in tracing the origins both of European peoples as well as “newly discovered” peoples, biblical narrative guided the analysis. Peoples were classified in relation to Noah’s children,⁵⁰ and it was the link between Noah’s children and their religious practices that were viewed as determinative of other national or racial features.⁵¹ Thus, long before preachers of the American South linked Ham’s “hereditary affliction” to race and racially based slavery,⁵² European Christian authors defined this affliction in terms of religion: “Idolatry had, in modern parlance, a genetic basis, and as a result was characteristic of certain races—those races descended from Ham.”⁵³

Historians of North America have also shown that racial differences in the European colonies were defined along religious lines before the labor arrangements of slavery and eventually the biological sciences became the privileged sites for defining race.⁵⁴ In other European colonies such as India, it is not until the mid-nineteenth century that “race comes to replace religion as the defining characteristic of the British nation and its right to imperial rule.”⁵⁵ Even so, religion and ethnicity/race remain closely interconnected in colonialism, since religious conversion could be perceived and intended to have ethnic/racial effects, especially as a challenge to modern discourses about the fixity of ethnic or cultural identities.⁵⁶

Since race has been defined in many ways over time, we must ask what is at stake for modern scholars in excluding race from a historical analysis of classical antiquity by delimiting the meaning of “race” according to one particular modern definition, especially since classicists (among others) have begun to examine how the very tools for studying ancient history have their own modern histories that include both complicity in and resistance to modern racism and ethnocentrism.⁵⁷

Despite the fact that both ethnicity and race are modern concepts, many scholars view ethnicity but not race as a viable analytical category for interpreting the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods.⁵⁸ How can one modern concept be ruled in and another ruled out? This apparent contradiction has everything to do with how they are defined relative to each other in the present.

Ethnicity cannot be understood without reference to race insofar as it is a term coined in the mid-twentieth century specifically as an alternative to biologically based understandings of race. The very distinction between these concepts must also be seen in light of the circumstances—especially World War II and the civil rights movement—that made desirable the formulation of a category like ethnicity to stand as an alternative to the biological ideas about race that were invoked to classify humans in ways that supported programs of genocide, colonialism, slavery, and class exploitation. In twenty-first-century America, we are still struggling with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacy of ideas about race as a biological or natural concept and the racist social policies these ideas continue to undergird. The claim that ethnicity can be perceived as mutable while race can only be perceived as immutable does not hold up. Biological definitions of race have largely come to be seen as the product of particular historical and social circumstances in modern European and American history; this paradoxically suggests that race is a sociocultural category, even as its “naturalized” associations are actually foregrounded by the coining of “ethnicity.” Nonetheless, both ethnicity and race continue to seem “natural,” and ethnicity is often used with biological or genetic connotations when used to convey identity linked to birth (not just upbringing, preferred food, clothing, or music).

We also need to remember that “religion” is a modern construction, by which certain phenomena are identified as belonging to the species “religion.” Classifying phenomena within that species is a relatively recent enterprise.⁵⁹ So even if one argues that second-century Christians produced and practiced a different kind of religion than Coptic Christians or twentieth-century Lutherans, the persuasiveness of the argument rests not in the historical “proof” one cites but rather in the conceptualization of what religion can entail and how one interprets and classifies historical sources within the concept.

I am suspicious of the ways that certain modern concepts seem to be viewed as unproblematic for analysis of antiquity—religion, ethnicity, and gender, for example—whereas others have become “off-limits” (“race” and increasingly also “sexuality”). The use of familiar categories does not preclude analyses that destabilize modern meanings. Studies abound that attend to the differences between our modern understandings of family, gender, and social status (such as created through slavery) and ancient ones. Increasingly, sexuality is viewed as a modern concept without a direct correlation in antiquity; nonetheless, many studies explore the “prehistory” of the concept or still employ the modern term. The value of using our modern categories of race and ethnicity to talk about early Christian self-definition lies in the modern context for and consequences of historical interpretation.

In his introduction to an anthology of theories of ethnicity, Werner Sollors concludes by indirectly highlighting the need for further attention to how we study ethnicity and race in relation to religion. While noting the uncertainty about the philological origin of the English term “race,” he speculates on the hypothesis that it derives from the Spanish and Castilian term raza:

It was used in Castilian … to describe (and expel from Spain) people “tainted” by Jewish and Moorish blood—hence “race” in the “physical” and “visible” sense, we might think. Yet the list of people to which the doctrine of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) was applied went on and included descendants of heretics and of “penitenciados (those condemned by the Inquisition).” Thus at this terrible beginning, “race” was hardly based on perception of “phenotypal” difference but on a religiously and politically, hence “culturally,” defined distinction that was legislated to be hereditary, innate, and immutable.⁶⁰

I am not interested in whether or not Sollors has in fact identified the origin of the term race. Rather, I want to underscore two points: first, we ought not to overstate the distinctions between race and ethnicity—since in this example raza “was what we would now call an ‘ethnic’ distinction.”⁶¹ Second, in spotlighting the cultural basis for defining raza in the context of the Spanish Inquisition and its aftermath, we find an example of how religion and race/ethnicity can interrelate. In this example, the definition of raza intersects with the definition of religion: to define who counted as an authentic Christian, as well as an authentic Spaniard, Christian authorities also formulated ideas about race. This project of classification was part of a larger political and colonial project with implications for defining gender, colonial and political status, as well as race/ethnicity and religiosity.⁶² In the medieval and early modern Spanish context on the continent and in the colonies, religiosity and race are intertwined.

I am not suggesting that our modern understandings of race and ethnicity, which can themselves range quite broadly, were shared by inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world. The important differences between the discourses that produced the modern nation-state and those that produced the Roman Empire, and between the discourses that produced the variety of movements we analyze under the common rubric “early Christian” and those that serve modern Christians, raise questions about how we use historical readings in service of contemporary arguments. Our very ability to assert that there are important differences (or continuities) is always determined in the present and always has consequences for the present. If I insist on disjuncture between the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and today, these differences also underscore the contingent character of present-day modes of thought.

In order to evaluate the strengths and limitations of historical analysis we need to consider at least three things: the history of the interpretive frameworks we are using to make sense of the ancient sources, the present context in which we are writing, and the historical period in which early Christian texts were produced. This threefold consideration of historical interpretation has important implications for the ways we draw the boundaries around concepts like “race,” “ethnicity,” and “religion,” as well as “gender,” “sexuality,” and “identity.”

What Stoler suggests is fundamental to the concept of race, a combination of rhetorical and material fluidity and fixity,⁶³ is precisely what many ancient historians and classicists are now articulating as characteristic of ancient ethnicity and “cultural identity.”⁶⁴ Indeed, her description of the ethnography of race in the Dutch Indies resembles the network of concerns that appear in texts that attempt to define Romanness, Greekness, Jewishness, as well as Christianness. For example, Greg Woolf has forcefully argued that Romans “valued common descent hardly at all, and regarded material culture and morality as much more central constituents of their sense of self.”⁶⁵ Romans were also characterized by an ingathering of previously disparate peoples: “Roman identity was based to an unusual degree on membership in a political and religious community with common values and mores (customs, morality, and way of life).”⁶⁶ And crucially, the Roman mos maiorum was itself a double-edged concept, invoking stability (“ancestral ways”) while nonetheless continuously under revision: “It was not an option to freeze an inherited identity of the Roman, based on the mos maiorum; the ancestral way was always disputed and changing.”⁶⁷ Like Romans, early Christians do not view descent as a bar to (or a precondition of) becoming Christian; nonetheless, Christians also develop and ritually elaborate claims of primordial descent as a basis for defining the Christian community. Increasingly, studies of ancient materials are taking into account rhetorical claims that these categories of collective identification have some fundamental reality while also noting ways that they are malleable.⁶⁸

Finally, I want to address the “avoid race because it’s noxious” argument. Some classicists, such as Jonathan Hall, acknowledge the similarity between contemporary views of race as a socially constructed category and his definition of ancient ethnicity. Despite this, Hall expresses uncertainty as to “whether the term ‘race’ has yet outgrown its troubled past sufficiently to re-enter current social-scientific discourse.”⁶⁹ If we want to move beyond racism, we cannot wait for it to outgrow its troubled past on its own; rather, we need to confront the elusive elasticity of race, since racism persists even when race has been exposed as a construct.⁷⁰

Because our interpretive models for studying the ancient past have been formulated and revised within racist cultures, we need to keep the term active so as to be able to examine how our interpretive models encode, and thus perpetuate, particular notions about race.⁷¹ By using the terms race and ethnicity interchangeably I signal my view that neither term has a one-to-one counterpart in antiquity; moreover, this choice indicates that these terms cannot be neatly distinguished even in modern parlance. I also want to keep modern readers alert to the contemporary stakes of historical work. By excluding the category of race from work on classical antiquity, we risk implying that our modern legacy of racial thinking can be shut off when we examine ancient texts and that our versions of ancient history are either irrelevant or alien to the ways that we handle questions of human sameness and difference in the present.

The Modern Study of Religion Meets the Modern Study of Race and Ethnicity

We are used to thinking of science, especially the biological sciences, as the site for authoritative knowledge about race. But we have seen that “religion” had already been a domain for the production of ideas about racial difference.⁷² The study of religion came into its own as a distinct discipline, with its own academic departments at the end of the nineteenth century, precisely at the moment when modern scientific disciplines were being formed and were cornering the market on cultural authority. What changes with the construction of religion as an academic discipline is not so much the interconnection of ways of thinking about race and religion than the dominant epistemological framework for doing so. This shift occurs in part alongside and through the consolidation of modern academic disciplines.⁷³ To be sure, this shift is monumental because it results in an apparent severing of the discourses of race and religion. Religion itself gets produced as an object of scientific inquiry, parallel to race, rather than the site of production of “race.” I do not mean to suggest that religion was not already a discursive and cultural domain before academics so dubbed it, but rather that the perception of the category shifted.

Scholars shaping the study of religion recognized that this fledging discipline would gain the greatest clout if its practitioners presented their work as scientific in method and approach. They not only named their pursuits as scientific, but they also embraced the ideal of value-neutral, empirical inquiry that aimed to produce ever-expanding “objective form[s] of knowledge.”⁷⁴ This ideal of the detached observer who produces objective facts is the hallmark of modern scientific practices and disciplines. As Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman among others have noted, one troubling consequence of this epistemology is that it decentered and often disabled political and moral questions because this regime of knowledge claimed that it could offer “objective, neutral answers” about human difference.⁷⁵ Because late nineteenth-century scholars honed this epistemology through the science of race, sex, and sexuality and because the study of religion was at great pains to assert itself as a humanistic science, it would be surprising not to find ideas about race and sex in the models used to construct “religion” and its study.

These scientific practices authorized as objective knowledge ideas about race and ethnicity that were constructed in and through organic metaphors of sex, reproduction, and blood—ideas that were already in the air and especially salient in constructions of nationalism. The notion of nation as coterminous with race, and the Romantic idea of race as immutable and determined by “earth and particularly blood,”⁷⁶ were central to the articulation of German nationalism, for example, but in turn also mapped onto readings of history, especially the historical development of other peoples and nations—of Israel as well as other ancient peoples including Dorians and Greeks.⁷⁷ Regina Schwartz gives a clear example of how the well-known biblical critic Julius Wellhausen relied on such metaphors:

Familiar nineteenth-century organic metaphors govern his discourse: innate tendencies “grow,” a seed “flowers” into a nation…. Whether as the growth of an organism or the accretion of geologic deposits, this is the picture that he quickly applies not only to the development of the text, but to its plot, that is, to the biblical narrative’s own account of history. Deftly, almost without our noticing, the story of Germany becomes the story of Israel.⁷⁸

Not only do heterosexuality, sex, and race all become naturalized through mutually constituting organic metaphors; more ominously, these naturalized concepts take on both a vivid, concrete life and a covert life that sustains them. Concretely, they are institutionalized by social and political policies, legal rulings, and the like—this is most obvious in occupational and residential segregation.⁷⁹ Covertly, these metaphors lurk in the foundations of most academic frameworks for defining and studying history, science, anthropology, and religion, among other fields. In these contexts, organic metaphors may appear in disguise, as assertions of the totality of history, as evolutionary discourse, and as typologies of religion.⁸⁰ The metaphoricity with which these concepts and models are imbued has often gone unremarked as scientific experiments on organic matter—bodies—can function to transmute organic metaphors into perceived truths about organisms.

In the academic study of religion, race serves as a marker for distinguishing among types of religions. In the late nineteenth century, scholars tussled over how to define and classify religions, but often agreed that there were two basic types—even if they disagreed about the defining features of these types. William Whitney described the twofold division as that of “race-religion” and “a religion proceeding from an individual founder”;⁸¹ that is, for Whitney, race serves as primary basis for the two largest classifications of religion. In contrast, Whitney’s contemporary Cornelius Tiele advocated an alternative dichotomous classification—between “nature” and “ethical” religions. In many respects, Tiele’s alternative closely resembles Whitney’s. For both, the former variety of religion (“race” or “nature”) corresponds to local, indigenous religions, whereas the latter (from a single founder or “ethical”) has a “revealed” or prophetic component.⁸²

What Tiele’s classification accomplishes, however, is a resituation of the significance of race. Far from disappearing, race now appears as the salient factor in distinguishing between “ethical” religions. For Tiele, nature religions are tied to specific races, states, or nations; but he thinks that this also holds true for almost all ethical religions. Tiele writes, “Most religions limit themselves to a particular people or nationality, it is as part and parcel of the civilisation to which they belong; but these two alone [Christianity and Buddhism] address themselves, not to a single people, but to all men and to every nation in its own language.”⁸³ Most ethical religions are ethnically or nationally linked, whereas a rare few transcend this limit. Thus Tiele uses race as a way to define a small group of religions, including Christianity, as exceptional in not being racially linked.

The distinction between religions viewed as ethnoracially linked (and usually geographically specific) and those that are universal (in aspiration if not in reality) does not imply a single kind of relationship between “race” or “ethnicity” and “religion” but does carry with it a value judgment, since universal religions are often depicted as the evolutionary successors to religions that are tied to a particular social or cultural group or region: the ideal is to transcend the particular.⁸⁴

Race and ethnicity have not only been used to classify and compare religions with one another in a given moment but also to assert the relationships among religions over time. In a sociopolitical context that supports the institutionalized disciplinary methods dominated by the notion of progressive time and evolution, this means that religions often get arranged developmentally as progressing from least developed to more developed. Universalization and individualization (and secularization) are privileged as signs of cultural progress. In the study of Christianity, and especially Christian origins, this has translated into an emphasis upon defining the difference between Christianity and Judaism as that of an ideally universal religion versus a religion of a particular people. It has also allowed a masking or dismissal of the significance of how Christian congregations today still often correlate with ethnoracial communities (Irish Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Norwegian Lutherans, “Black church,” and so on). That is, ideas about race and ethnicity have been used to define Christianity as a special kind of religion, one that is universal because it is not tied to a cultural marker of particularity, most notably race, despite acknowledged links in social arrangements.

While race and ethnicity may be used to define Christianity, Christianity has often served, explicitly or not, as the measuring stick for defining religion as a whole. The most obvious examples of this are the ways that belief (or faith), the idea of divinity (or God), and scripture have often been made essential criteria for determining whether or not something counts as a religion at all (Buddhism has sometimes not counted as a religion because a belief in god[s] is absent), or for determining what kind of religion it is (such as distinctions between practice- or ritual-centered religions and belief-centered ones, or religions that assert that there is only one God in contrast to those that assert that there are many gods, or religions that have a set body of authoritative texts like a Bible versus those that do not). In this way of thinking, aspects that are considered central to Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, have often served as the basis for producing theories about religion overall. Just as “religion” is a construction whose contours have owed much to assumptions imbued with Christian resonances, so too “Christianity” is a construction with no singular manifestation. What counts as Christian has always been a matter of negotiation, argument, and revision. Christianity’s privileged place as the unmarked referent for “religion” with its idealized construction as transcending race has meant that race and ethnicity function as indices of particular, marked religions.⁸⁵

Scholarship since World War II has sought to dismantle approaches that reinscribe Romantic, social-evolutionist, and positivist readings of race and ethnicity and historical development of peoples and religions, as well as approaches to religion that privilege Christianity (especially in its Protestant forms). Regina Schwartz’s work on biblical monotheism offers an important recent example; in her interpretation of Israel and biblical history she tries to account both for a “narrative that tends to construct identity as someone or some people set apart, with boundaries that could be mapped, ownership that could be titled” and the persistent instability of this identity: “if … the parameters of Israel’s identity are always very much at issue, if which God is allowed and which is not, and which woman is allowed and which is not forever being contested, then the identity of the nation and the people is not already mapped, but in the process of being anxiously drawn and redrawn.”⁸⁶ Most importantly for this study, Schwartz proceeds to link the questions raised by this tension with historiographical method and its implications:

The biblical narrative’s effort to construct Israel’s past may well be an effort to construct Israel, but this is not a German historian’s project, not a construction in the sense of building a building, or national spirit unfolding, or an organic personality flowering. Instead, the notion of “Israel” is an inconsistent, fractured, and multiple concept: a people who are bound by a law that they refuse to obey, a people who are defined by their nomadism but who are promised a land to settle in and embark on its conquest, a people who remember (or adopt) a shared history only to constantly forget it, a people who promise fidelity to their God only to go astray. And even these formulations are misleadingly stable, for each presupposes a “people” when defining them is very much a part of the task of this history.⁸⁷

In reconstructing early Christian history, we need to heed Schwartz’s insistence on identifying the slippages both between the historian, the text, and the historical reconstruction, as well as between the rhetoric of the text and the historical situation being conjured.

Race and Ethnicity in the Modern Study of Christian Origins

Definitions of peoplehood, race, and ethnicity as natural, heritable, and immutable have left their mark on the study of Christian origins. Religion has no intrinsic or necessary relation to race or ethnicity. The ways in which ethnicity and race have been defined and interpreted in relation to the development of Christianity prior to its legalization in 313 vary widely, but have generally served to build and reinforce an understanding of Christianity as a universal religion. Both elements of this description, “universal” and “religion,” are loaded; their connotations, both apart and when combined, have been forged at least partly in relation to the production of modern ideas about race and ethnicity, as well as gender and social status.

This section briefly outlines how organic and evolutionary metaphors about race and human difference lurk in the way scholars often reconstruct early Christian history, thereby creating an interpretation of the past that perpetuates modern habits about race, ethnicity, and religion that we would do well to break. By asking what kinds of assumptions about race, ethnicity, and religion shape our approaches to ancient history, we can understand why mainstream interpretive frameworks and presuppositions shape interpretations in such a way that the vast majority of historical accounts explain as absent or aberrant early Christian self-definition either in terms of race or ethnicity, or as a race.

Specialists in the study of Christian origins have produced their own kinds of classifications of religion. We find echoes of Tiele’s framework in early twentieth-century explanations of early Christianity’s relationship to its contemporary religious setting. In his influential 1933 study of conversion in antiquity, for example, Arthur Darby Nock distinguishes between two primary varieties of religion. He classifies most ancient Mediterranean religions as linked to particular communities and/or peoples, whereas he defines Judaism and Christianity, as well as Greek philosophical schools, as “prophetic” religions (characterized by the possibility of conversion).⁸⁸ In this work, prophetic religions correspond to what Tiele calls ethical religions.

The basic differences between Nock’s two types of religion come down to this: the older, particularized type is ascribed, given, transmitted in culture, maintained through practices, and tied to or dependent upon a population group.⁸⁹ The second, prophetic type of religion is always acquired, and as such taken up as a matter of individual choice. It is belief-centered, and not inherently tied to any population group or culture. Nonetheless, Nock distinguishes among prophetic religions on the basis of the scope of their prophetic vision; that is, like Tiele’s ethical religions, prophetic religions differ as to whether they are universal or restricted to a particular group/people. In this way, he distinguishes Judaism from Christianity. Nock sees Judaism as having universal potential but primarily restricted in practice to one people. Christianity, in contrast, he views as having emerged from Judaism precisely by departing from a national, ethnic restriction to include gentiles actively in its prophetic vision.⁹⁰ For Nock, it is not prophetic vision per se that makes Christianity separate from Judaism, but rather its fully actualized universal scope.

Reconstructions of early Christian history have generally been framed in relation to two central questions: “What is the original form of Christianity?” and “How and why did Christianity ‘succeed’?” Although it may not appear so at first glance, both of these questions rely on modern ideas about race for answers. These questions have been problematized by many scholars of early Christianity for the last few decades. My work contributes to this impulse both by calling attention to the submerged ways that ideas about race support these framing questions and by outlining the benefits of devising alternative framing questions that tackle the deployment of ideas about race and ethnicity in early Christian texts.

The first question, regarding the original form of Christianity, is genealogical (in the non-Foucauldian sense). It presupposes that we can determine essence by looking at origins—and that there is a fundamental essence to be traced. It also contains within it a prior question: what makes Christianity different, distinct, or unique (that allows us to even speak about it having an origin)? Christianity is then studied implicitly in organic terms as a life form, with the presupposition that there is a fundamental essence or structure to this life form that may be altered in subsequent strains but which can be uncovered by tracing Christianity back to its original roots.⁹¹ Within this line of questioning, the relationship between Christianity and Judaism becomes especially pressing: if Jesus was a Jew and his first followers were Jews—that is, if Christianity is itself traceable to Judaism—then what is the essence of Christianness that is not Jewishness?⁹²

I want to underscore two points about the complex ways in which this question has been answered. First, this question demands an answer that defines Christianity as specific and different from Judaism, if not also from everything else in its day. Since the late nineteenth century, a privileged marker for distinguishing among phenomena, including religion, has been organic, biologized race. This means that there would be a strong tendency to define Christianity in racially inflected terms, to model the essence of Christianity’s difference using organic metaphors associated with constructing racial differences among humans. So we might expect modern ideas about racial difference to support genealogical answers about Christianity’s original essence.⁹³

My second point, however, is that a racially informed model for Christianity had to be denied, even as it returns to haunt. This denial rests on the mapping I mentioned earlier, of Christianity as a kind of religion that is defined by its being not linked to race, and the higher value accorded to Christianity on this basis. Ironically, we may fail to see how, in the deployment of a developmental framework, Christian history is treated precisely as the history of a people.⁹⁴ That is, we fail to see that many of the structuring categories and explanations used to chart the development of Christianity or to analyze the differences among Christians rely on metaphors of sexual reproduction.⁹⁵ Moreover, these metaphors encode organic notions of racial and sexual difference that appear in preoccupations with what we might call miscegenation.

Three concepts in particular signal this concern with early Christianity’s sexual/racial purity: “syncretism,” “Judaizing,” and “heresy.” All three are used to explain differences within Christianity in terms of improper “mixing” of some original essence of Christianity with allegedly external elements.⁹⁶ Some feminists have noted how these concepts rely on sexual metaphors to explain the mixing process, and are gendered. Women, for example, are viewed as especially susceptible to heresy and Judaizing.⁹⁷ Others have noted that the search to identify the authentic core of Christianity serves the interest of those conducting the search and often “discovers” as the core that which has already been established as authentic by dogma and institutions.⁹⁸ Nonetheless, these important interventions do not call attention to the presence of modern ideas about race in the very framing of Christian history.

There is an irony here. Naturalized ideas about race help to structure the very classifications of religions despite the insistence on defining Christianity as not-race.⁹⁹ This racially linked notion of what religion is helps to explain why anti-Judaism persists in the face of reconstructions of Christian origins that are quite explicit about seeking to avoid this implication. By distinguishing Christianity as universal and racially unmarked, Judaism is constructed as its constitutive other—the racially marked particular. Furthermore, when these two complexes are located in a historical sequence, first Judaism, then Christianity, an evolutionary progression from particular to universal is implied.¹⁰⁰

The second question that drives many scholarly reconstructions of early Christian history, “how did Christianity succeed?” is forward-looking, or teleological.¹⁰¹ It takes success for granted and works backwards to seek causal explanations and contributing factors. The question of Christianity’s original form is usually implied in the teleological question of Christianity’s success. The teleological question has a negative twin: “When and how did Christianity go astray?” A negative teleology can be developed using a model of Christian degeneration—one that often relies on the idea of mixing (as seen in the concepts of syncretism and heresy) noted above.¹⁰²

Answering the teleological question, either positively or negatively, means not just stating how Christianity is distinct, but especially how it is distinct from Judaism. How and when does this movement associated with the Jewish Jesus and his Jewish followers get to be something else? This means that one of the continuing questions in scholarly reconstructions is “when did Christianity break from Judaism?” Even scholars who actively resist producing histories that trumpet Christianity’s history as one of triumph remain obsessed with this question.

Although the responses to this question vary in terms of timing and circumstance, the very formulation of the question implies that Christianity’s coherency, if not success, depends upon having established a definitive break with Judaism.¹⁰³ What has remained strikingly consistent in the last century of mainstream scholarship is the assertion that Christianity’s success (as well as its “break” with Judaism) correlates with its “going universal.” But when we inquire about this universalism, it turns out that it is measured by the extent to which Christianity becomes a gentile movement that has transcended its particular roots in Judaism.¹⁰⁴ This is an odd measure of universality, since it depends on ancient dichotomies of self-other (Jew/gentile), adapted loosely so that “gentile” becomes “self” and the Jew becomes the “other” by which the self is defined.

In holding up for scrutiny the biologized assumptions that pervade the metaphors with which historiographical narratives have been devised, we are better able to inquire into their limits and implications. We need instead to view religion (including Christianity) as well as race and ethnicity, as strategic, contingent, and mutable concepts. As others have argued (without paying specific attention to ideas about race), we need to approach Christianity not as an essence but as a contested site—one defined and claimed by competing groups and individuals—and Christian history not as an evolving totality but rather as a series of ongoing struggles, negotiations, alliances, and challenges.¹⁰⁵ Our interpretive models should seek not an original essence for Christianity but rather highlight the processes and strategies of negotiation and persuasion that permeate the very creation of Christianness. By exposing the subtle persistence of a “fixed” and naturalized understanding of race in modern interpretive frameworks and by selfconsciously producing interpretive frameworks that imagine race and ethnicity as discourses that rely on appeals to both fixity and fluidity, new ways of reconstructing Christian history emerge that neither insist that differences are natural and essential—and thus fundamentally incommensurable and unbridgeable—nor that all difference must be dissolved into one ultimate sameness.

Toward an Alternative Reconstruction of Early Christian History

So how do these broader historiographical and epistemological issues affect the interpretation of early Christian texts? The Epistle to Diognetus, the writing that contains the question “Why this new race [genos]?”, offers a glimpse of how a different approach to early Christian history can work, an approach that does not rely on either a genealogical or teleological framework.

The Epistle to Diognetus is a tantalizing early Christian text because of its unknowns: we do not know who wrote it, nor when or where it was written. The content suggests that it predates the legalization of Christianity; it might have been composed in Alexandria, Egypt about 200 C.E. These guesses themselves indicate the extent to which any interpreter of this (or any other) text always brings expectations and assumptions to the text that shape her interpretation. But in addition to questions of authorship and historical context, of course, our reading of texts also depends upon broader epistemological and theoretical choices, as this chapter has emphasized.

The Epistle to Diognetus opens with a series of questions about Christianity that the reader expects to have answered:

I perceive, most excellent Diognetus, that you are exceedingly eager to learn about the piety (theosebeia) of the Christians and you are asking very clear and careful questions about them: who is the god in whom they believe, and how do they worship (thrēskeuein) it … and why this new race (genos) or practice (epitēdeuma) has come to life at this time, and not formerly.

(Ep. Diog. 1.1).

By implying that the addressee of the text has already posed these questions, the narrator gives the impression that the discussion to follow is guileless, aiming only to answer Diognetus’s “very clear and careful questions.” These questions intrigue but they also raise further interpretive questions: how does the author control the depiction of Christianness by depicting these as the most salient issues—the details of this piety, concern with justifying its novelty? What is the significance of juxtaposing “race” with “practice”? How does the text address the question of Christians being considered a genos, the Greek term that I have translated as “race”?

Before addressing the specifics of the Christians in question, the narrator first offers a criticism of “Greeks” and “Jews,” focusing specifically on their respective practices. Thus, the structure of the narrative makes Christians comparable with and parallel to Greeks and Jews, and then portrays Greekness and Jewishness especially via “religious” ideas and actions. Rhetorically, this positions Christians as comprising a genos, like Greeks and Jews; moreover, it implies that the salient content of a genos for this text is “religion,” depicted in terms of both appropriate practices and the appropriate understanding of the object of worship. This structure raises the possibility that this text is defining “race” in quite a different way than is familiar to most modern readers. I develop these points further in chapter 1.

The speaker then turns to consider Christians, situating the topic in terms of the question of difference—what makes Christians distinct? The narrator’s framing indicates that language, customs, and place of residence (if not origin) are among the accepted means of distinguishing people from one another. Nonetheless, he or she insists that these categories fail to determine Christian difference: “For the distinction between Christians and the rest of humanity is neither country nor language nor customs [ēthe]. For they do not dwell in cities in some place of their own, nor do they use any strange variety of dialect, nor practice an extraordinary kind of life” (Ep. Diog. 5.1–2). Since language and customs, as well as territory, were then, as they have sometimes been in the modern period, possible indexes of ethnicity and race, the narrator seems to unsettle the question of whether Christians are, in fact, a new race or a new practice.

But if Christians are not distinct in their manner of language, customs, or habitation, what—if anything—makes them different from non-Christians? Distinctiveness, it seems, is to be found in their political or civic status:

Yet while living in Greek and barbarian cities, depending upon their respective situations, and following the local customs, both in clothing and food and in the rest of life, they display the wonderful and admittedly strange character of the constitution of their own citizenship (politeia). They dwell in their own homelands (patria), but as if visitors (paroikoi) in them; they share all things as citizens (politai) and suffer all things as foreigners (zenoi)…. They pass their time upon the earth but have their citizenship in heaven.¹⁰⁶

(Ep. Diog. 5.4–5, 9)

What can we make of this? This text initially links Christians with a race (genos), but when we ask what this means, we find the notion of citizenship at the center. For the Epistle to Diognetus, this defining feature makes it possible to portray Christianness in at least partially universalizing terms—as an identity that, like other forms of citizenship, is potentially accessible to all free male people, something that sets Christians apart yet allows them to otherwise “fit” into the status quo. In the process, the text articulates and rejects other ways to define peoplehood in antiquity, such as territory, language, and customs. Nonetheless, the prior sections of the text, condemning the religious practices of Greeks and Jews, suggest that religious practices are central to the distinctive politeia embodied by Christians.

This text does not employ the concept of race as particularity in order to pit the notion of the universal over and against the notion of the particular, where Christianness is not race because it is defined as universal. Instead, genos is redefined as that which is a marker of difference but potentially (if never actually) universal, like Roman citizenship. This slippage between ideas of ethnicity, race, and civic status would have been especially clear to ancient readers in relation to being Roman since Romanness is both a civic identity (linked to the city of Rome) and a broader ethnoracial one (in the context of the Roman Empire). Furthermore, the idea that a people can be spread out across a vast geographical area and not necessarily bound by one language, was one already published by Roman-period Jewish writers such as Philo and Josephus. Chapters 1 and 4 especially explore ways that ethnicity and race in antiquity were seen to be acquirable (like citizenship) yet “real.” Chapter 5 builds upon these concepts, analyzing early Christian universalizing strategies as a form of ethnic reasoning.

Within the framework built upon genealogy and teleology, the reading I have offered is impossible. In that framework, only two main options are available. The first option is to insist that the Epistle to Diognetus raises the question “why this new race?” only to reject it. We find this interpretation in the French-Greek critical edition of the text. The editor, Henri-Irénée Marrou, interprets the author’s answer to this question by stating that “the author protests with vigor” this notion of Christians being a new race. Marrou explains: “the Christians are not a people, a specific human race, like the Jews are.”¹⁰⁷ For Marrou, the narrator’s assertion that place, language, and customs do not distinguish Christians from non-Christians is the proof that the narrator is protesting the equation of Christiannness with race. But Marrou’s explanation is unsatisfying. As I have argued, the narrator does not stop here but instead affirms this equation, by defining genos primarily in terms of citizenship or civic membership as well as implicitly in terms of religious practices according to the overall organization of the text. Instead of protesting with vigor the idea that Christians constitute a genos, the Epistle to Diognetus answers in the affirmative even while defying Marrou’s (and perhaps also some ancient readers’) expectations about the meaning of genos.¹⁰⁸

The second option is to argue that the text is exceptional, that is, not representative of “mainstream” Christian thought—an interpretive move that has embedded in it the presupposition that there is an identifiable essence to early Christian thought. Is the Epistle of Diognetus exceptional? Not especially. It closely resembles other early Christian texts that also seek to explain and defend Christianness (such as Aristides’ Apology and Athenagoras’s Embassy on Behalf of the Christians. See chapter 1 for further discussion). Furthermore, as we see happening in the Epistle to Diognetus, a number of other early Christian authors define Christianness through similar juxtapositions of peoplehood, religiosity, and citizenship by depicting Christians as foreigners or strangers in the world or as citizens of heaven (for example, Odes of Solomon, Hebrews, and 1 Peter). These texts presume a correlation between religious practices and participation in a civic whole.¹⁰⁹ As such, they preserve and perpetuate a long tradition of Jewish thought—both in terms of imagining a peoplehood that ultimately embraces all and in terms of articulating this vision of universal citizenship still in terms of a people.

Plan of the Book

I advocate a prismatic approach to the study of the past, which requires a consideration of at least three vantage points: the present, for how our commitments and social location condition our historical analyses; the recent historical past, for how it has shaped and constrained both our interpretive frameworks and our present commitments; and the ancient historical period in which early Christian texts were produced, to gauge their interests and constraints. Because of this, each chapter tackles questions about modern interpretive frameworks and their implications as well as offering close readings of ancient materials. Each chapter touches on most of the four strategic uses of ethnic reasoning (defining ethnicity through religious practices, viewing ethnicity as mutable even if “real,” universalizing ethnicity and religion, and using ethnic ideas as polemic), while emphasizing a cluster of implications that ethnic reasoning has for our understanding of early Christian self-definition. In all of these chapters, we see that approaching ethnicity/race as a dynamic concept characterized by fixity and fluidity helps to complicate and rethink our assumptions about early Christian self-definition.

Chapter 1 explores how religious practices were already closely associated with ethnicity in the early Roman imperial period, reading selected early Christian apologies and martyr narratives to show how early Christians used this connection to construct the boundaries and legitimacy of Christianness. This chapter also calls for rethinking the ways that scholars have defined Christianity in relationship to other ancient forms of religiosity.

Chapter 2 explores the scholarly treatment of Christians as a historically new movement, and the function this serves for our own understanding of the relation between the past and the present. Here, I show how early Christians used ethnic reasoning to give themselves a past as well as a distinctive present and future. By looking at writings by Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, as well as the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and The Tripartite Tractate, we can see how ethnic reasoning informs the ways that early Christians appropriate and (re)write the past and create a universalizing future for their “new” people.

Chapter 3 addresses the broad question of how to reconstruct Christian-Jewish relations in the first few centuries of the common era. My contribution includes a close reading of Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, showing how claims to ethnic fluidity and fixity can be manipulated to differentiate between Christians and Jews while defining both Christians and Jews as members of ethnic groups.

Chapter 4 problematizes the persisting temptation to speak about early Christian diversity along the lines of heretical or sectarian and orthodox or proto-orthodox. It hones in on how attention to ethnic reasoning not only helps us to understand early Christian depictions of conversion but also the internal disputes among Christians. I especially examine anti-Valentinian polemic in Clement and Origen’s writings as well as the rhetoric in The Gospel of Philip.

Finally, chapter 5 reflects on the implications of how universalism is de-fined—what it means for early Christians, how they used ethnic reasoning to make universalizing claims, and what it means for modern interpreters to define early Christianity as a universal religion. I give special attention to what we learn from the visionary text The Shepherd of Hermas while also considering examples from Clement, Justin, Tertullian, and the apocryphal Acts of Andrew. Because universalizing claims presuppose the possibility of individuals becoming members of this movement, I also examine the implications that ethnic reasoning might have for theorizing conversion.