Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity Columbia

7. On the relationship between “race” and “ethnicity,” discussed in more detail below, see Werner Sollors, “Foreword: Theories of American Ethnicity,” in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1996), xxix–xxxv; Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 189 n. 1; and Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 39–42. On taking the present as starting point, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, 11, 28, 49; and Vincent Wimbush, “Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scripture,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent Wimbush with the assistance of Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Continuum, 2000), 9–19.

8. On some reasons for this marginalization, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984); and Fernando F. Segovia, “Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Biblical Studies,” in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark Brett (1996; repr. Boston: Brill, 2002), 469–492.

9. Denise K. Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10:4 (2002): 429–468.

10. Denise K. Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition.” HTR 94 (2001): 449–476.

1. Ep. Diog. 1.1. Some of the ideas in the introduction are developed from Denise Kimber Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” HTR 94 (2001): 449–458, 473–476.

2. Frank M. Snowden Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 99.

3. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 35.

4. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Sexism and God-Language,” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 156.

5. Guy G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1999), 83.

6. See Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35–37; and “γένος,” in A Greek Lexicon, compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised and expanded by Henry Stuart Jones with Robert McKenzie, et al., 9th ed. (1940; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 344.

7. For example, when early Christians discuss themselves in a context that makes “Christians” analogous with “Greeks,” “Romans,” and/or “Egyptians,” I see ethnic reasoning at work.

8. In this universalizing context, the term modern term “race” is more useful than “ethnicity,” since the former includes universalizing connotations (“human race”) whereas “ethnicity” connotes only particularity. Thanks to David Konstan for this important observation.

9. This effect complements Daniel Boyarin’s goals in Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–19; Daniel Boyarin, “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” Church History 70 (2001): 427–461; and Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). See also Charlotte Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Followers of Jesus,” JECS 9.4 (2001): 483–509.

10. Judith Lieu’s important book Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) was released after this book was completed. Her approach and arguments complement my own closely both in her attention to Christian self-definition in context and specifically her discussion of ethnicity as one form of Christian self-definition. See especially, 20–21, 98–146, 239–268, 305–310. See also Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig, “Drawing Large and Startling Figures: Reimagining Christian Origins by Painting like Picasso,” in Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig (Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1996), 12–13.

11. Antony Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness: A Lydian Case Study,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin (Washington D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies/Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 375–400. See chapter 2 below for further discussion of the Lydians.

12. Walter Bauer’s regional approach commands the greatest influence in this regard, but there are divergent analyses of regionalism. The contingent, particular formations of Christianness may be placed in an interpretive model where Christianity, though local, particular, and “ethnic” in inception, improves by moving above and beyond the particular considerations of social context (as if this is possible) to achieve a universal form. This idea seems embedded in Brock’s distinction between religious and “national” communities in Sebastian P. Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire: A Case of Divided Loyalties,” in Religion and National Identity: Papers Read at the Nineteenth Summer Meeting and the Twentieth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Stuart Mews (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 15–19. Even Bauer’s own analysis relies upon ethnic stereotypes to explain regional variations, privileging Rome as the cultural site where what became orthodoxy could properly flourish (unlike the syncretism that characterized the Syrian and Egyptian context). See Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, trans. Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (Mifflintown, Penn.: Sigler, 1971), 230. Steven Grosby offers a related approach, asking about the lingering effects of “primordial” ties upon Christians, by which he means especially those of kinship and territory. See Steven Grosby, “The Category of the Primordial in the Study of Early Christianity and Second-Century Judaism,” History of Religions 36 (1996): 140–163.

13. This is the argument J. B. Lightfoot makes in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881).

14. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 198.

15. Irad Malkin, “Introduction,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Washington D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies/Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 15.

16. Stoler, “Racial Histories,” 186.

17. Malkin, “Introduction,” 6, 15–16; and Stoler, “Racial Histories,” 198–200.

18. Gerd Baumann, The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities (New York: Routledge, 1999), 90.

20. Baumann views putative claims to common descent as a hallmark of ethnicity. More vaguely, he views appeals to moral absolutes as a hallmark of religion. Both are used to formulate communal rights claims, but they draw their boundaries differently (7). Both are co-opted by the authorizing rhetoric of the nation state, but in contrasting ways. The distinction between ethnicity and nationality becomes flattened to the extent that nationality functions as an “unmarked” ethnicity (with its mark revealed by the identification of some internal groups as “other, minority” groups), whereas religion is apparently rejected by the secular rhetoric of the state even while it covertly produces its own “civil religion.”

22. Ibid., 141 n. 1, 143–158.

23. Within classics and ancient history, one of the most eloquent spokespersons for such a view is Jonathan Hall. See Hall, Ethnic Identity, 17–33; and Jonathan Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9–17.

24. See David M. Schneider, “What Is Kinship All About?” in Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year, ed. Priscilla Reining (Washington D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1972), esp. 44–47.

26. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 276 n. 116. For an English translation of Renan’s work, see Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus, trans. Charles Edwin Wilbour (New York: Carleton, 1864).

27. Heschel, Abraham Geiger, 156.

28. Ernest Renan, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari, 10 vols. (Paris, 1947–1961), 5:1142; cited from Heschel, Abraham Geiger, 156, 277 n. 129.

29. See Vincent Wimbush, “Reading Texts as Reading Ourselves: A Chapter in the History of African-American Biblical Interpretation,” in Reading from this Place, vol. 1: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, ed. Fernando Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 103–108.

30. The modern racial landscape of Christianity in North America has been adduced to demonstrate a failure in early Christian universalistic and egalitarian ideals. The fact that mainline Protestant Christian churches remain among the most racially segregated spaces in America reveals a gaping chasm between the assertion of such ideals and concrete social arrangements of Christianity. See Bradford J. Verter, “Furthering the Freedom Struggle: Racial Justice Activism in the Mainline Churches Since the Civil Rights Era,” in The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and The Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, ed. Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 181–212. It is necessary to ask whether and how this ideal, in the hands of the white Christians, has rendered assertions of Christian universalism complicit with racism. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith view this complicity as arising from Protestant ideals of individualism that obscure the systemic character of racism. By insisting on the nonracist character of Christianity and viewing racism as an individual rather than systemic problem, white evangelicals often view themselves as non-racist and lack the strategies to tackle racism on an institutionalized and cultural level. See Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). This problem within modern American Christianity is part of a larger American problem. As Patricia Williams has argued, even well-intentioned assertions of America’s colorblindness do not create the condition of colorblindness (that is, do not function as performative utterances) but rather signal a hysterical refusal to see precisely the extent to which colorblindness is not the case and function to impede the achievement of a society in which race, especially marked in terms of “color,” no longer matters. See Patricia Williams, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York: Noonday, 1997), 3–16.

31. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:276.

32. “The left-wing myth asserts that Jews are an anachronistic religious and national group … opposed to universal egalitarianism and internationalism.” Katherina von Kellenbach, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 42.

33. To question the definition of Jewish/Christian differences in ethnic terms may seem strange to Christians, but it may also be unsettling for Jews. There is considerable debate among Jews as to how to speak about Jewishness with respect to “religion,” “race,” and “ethnicity.” Nonetheless, strengthening and maintaining Jewishness in the wake of attempted genocide is often construed in biological terms—that is, in light of the topics of family, marriage, and childbearing (rather than, say, in terms of conversion). This emphasis on the biological continuity of Jewishness is an understandable response to the terrible biological reasoning that was used as a basis for anti-Jewish discrimination and murder. Biological explanations of Jewishness (or other identity categories) result from historically and culturally specific circumstances rather than demonstrations of essential truth about identity. The meanings of Jewishness, like blackness, whiteness, and Christianness, are not fixed but are produced, revised, and debated in specific contexts. My thanks to Ann Braude for raising this issue.

34. For example, James Cone forcefully critiques white theologians for not taking race and America’s history of racism into account when articulating and analyzing their theologies. See James Cone, Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 130–133.

35. Denise Eileen McCoskey, “Answering the Multicultural Imperative: A Course on Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity,” Classical World 92 (1999): 553 n. 1. It is worth noting, however, that a number of influential works on identity in classical antiquity were published in the twentieth century that used the category of “race,” often by authors writing in a context where contemporary race relations were pressing (Snowden and American civil rights; Saddington and South African apartheid). See for example, A. N. Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Frank Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Frank Snowden Jr., Before Color Prejudice; and D. B. Saddington, “Race Relations in the Early Roman Empire,” ANRW II.3 (1975): 112–137. Classicists may begin to revisit the concept of race (and racism) in light of Benjamin Isaac’s book The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), which was published after this book was completed. Isaac argues for the presence of “proto-racism” in classical sources.

36. C. Loring Brace et al., “Clines and Clusters Versus ‘Race’: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile,” Black Athena Revisited, ed. Mary Lefkowitz and Guy M. Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 162.

37. In some scholarship in classics, “cultural identity” is beginning to be suggested as a replacement for “ethnicity,” if ethnicity is defined as connoting “fixity.” Thus the rationale is somewhat analogous with that of using “ethnicity” instead of “race.”

38. This section is adapted from Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 432–441. Molly Myerowitz Levine notes that this dismissal of race as anachronistic has been a central feature of criticism of Bernal’s work. See Levine, “The Marginalization of Martin Bernal,” Classical Philology 93 (1998): 347, 351. Two essays published in a collective rebuttal of Bernal’s work especially exemplify this trend: Kathryn Bard, “Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race,” in Black Athena Revisited, 104–111; and C. Loring Brace et al., “Clines and Clusters,” 162.

39. William Chester Jordan, “Why ‘Race’?” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 169.

40. Ibid., 168–169.

41. Audrey Smedley, like Jordan, distinguishes race from ethnicity primarily in terms of change. Race, she asserts, is held to be immutable, whereas ethnicity has long been perceived to be mutable. See Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999), 8, 28–35.

42. Race is the keystone idea for an ideology that appeals to immutability to justify social inequalities. “Race” and “ethnicity” can function in particular sociohistorical moments to signify different things (that is, while sometimes used interchangeably, they can also function distinctly).

43. Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also David Brakke, “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 501–535. Both Byron and Brakke foreground the ancient link between Ethiopianness and black skin.

44. Stoler, “Racial Histories,” 197.

47. Ibid., 197. In this passage she is also referring to George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 234–269.

48. Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 120–121.

49. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British writers, for example, especially spurred by the “discovery of America,” drew from the Bible to pose questions about how to classify its inhabitants: Were they human? If so, were they (and how were they) descended from Adam? If not from Adam, then how did they fit into the scheme of salvation and sacred history? This is discussed in more detail in Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions.

50. Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 109.

51. For example, seventeenth-century interpreters not only attributed to Cain the origin of “false religion” but also argued that “Cain’s progeny began to intermarry with those of more pure stock” thereby further corrupting authentic religion (Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 105). Readings of Noah and his descendants reinforced this pattern, with specific correlations made to religious and racial differences: “A long-standing tradition had it that religious corruption re-emerged in the sons of Noah, and in particular in the person of Ham, ‘who it’s likely,’ said Bishop Simon Patrick, ‘carried much of the Spirit of Cain with him into the Ark.’ Soon Ham’s offspring were to manifest the symptoms of their hereditary affliction” (106). Augustine’s writings were influential here, as he had argued that “Ham prefigured the heretics, while Noah’s other two sons, Shem and Japheth, represented the Jews and Greeks respectively” (106).

52. Eugene D. Genovese argues that it was white southern theological liberals, rather than conservatives, who conjoined scientific racism with biblical interpretation to support the notion that race-based slavery was sanctioned by scripture. See Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), esp. 84–85. See also Randall C. Bailey, “Academic Biblical Interpretation among African Americans in the United States,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, Vincent Wimbush, ed., with the assistance of Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Continuum, 2000), 700; David M. Goldenberg, “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism?” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 32; David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 103–106.

53. Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 108. One writer, Glanvill, named Ham as the progenitor not just of idolaters but of apes. Harrison notes, “This judgment … highlights again the tendency to see sin and its first offspring—idolatry—as having a biological and inherited basis. Sin results in degeneracy. The ultimate degeneracy results in the loss of humanity. Neither does Glanvill’s view seem so farfetched in the light of discussions about whether the American natives were human or not” (108).

54. See, for example, Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 16–45; and Matthew Jacobson Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 171–172. Frye notes that European Christian colonists in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also classified Jewish differences in terms of religion rather than race (3–4, 171–72).

55. Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13.

56. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

57. Furthermore, Jonathan Hall notes that, in some post–World War II scholarship, “ethnicity” was substituted for “race” without a significant change in meaning (Hall, Ethnic Identity, 19–20).

58. A spate of recent classics publications with “ethnicity” or “ethnic” in their titles gives one indication of this consensus. Note, for example, Koen Goudriaan, Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1988); Per Bilde et al., eds., Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1992); Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity; Walter Pohl, ed., Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatex, eds., Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000); Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (2001).

59. Jonathan Z. Smith has been the most eloquent spokesperson for this insight. See his “A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion,” HTR 89 (1996), 387–403; and his “Classification,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Cassell, 2000), 35–44.

60. Werner Sollors, “Foreword: Theories of American Ethnicity,” in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1996), xxxv.

62. Irene Silverblatt’s research explores the overlap and intersection between religious, ethnoracial, national, and gendered categories in the context of colonial Peru. She notes, for example, how “Portugese” often functions as a synonym for “Jew” in Spanish colonial discourse. Irene Silverblatt, “Race, Religion, and the Modern/Colonial World: Spanish Cultural Politics and the Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Peru” (public lecture, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 2001). See also Irene Silverblatt, “New Christians and New World Fears in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith Axel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 95–121.

63. Although not all modern scholars agree with Stoler about how to characterize race, many recent sociological and anthropological studies of ethnicity also show how individual and group practices display mutability even when ethnicity is articulated as a “given” aspect of identity. See, for example, Anthony D. Smith, Ethnic Origins of Nations, 211 (cited approvingly by Malkin, “Introduction,” 16); Gerd Baumann, The Multicultural Riddle, esp. 91–94; Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); G. Carter Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” Journal for the Study of Comparative Society and History 29 (1987): 24–55; Charles F. Keyes, “The Dialectics of Ethnic Change,” in Ethnic Change, ed. Charles F. Keyes (Seattle: University of Washington, 1981), 3–30.

64. See now Lieu, Christian Identity, 98–146, and also 309. That ethnicity and “cultural identity” are increasingly contrasted seems to me an analogous move to the one I have just described for the distinction between race and ethnicity. In the contrast between ethnicity and cultural identity, ethnicity often gets reductively linked to notions of descent (“real” or “imagined”—another problematic divide) in contrast to cultural identity’s definition as a category defined by the acquisition and performance of rather fluid cultural norms. Ethnicity and race should be interpreted as facets of cultural identity, not in opposition to it. See Denise Kimber Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10:4 (2002): 438–439.

65. Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 40 (1994): 130.

67. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “To Be Roman, Go Greek: Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome,” in Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, ed. Michel Austin, Jill Harries, and Christopher Smith (London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1998), 85–86.

68. Two especially good recent collection of essays that span classical and Roman antiquity are: Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Malkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity.

69. Hall, Hellenicity, 15.

70. Stoler notes that antiracist motivations partly explain the trend to expose race’s immutability as a false idea. While not criticizing antiracist motivations, she critiques those who attack the immutability of race for assuming that “if we can disprove the credibility of race as a scientific concept, we can dismantle the power of racism itself—that racisms rise and fall on the scientific credibility of the concept of race” (Stoler, “Racial Histories,” 196). Not only have these debunking efforts stunningly failed to eradicate modern racisms, but, as Stoler further notes, they offer a flattened picture of historical formations of race and racism, by implying that race used to be “a clear concept, and that past racisms were dependent on it. Contra that prevailing wisdom … colonial concepts of ‘race’ have had more the consistency and constancy of the Milky Way—perceptible boundaries from a distance but made up of a moving constellation of parts of changing intensity—and less the fixity of a southern star” (197). In this passage, Stoler is specifically alluding to the views of Howard Winant.

71. In reflecting on the reception to her essay “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” Ann Stoler remarks that her argument about the resiliency of racial logic because of its double-sided character has largely been ignored. I find wholly persuasive her emphasis on the importance of this argument: “I argued that scholars have failed to appreciate the power of essentialist thinking. Racial essences are not made up of a fixed and finite set of features but rather an interchanging and malleable range of them…. The crucial point is that racial systems combine elements of fixity and fluidity in ways that make them both resilient and impervious to empirical, experiential counterclaims. I would still hold that how people imagine race to be secured should be the subject of sustained analysis.” In Stoler, “Reflections on ‘Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth’” in Race Critical Theory: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 420.

72. See, for example, van der Veer, Imperial Encounters. As Bruce Lincoln has recently shown, religion and language converge in the production of race/ethnicity/nation in modern definitions of “myth”; see his Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

73. See, for example, Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and British Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of British Archaeology (New York: Routledge, 2000).

74. Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 178.

76. Hall, Ethnic Identity, 13.

78. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 126.

79. See, for example, Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 55–76, 178–179.

80. Regina Schwartz gives a good example of how political context and intellectual traditions converged to produce a strong and long-standing interpretive approach to the [Hebrew] Bible. She argues that the influence of Romanticism and German nationalism upon historical-critical approaches to biblical interpretation has meant that “even when the Bible embraces multiplicity and even when its version of history is marked by disruptions, biblical scholarship … has insisted upon establishing continuity” (Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 124). She explains, “In the nineteenth-century, historical-critical scholarship saw itself as part of a larger Germanic historiographic tradition…. The chief assumptions of that tradition—that history charts development, that its focus should be the development of the nation (the German nation in particular), and that the nation should be understood as an individual entity with its own unfolding spirit, its own internal laws of development—will govern biblical interpretation” (124–25).

81. Cited in Cornelius P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 1:42.

82. This distinction echoes the earlier sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British distinctions between “religions of revelation” and “natural religion” (see Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions, 39).

83. Tiele, Elements, 1:125–26.

84. Ibid., 1: 45; 1:124–126. See also Crawford Howell Toy, Judaism and Christianity: A Sketch of the Progress of Thought from Old Testament to New Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1891), 1–45, esp. 30–34.

85. In the modern period, race and ethnicity sometimes have been viewed as constituent elements of Christianness, often to serve unabashedly white, “Anglo-Saxon” (in the United States) or “Aryan” (in Germany) goals. James Moorhead shows that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some white Americans promoted an ideal of universalism that interpreted these ideals as embodied in white (“Anglo-Saxon”) Protestant Christianity. For its proponents, this message combined a long history of national rhetoric of American chosenness with a specific understanding of who represents this chosenness and a paradoxical assertion that this group’s values embodied universal values. Even if the heyday of this rhetoric has passed, its legacy persists in both international policies and intranational race relations. See James H. Moorhead, “The American Israel: Protestant Tribalism and Universal Mission,” in Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William R. Hutchison and Martmut Lehmann (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 145–166, esp. 151–154 and 165–166.

86. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 141–42.

87. Ibid., 142. Schwartz concludes this discussion by underscoring the epistemological and ethical implications of her reading: “A Bible that suggests that identity is a question rather than an answer, provisional and not reified, fails to underwrite nationalism, imperialism, and persecutions of the Other, in part because it fails to make any clear claims about who the Other is. But if I have offered a more politically congenial Bible (for some) than the one the heirs of German historicism have given us, it is not an invitation to authorize it, for to seek such authority—even for the insight that history is ruptured and collective identity provisional—is, as I have tried to show, to seek foundation in shifting sand” (142).

88. Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (1933; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 4–5, 14.

89. Nock theorizes that an individual can, via migration or intercultural contact (such as through travel or trade), take on new religious practices that fall into this first category. But he defines this process as adhesion, not conversion. For Nock, conversion differs from adhesion in requiring a complete transformation and exclusive allegiance. He imagines adherence as supplemental or additive, as signaling no fundamental change in one’s identity. Nock, Conversion, 6–7, 13–16. I discuss conversion in more detail in chapter 5.

90. Nock, Conversion, 187–190.

91. This way of thinking is indebted to scientific discourses with their privileging elements/fundamental units/atomism. In the study of religion writ large the best-known example would be Durkheim’s elementary forms (which also has a teleological dimension).

92. For excellent discussion of some of the history of scholarship on this question, see Susannah Heschel, “Jesus as Theological Transvestite,” in Judaism Since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 188–199; and Halvor Moxnes, “Jesus the Jew: Dilemmas of Interpretation,” in Fair Play: Diversity and Conflicts in Early Christianity: Essays in Honour of Heikki Räisänen, ed. Ismo Dunderberg, Christopher Tuckett, and Kari Syreeni (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 83–103.

93. This is borne out in the work of scholars such as Ernst Renan, H. S. Chamberlain, and Walter Grundmann (see for example, Heschel, Abraham Geiger, 156; and Moxnes, “Jesus the Jew,” 88–89).

94. Jonathan Z. Smith, for example, argues that many modern scholars of Christian origins replicate patterns established by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus in studies of “the relations of early Christianity to the religions of Late Antiquity.” Herodotus and later historiographers and ethnographers wrote to classify the relations among races and nations. Smith does not call attention to this slippage between ancient ethnography and modern assertions about Christianity, but he implies that scholars are modeling Christianity in terms of peoplehood. He claims that scholars rely especially on the notion of Christian “autochthony” to support the notion of Christian uniqueness: “This concept of self-generation, in the Herodotean enterprise, is always conjoined to a second topos, the notion of ‘borrowing.’ Thus the Egyptians are dependent on no one for their customs and borrow no foreign practices (Histories 2.79, 91); the Persians, objects of scorn for both the Greeks and the Egyptians, borrow from everyone…. For secondary cultures, such as Greece, everything depends on pedigree, on borrowing from a prestigious primary centre. Thus, taking up Egyptian propagandistic claims, Herodotus writes that the ‘younger’ Greeks borrowed freely from the ‘older’ Egyptians (e.g., 2.4, 43, 49, 50, 57, 58, 81, 82) with no suggestion that this implies a necessarily negative evaluation.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 45–46. In writing about Christian origins, if scholars do not claim autochthony for Christianity, then they trace Christianity’s pedigree to “a prestigious centre. In this model, Israel appears in the role of the Herodotean Egypt. The Catholic Church, or in more recent treatments, ‘Greco-Oriental syncretism,’ plays the part of Persia” (46). Smith’s comparison between ancient ethnography or historiography and modern accounts of Christian origins is provocative and illuminating to the extent that he indirectly shows how modern scholars construct Christian history as the history of a people. But Smith’s example also has an important limitation, because one need not make Herodotus the precedent for modern scholarship. Early Christian authors certainly do adapt the ethnographic and historiographic models of at least non-Greek authors. See Frances Young, “Greek Apologists of the Second Century,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price in association with Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92–99; and Arthur Droge, Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1989), 11, 13. But it might be better to say that modern scholars read early Christian adaptations of ancient ethnographies through the lens of social evolution and modernist assumptions about progress. As a result, modern scholarship has produced a view of Christianity as a new species of religion, an evolutionary advance over earlier forms (most especially Judaism), but novel in breaking the connection between religion and race or nation.

95. For an analysis of how metaphors of sexual reproduction inform Clement of Alexandria’s approach to early Christian identity and polemics, see Denise K. Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

96. See both Smith, Drudgery Divine; and Karen L. King, “Translating History: Reframing Gnosticism in Postmodernity,” in Tradition und Translation: Zum Problem der Interkulturellen Übersetzbarkeit religiöser Phänomene. Festschrift für Carsten Colpe zum 65. Geburstag, ed. Christoph Elsas et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 264–277.

97. See for example Margaret MacDonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ross S. Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 157–173; and Shelly Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

98. For example, Castelli and Taussig, “Drawing Large and Startling Figures,” 9–12.

99. This is not unlike the way that ideas about religion ground and structure our notion of the secular (Kathleen Sands, “Tracking Religion…” (public lecture, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 2001). See also Janet R. Jakobsen with Ann Pellegrini, “World Secularisms at the Millennium,” Social Text 64 (2000): 1–27.

100. This historical sequencing is by no means comprehensively accepted, but Katharina von Kellenbach identifies it as one of the three “rules of formation” of Christian discourse about Judaism (Kellenbach, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings, 41). A model of the historical codevelopment of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism is favored by others (Alan Segal and Daniel Boyarin, for example). Even though the formulations and implications of this model remain less widely developed, my work should be read as contributing to this scholarly direction.

101. This question of Christianity’s success emerges from a simplified appropriation of evolutionary logic.

102. Jonathan Z. Smith argues that this negative teleology, from pure origins to corrupted forms of Christianity via “mixing” with Greek and Roman religions, was favored especially by Protestant biblical scholars and served an anti-Catholic function (Smith, Drudgery Divine). Beard, North, and Price also note how obsession with finding pristine origins (genealogy) and a story of decline and syncretism (negative teleology) have dominated traditional interpretations of Roman religion. If we can remove “all the ‘foreign,’ non-Roman elements that are clearly visible in the religion of (say) the late Republic,” we can discover the authentic core of Roman religion (Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:10). They rightly reject this approach (14, 16) and advocate instead a model that tries to account for change and continuity by starting from an analysis of already developed religious institutions in the republican period. They reason that by starting in media res they have fuller documentation about the organization and practice of Roman religion; combined with the principle that “the structural features of an religion change only slowly” (17), they strive to find nuanced explanations for how changes in perceptions of religion as well as changes in structure take place over time, before and after this arbitrary starting point. While this alternative risks overstating continuity, it is a definite improvement on earlier patterns.

103. Recent important complications to this have been offered by Boyarin and Fonrobert (see note 9, above). Other criticisms of particular hypotheses about a historical “break” between Christianity and Judaism appear earlier: Reuven Kimelman, “Birkhat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity,” in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 2: Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period, ed. E. P. Sanders, A. I. Baumgarten, and Alan Mendelson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 226–244; Wayne A. Meeks, “Breaking Away: Three New Testament Pictures of Christianity’s Separation from Jewish Communities,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernst Frerichs (Chico, Calif.: Scholars, 1985), 93–116; and Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 2003), esp. 2–24.

104. For example, see Jeffrey Siker, Disinheriting the Jews: Abraham in Early Christian Controversy (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 189–192.

105. See most recently, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s two books, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 48–51; and Rhetoric and Ethic, 48–49, 145–148, 191. See also the important programmatic essay by Castelli and Taussig, “Drawing Large and Startling Figures,” 3–20.

106. Johannes Roldanus examines how these motifs of citizen of heaven and strangers in this world develop in early Christian writings partly in light of the exegesis of four Christian Testament passages: Gal. 4:26; Phil. 3:20; Heb. 11:9–16; and 1 Pet. 1:17, 4:4. See Johannes Roldanus, “Références patristiques au ‘chrétiens-étranger’ dans les trois premiers siècles,” Cahiers de Biblia Patristica 1 (1987): 27–52.

107. A Diognète, ed. and trans. Henri-Irénée Marrou, 2nd ed. (Paris: du Cerf, 1965), 131.

108. The author of the Epistle to Diognetus also metaphorically depicts Christians’ place in the world as “what the soul is in the body” (6.1). This metaphor offers another way to explain how Christians can be a genos, yet also be geographically dispersed: “The soul is spread through all the members of the body, and Christians throughout the cities of the world” (6.2). By extension, the author claims that Christians are not of the world, but are necessary to it; hatred of Christians is explained by analogy with the hatred of the pleasure-seeking flesh for the soul. And finally, Christians, like the soul, only grow stronger when punished.

109. See for example, Rowan Greer, “Alien Citizens: A Marvelous Paradox,” in Civitas: Religious Interpretations of the City, ed. Peter S. Hawkins (Atlanta: Scholars, 1986), 39–56.

1. In his introduction to a recent collection of essays primarily by classicists, Simon Goldhill has called attention to this lack: “religious affiliation is a question rapidly growing in importance” and can provide a vital context for illuminating “that slow process of Christianization.” See Simon Goldhill, “Introduction. Setting an Agenda: ‘Everything is Greece to the wise,’” in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24–25.

2. Within the study of early Christianity, Judith Lieu offers an important exception. See her Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and “Race of the God-Fearers,” JTS n.s. 46 (1995): 483–501. See also David M. Olster, “Classical Ethnography and Early Christianity,” in The Formulation of Christianity by Conflict Through the Ages, ed. Katharine B. Free (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1995), 9–31.

3. The Greek version of Aristides’s Apology additionally subdivides the first group into three more recognizable groups: Chaldeans, Greeks, and Egyptians. Aristides does not provide any principle by which this further division is made, although Helmut Koester notes that the text draws on well-known distinctions from Jewish apologetics. See Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament. Vol. 2: History and Literature of Early Christianity (New York: de Gruyter, 1982), 341. The first race is functionally equivalent to “gentile,” which can be subdivided further into particular nations. Because Greeks form only one of the subdivision of this first genos, Judith Lieu cautions against overstating the parallels between the Greek version of Aristides’s Apology and the threefold divisions of humanity (that is, Greeks, Jews, and Christians) found in other early Christian texts such as the Preaching of Peter, Epistle to Diognetus, and the Tripartite Tractate. See Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 167–168. But the parallel may in fact hold, since Philo of Alexandria and Paul both use the terms “Greek” and “gentile” as almost interchangeable, even if they do not equate Greeks with all gentiles.

4. Indeed, translators of this text did not take this tripartite division for granted. Both the Syrian and Armenian versions of the Apology say that there are four kinds of humanity: Barbarians, Greeks, Jews (Syrian) or Hebrews (Armenian), and Christians. See Aristide, Apologie, introduction, critical edition, French translation, and commentary by Bernard Pouderon and Marie-Joseph Pierre with Bernard Outtier and Marina Guiorgadzé (Paris: du Cerf, 2003).

5. In the introduction.

6. Jonathan Friedman, “Notes on Culture and Identity in Imperial Worlds,” in Religion and Religious Practice in the Seleucid Kingdom, ed. Per Bilde et al. (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1990), 23.

7. Irad Malkin, “Introduction,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.

8. Ibid., 5–6. See also Rosalind Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 213; and Suzanne Saïd, “The Discourse of Identity in Greek Rhetoric from Isocrates to Aristides,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 275.

9. Because this passage is the earliest surviving Greek passage recognizable as a definition of Greekness, it is tempting to invest it with an authority and stability that belies its own rhetoricity. Jonathan Hall, for example, has noted that Herodotus’s appeal to shared sanctuaries and sacrifices might have seemed quite an unlikely basis for asserting collective Greekness. Because of the diversity of religious cults and deities worshipped, religion could easily be used to describe the differences among Greeks. See Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45.

10. Carla Antonaccio has explored fifth-century B.C.E. speeches about the colonists of Sicily. In one of these, Hermocrates defines the Sicilian colonists from the mainland on the basis of the land they now occupy: “In essence, Hermocrates asserts a new identity and homeland against the old ethnicity of Dorian and Ionian. In the face of a common threat, he argues that this new identity should override other ethnic, political, or civic identities and interests” (Carla Antonaccio, “Ethnicity and Colonization,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 120). In this context, the negotiation of colonial identity, both in relation to the colonized and to the homelands, motivates appeals to territory.

11. Rosalind Thomas comments that this approach is not much used by Herodotus, but is central for the Hippocratic text Air, Waters, Places (Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus,” 217). D. B. Saddington notes that climatic theories of ethnoracial difference remain important during the Roman imperial period. See his “Race Relations in the Early Roman Empire,” ANRW II.3 (1975): 113.

12. For example, Ptolemy insists that the inhabitants of Coele Syria, Idumaea, and Judaea are “bold, godless (atheoi), and scheming” (Tetr. 2.3). A more extended example from this second-century C.E. text gives a sense of the broad range of characteristics Ptolemy attributes to regionally specific astral influences. He divides the world into four quadrants, and this description of the middle portion of the southeastern quadrant encompasses multiple ethnē: “Accordingly those who live in these countries [Cyrenaica, Marmarica, Egypt, Thebais, the Oasis, Troglodytica, Arabia, Azania, and Middle Ethiopia], because they are all subject to the occidental rule of the five planets, are worshippers of the gods, superstitious, given to religious ceremony and fond of lamentation; they bury their dead in the earth, putting them out of sight, on account of the occidental aspect of the planets; and they practice all kinds of usages, customs, and rites in the service of all manner of gods. Under command they are humble, timid, penurious, and long-suffering, in leadership courageous and magnanimous; but they are polygamous and polyandrous and lecherous, marrying even their own sisters, and the men are potent in begetting, the women in conceiving, even as their land is fertile. Furthermore, many of the males are unsound and effeminate of soul, and some even hold in contempt the organ of generation, through the influence of the aspect of the maleficent planets in combination with Venus occidental” (Tetr. 2.3).

13. Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Representation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 33.

14. Ibid. She is referring to Polemo as epitomized by Adamantius (Adamantius 2.31, 1.382–83F).

15. It might strike some readers as very odd that Egyptians should be excluded from a city in Egypt. But this puzzle can partly be solved by understanding that, since its founding by Alexander the Great, Alexandria had a strange relationship to the rest of the country, as its moniker “Alexandria by (ad) Egypt” suggests. Although containing a diverse and cosmopolitan population, it was culturally associated with Hellenism. To further complicate matters, it is worth knowing that when Rome subsumed Egypt politically, it declared that all who were not citizens of Alexandria, Ptolemais, and Naucratis would count as Egyptian for imperial purposes, including taxation. Not surprisingly, this decision did not correspond to existing practices of ethnic self-definition in Egypt, which were already fairly fluid. See, for example, Roger S. Bagnall, “Greeks and Egyptians: Ethnicity, Status, and Culture,” in Cleopatra’s Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies, curated by Robert S. Bianchi (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1988), 21–27; and Willy Clarysse, “Some Greeks in Egypt,” in Life in a Multi-Cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond, ed. Janet H. Johnson (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1992), 51–56.

16. P. Giss. 40 ii; trans. Naphtali Lewis.

17. This sentence also addresses those who are not covered by the expulsion edict: “[the ones to be prevented from entering Alexandria are] not those who converge upon Alexandria out of desire to view the glorious city or come here in pursuit of a more cultured existence or on occasional business” (P. Giss. 40 ii; trans. Naphtali Lewis).

18. P. Giss. 40 ii; trans. Naphtali Lewis.

19. David Konstan, “To Hellēnikon ethnos,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 30. As Konstan rightly emphasizes, “In themselves, common traits, whether recognized as such or not, do not constitute an ethnic self-awareness. Rather, ethnicity arises when a collective identity is asserted on the basis of shared characteristics” (30).

20. Ibid., 33, 36. Rosalind Thomas offers an important complementary analysis of Herodotus’s use of ethnic claims that highlights how Herodotus emphasizes mutable facets of ethnicity (Thomas, “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus,” 218–228).

21. See Ewan Bowie, “Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic,” in Studies in Ancient Society, ed. Moses Finley (London: Routledge, 1974), 166–209; Antony Spawforth, “Shade of Greekness: A Lydian Case Study,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 375–400; and Rebecca Preston, “Roman Questions, Greek Answers: Plutarch and the Construction of Identity,” in Being Greek Under Rome, 86–117.

22. See especially Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “To Be Roman, Go Greek: Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome,” in Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, ed. Michael Austin, Jill Harries, and Christopher Smith (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1998), 79–91.

23. See for example, Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

24. Hall, Ethnic Identity, 40.

25. See for example, Gerd Baumann, The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities (New York: Routledge, 1999).

26. Hall, Ethnic Identity, 24.

27. David Konstan, “Defining Ancient Greek Ethnicity,” Diaspora 6 (1997): 109.

28. Hall, Ethnic Identity, 19, 25, 40.

29. Greg Woolf writes: “Romans did not conceive of their identity as underwritten by a unique language or a common descent in the same way that some others (including Greeks) did, and their traditions of origin stressed the progressive incorporation of outsiders. Roman identity as based to an unusual degree on membership of [sic] a political and religious community with common values and mores (customs, morality, and way of life).” See Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 40 (1994): 120. See also Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, A.D. 50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

30. See Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Mutatio morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution,” in The Roman Cultural Revolution, ed. Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–22.

31. Nicole Loraux’s Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, trans. Selina Stewart (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) not only argues that Athenians define themselves in terms of place and lineage, but also that this definition serves to define males in contrast to females, such that the Athenian genos relies on but does not count females for its existence and perpetuation.

32. For example, as David Konstan discusses, Pericles’ funeral oration defines Athenian identity in terms of common values and way of life, not genealogy (Thucydides 2.35–46; in Konstan, “To Hellēnikon ethnos,” 35–36). Five centuries later, Favorinus provocatively claims “to show the Greeks of Hellas that education can produce the same results as birth” (Corinthian Oration 28). He elsewhere delights in calling himself a Gaul who knew Greek—as if this were an unlikely combination—but in the Corinthian Oration, Favorinus invokes the image of one who seeks “at all cost not to seem Greek but to be Greek too” (25), suggesting that the results that education might effect are ethnoracial (discussed in Gleason, Making Men, 16; see also 144, 150).

33. Hall, Ethnic Identity, esp. 28–32.

34. Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 12.

35. Arthur D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (1933; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 18–19.

36. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price note: “In the late Republic and into the first century A.D., there seems to have been a general assumption at Rome that each foreign race had its own characteristic religious practices.” See Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:121.

37. See D. B. Saddington, “Race Relations in the Early Roman Empire,” 115.

38. For example, see Juvenal Satires; Plutarch On Isis and Osiris 71 [379D4–E15]; Josephus Against Apion 1.225.

39. See my more extended interpretations of this passage in Denise K. Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” HTR 94 (2001): 461–462; and Denise K. Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10:4 (2002): 429–432, 441–442.

40. Clement interprets this passage not only as a means to distinguish among Greeks, Jews, and Christians, but also to argue for their unification—as Christians—through the adoption of Christian beliefs and practices: “Accordingly then, those from the Hellenic training and also from the law, who accept faith are gathered into the one genos of the saved people (laos): not that the three peoples are separated by time, so that one might suppose [they have] three different natures, but trained in different covenants of the one Lord” (Strom. 6.42.2).

41. Cited in Malkin, “Introduction,” 6. From Robert Parker, Cleomenes on the Acropolis: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 12 May 1997 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 12.

42. Nancy Jay, “Throughout Your Generations Forever”: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

43. Ibid., 37 (and see also 30–46). Jay notes that: “Social paternity and biological paternity may, and often do, coincide, but it is social paternity that determines patrilineage membership … Sacrifice cannot be infallible evidence of begetting and therefore obviously cannot constitute biological paternity. It is the social relations of reproduction, not biological reproduction, that sacrificial ritual can create and maintain. Where the state and the social relations of production are not separable from patrilineally organized social relations of reproduction, the entire social order may be understood as dependent on sacrifice” (36–37). Throughout the book, she underscores the gendered implications of such a social system, noting that it creates social relations around “fathers” and “sons” (socially, if not biologically), bypassing women and maternity. Taking a different approach, Gianna Pomata uses Greek and Roman medical literature about procreation to show that while Romans did hold a view of kinship linked to notions of “shared blood,” only men were thought to be able to produce the relationship of kinship by shared blood (agnatio), which had civic, legal consequences. Women could only produce a “natural” form of kinship (cognatio) without such consequences. See Gianna Pomata, “Blood Ties and Semen Ties: Consanguity and Agnation in Roman Law,” in Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, ed. Mary Jo Maynes et al. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 43–64. The sacrificial system in both Greek and Roman cultures concerned (and Jay would say helped to create as well as signify) relations of agnatio only.

44. Chapter 3 explores how Justin Martyr adapts this tradition.

45. Judith was most likely composed in the mid-second century B.C.E.

46. Josephus explains the differences and enmity between Jews and Egyptians as stemming not only from bitterness over former power differences (“the domination of our ancestors [progonoi] over their country”) but also the differences between their forms of piety (eusebeia) (Against Apion 1.224).

47. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness, 132–138.

48. See Denise K. Buell, “Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond,” Religious Studies Review 26 (2000): 247.

49. Naomi Janowitz, “Rethinking Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatex (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000), 213–214.

50. As Jonathan Friedman describes it, “traditional ethnicity … is based on membership defined by the practice of certain activities including those related to genealogical descent…. Ethnic affiliation can easily be changed or complemented by geographical mobility or by change in social reference. Where a member of a group changes residence he is adopted or adopts the local ancestors and gods and becomes a practicing member of the new community. Here the social group is more like a congregation than a biological unit. This does not mean that identity is a mere question of social roles or membership as we understand it, i.e. as an externality that does not touch our inner selves. On the contrary, personal identity in such societies is not independent of the social context but almost entirely defined by it” (Friedman, “Notes on Culture and Identity in Imperial Worlds,” 27).

51. Tim Whitmarsh, “‘Greece is the World,’” in Being Greek Under Rome, 273.

52. Even though Jonathan Hall and I disagree about precisely how to define ethnicity, he too argues that “ethnicity is a specific type of cultural identity” (emphasis in original). For Hall, what makes ethnicity different from other possible types of ethnicity “is the fact that the symbols on which it draws revolve around notions of fictive kinship and descent, common history, and a specific homeland. See Jonathan Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 17.

53. While 1 Peter uses the term “Christian” as one of self-identification, my use of scare quotes is intended to remind readers that this term’s meaning needs to be argued for, not presumed.

54. John Elliott’s study of 1 Peter is valuable for its argument about the centrality of the concepts of resident alien (paroikos) and visiting stranger (parepidēmos), concepts that discursively locate Christianness in terms of kinship, civic, and ethnoracial categories. See John H. Elliott, A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 23, 25, 118–150, 284.

55. The Greek version specifies that this is the preaching of the “true Gospel” spread by the twelve disciples after Jesus’s ascension (Apol. 15.2).

56. See Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Étude sur les relations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’empire romain (135–425) (Paris: Éditions de Boccard, 1964), 136.

57. Caroline Johnson Hodge, “‘If Children, Then Heirs’”: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in Paul’s Letters (Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 2002), 55–137; 178–222. See also Denise K. Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge, “The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul,” JBL 123 (2004): 235–252.

58. The initial depiction of Judith does locate her genealogically as a descendant of Israel (Jth. 8:1) but the overwhelming emphasis is on her piety. The presence of the genealogy only reinforces the dynamic movement between fixed (in this case, communicated in the genealogy) and fluid in conceptualizations of ethnicity/race.

59. For an example of saved genos, see Acts of Andrew 50.5 (18); for an example of righteous genos, see Shepherd of Hermas Sim. 9.17.5; for an example of immovable genea, see Apocryphon of John (NHC III, 1) 33.3, (BG 8505, 2) 65.2; for an example of true genos, see Gospel of Philip 76.3; for an example of holy laos, see Justin, Dial. 119.3; for an example of special laos, see Clement, Strom. 6.106.4–

60. Josephus attributes this view tracing Jews to Egyptian ancestry to his enemy Apion (Against Apion 2.28). For places where Josephus rejects this view, see Against Apion 1.75, 104, 252, 278; 2.8. He relies on the work of Manetho, who wrote a history of Egypt for one of the early Ptolemies, for support.

61. A century earlier, Diodoros of Sicily recounts with some skepticism Egyptian claims that they are the ancestors of Jews and Athenians. Religious practices, notably circumcision (in the case of Jews) and the veneration of Demeter (in the case of Athenians) are among the factors offered as “proof” for these claims (see Diodorus 1.28.1–29.6).

62. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 55.

63. Indeed the very establishment of regionally organized cults was itself a departure from city-run cults, as Steve Friesen writes: “no Greek or Roman cults, either for rulers or for others, had been organized on a regional basis [before the early Augustan period]. The unprecedented spread of such institutions in the second century indicates that new social relationships were in formation.” See Steven J. Friesen, Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 144.

64. J. B. Rives argues that it is only under the Emperor Decius in the middle of the third century that Romans implement a religious system that is universal by insisting on a unifying cultic act. See J. B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of the Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999): 135–154.

65. This important point is made by Simon Price, who argues that studies of Roman imperial cult have too often looked through Christianizing lenses with the result that “inflates the importance of the imperial cult and posits a stark choice between Christ and the Caesars, between religion and politics” S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 15.

66. Religious “reform” is often justified in terms of restoring what already exists within the tradition. Much more controversial are those changes that are proposed or viewed as innovations, which seem to risk transforming the community’s identity altogether. Feminist theologians have repeatedly faced charges that their calls for changes within religious communities will result in such a break from tradition—that Christianity will cease being Christianity or Judaism Judaism, etc. Judith Plaskow offers a sensitive discussion of the stakes of such arguments in her ground-breaking Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

67. Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:212.

68. This portrayal of the fluidity of Romanness (or perhaps any collective identity) 107.1. can be extended to other domains as well, as Eve d’Ambra emphasizes: “Works of art commissioned by patrons of varying social ranks or in farflung regions of the empire reflect the extraordinary receptivity to diverse influences that characterizes Roman art and culture as a whole. This quality is also evident in the political character of the empire, which grew through conquest and assimilated its former enemies as residents or citizens of the empire. Not only were geographical boundaries fluid, but the rigid social order had loopholes: it permitted owners to free their slaves and confer Roman citizenship on them…. In a society driven by demonstrations of power and wealth, it is striking that there were styles and standards appropriate across the social spectrum. What defined the Roman character and allowed a person to pass as a Roman was never simply given. It had to be tested, challenged, and sorted out through the system that granted rank and status to citizens according to factors such as birth, wealth, and accomplishments, which occasionally clashed with one another.” See Eve d’Ambra, Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13.

69. Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:150. They note that these attempts correlate with the rise of theoretical discourses about “religion.”

70. Similarly, in the Hebrew Bible, “idolatry” functions both to mark foreignness and illegitimate religious worship (including that of Israelite insiders). The meaning and application of the term superstitio shifted over time. Where the label superstitio had previously connoted improper or excessive religious practices, including in Roman cults, by the second century C.E. its primary connotation shifted to participation in non-Roman cults that were deemed improper or excessive in their practices. Thus superstitio, as the converse of religio, shifts from having as its primary meaning something Romans risk doing by improper or excessive religious observances of Roman deities to a characteristic of non-Romans: “Tacitus, for example, refers to the Druids’ prophecy that Rome would fall to the Gauls as ‘an empty superstitio’ (Histories IV.54.4). Egyptian and Jewish rituals too were branded with the same label. According to Tacitus again, the people of Alexandria ‘subject to superstitions’ worshipped the god Serapis above all; while his extremely hostile account of Jewish customs observes that this race was ‘prone to superstitio, and opposed to religious practices’ (Histories IV.81.2; V.13.1)…. At the same time, these foreign cults were seen as potential forces of political subversion: Druids prophesied the downfall of Rome and the Jews actually did revolt against Rome” (Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:221–222)

71. This function of religion for the internal regulation of a people suggests that early Christian heresiological arguments may have been understood in the context of ethnoracial self-definitions. I consider this implication in chapter 4.

72. I thus depart from Hall on this point, who explicitly minimizes the possible discursive relevance of religion (Hall, Ethnic Identity, 21–24, 40).

73. We know little about Athenagoras, apart from his surviving works; this one situates itself somewhere between 166–180 by its address to the emperors Marcus Aurelius (d. 180) and Commodus (who was made Caesar in 166 and joint Augustus in 177). My discussion of the Embassy is adapted from Buell, Rethinking the Relevance of Race,” 462–464.

74. Frances Young, “Greek Apologists of the Second Century,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. Mark Edwards et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92 (my emphasis). Young is speaking of second-century Christian literature in Greek; without claiming to be comprehensive, she classifies the following works as apologetic: Justin Martyr, First and Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho; Tatian, Oration to the Greeks; Athenagoras, Embassy, Epistle to Diognetus; Theophilus, To Autolycus (82–90). I agree with Young’s view that apologetics is not a literary genre but a rhetorical strategy that can appear in any number of literary forms (91). I interpret the primary readers of this “fight” to be those with some relationship to Christian teachings and practices rather than the emperors and imperial officials to whom they are often ostensibly addressed.

75. See also Frances Young, “Greek Apologists of the Second Century,” 103.

76. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 214–215.

77. Other Christian authors of this period, like the anonymous writer of the Epistle to Diognetus, assert instead that Christians share customs with their neighbors even though their true allegiances lie elsewhere (namely, heaven or the kingdom of God).

78. Athenagoras’s comparison of Christianness with civic allegiances indicates that the lines between civic identity and ethnicity are blurry. This fuzziness does not indicate category confusion so much as it indicates the importance of not imposing clear distinctions among categories that were more nested than bounded. Because Romanness develops out of and maintains its civic ties to a particular city even while it takes on universal, imperial connotations, it blurs the lines between civic, racial, and national/imperial identities. Religious practices were central to the way that at least the elites of some cities negotiated their allegiances with the Roman Empire while preserving a sense of distinctiveness. For example, see Douglas Edwards on Aphrodisias in Religion and Power: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greek East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58; and Steve Friesen on Ephesos in Twice Neokoros.

79. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self (New York: Routledge, 1995).

80. See Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109. Boyarin rightly emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between the setting of martyr texts and their dates of composition (113, 119). Although the latter cannot always be established with certainty, many are only preserved in fourth- and fifth-century texts, as Boyarin notes. See Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

81. Lieu, “Race of the God-Fearers,” 485–488, 492; and Lieu, Image and Reality, 83–86. Lieu translates genos as “race” and ethnos as “nation.”

82. Lieu, “Race of the God-Fearers,” 491–493; see also 494–497; and Lieu, Image and Reality, 84–85. She writes: “The sense of being a race or people is one proudly held in Jewish literature from the Maccabean period, often in a context of suffering and persecution. The threat from the Assyrians is directed against ‘the race of Israel’ (Jdt. 6:2, 5, 19; 8:20, 32; 11:10), while Judith herself prays, ‘may your whole nation (ethnos) and every tribe know that you are God … and there is none other who shields the race (genos) of Israel’ (9:14)” (Lieu, “Race of the God-Fearers,” 491). And in the Maccabean literature, she notes that “their suffering and celebration of deliverance is as a nation (2 Macc. 10.8; 11.25, 27; 4 Macc. 4.19) or race (2 Macc. 6.12; 12.31; 14.8); in particular the martyrs pray on behalf of the whole race who, through their death, will soon experience the mercy of God (2 Macc. 7.16, 37, 38)” (Lieu, Image and Reality, 84).

83. Lieu, Image and Reality, 85.

84. Although attention to ethnic reasoning shapes my analysis, the implications of this focus supports Daniel Boyarin’s arguments that the discourse of martyrdom, “far from being evidence for Christian influence on Judaism or the opposite, is most plausibly read as evidence for the close contact and the impossibility of drawing sharp and absolute distinctions between these communities or their discourses throughout this period (of the second through fourth centuries)” (Boyarin, Dying for God, 117).

85. The original date of composition remains unknown. See Herbert Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs: Volume II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), xx.

86. Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman, 225. See also Duncan Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 1987).

87. Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman, 38, 40, 216–217, 222, 231. Woolf writes that “the rise of Lyon to effective capital of the Three Gauls was due largely to the success of the neighboring sanctuary” (217). See also Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 302.

88. Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman, 225, 235.

90. I do not mean to imply, however, that the late second-century narrative setting is identical to the time, writing, or concerns of the author and readers of the text.

91. To avoid misunderstanding, let me stress that I am not arguing about the historical validity of the account—that is, whether or not Sanctus actually made such an assertion. Rather, I am underscoring what is at least a literary rhetorical strategy.

92. See Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 1–24.

93. While confession of the name denoted guilt, denial did not automatically denote innocence in Pliny’s eyes. Those who denied affiliation with the name had to reinforce it through ritual action.

94. Other texts studied as early Christian do not use the name “Christian,” however, opting instead for other collective terms of self-identification (for example, the elect, Hebrews, etc.). This is worth noting since it suggests that the importance of the name “Christian” does not apply to every individual or group in the second and third centuries that might now be classified by scholars as “early Christian.”

95. Daniel Boyarin, Dying For God, 95.

96. Herbert Musurillo, the editor and translator of the most widely used Greek-English edition of the Christian martyr acts, refers to this verse in a slightly different way: “Foremost, of course, is the portrayal of the martyrs’ courage in the face of the most vicious torture and humiliation, a courage shared by both sexes, by both slave and free, as though in fulfillment of Paul’s pronouncement in Galatians (3:28), For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, lii).

97. There are other texts that become prooftexts as well: notably, Matthew 28:19 (“Go therefore and make disciples of all ethnē, baptizing them …”); Acts 2:1–21 (Pentecost; especially vv. 5–11 interpreted with reference to all people, not just Jews of the diaspora); Acts 10:1–48 (Cornelius; especially Peter’s speech in verses 34–35: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him”); and Acts 17:26 (Paul’s speech: “And [God] made one every ethnos of humanity …”).

98. See also Recension C of The Martyrdom of Saints Justin, Chariton, Charito, Evelpistus, Hierax, Paeon, and Valerian (Acts of the Christian Martyrs 2:54–61). In this version, unlike recensions A and B, the trial and executions are prefaced not only by comments about the wickedness of the emperor (Antoninus) and the arresting official (Rusticus), but also by comments about the backgrounds of the Christians arrested: “Now the saints did not have the same native city (patris), for they came from different places. But the favor of the spirit bound them together and taught them to think as siblings and to have only one head, Christ” (1.2). As in the case of the Acts of the Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne, in this recension the first thing that Rusticus asks them is “what they are called, where they come from (hothen eien), and what their kind of piety (ti to sebas) they practice. They confessed that they were Christians and made clear to him what their calling was, and said that their only city was God’s, the free city, the heavenly Jerusalem, whose craftsman and creator was God. They said to him: ‘What advantage is it for you, o tyrant, to know the names of our earthly cities?’” (M. Just. 1.3). This response provokes Rusticus to demand to Justin that he “sacrifice to the immortal gods and fulfill the imperial edicts” (1.4).

99. This varies somewhat from Daniel Boyarin’s view that this phrasing is parallel not to “Ioudaios eimi” but rather the declaration of the Shema ‘(Boyarin, Dying for God, 188), because he sees both functioning equivalently as “a ritualized and performative speech act associated with a statement of pure essence [that] becomes the central action of the martyrology. In rabbinic texts this is the declaration of the oneness of God via the recitation “Hear O Israel.” For Christians, it is the declaration of the essence of self: “I am a Christian.” In both, this is the final act of the martyr’s life. For Christian texts, this is new with the Martyrium Polycarpi. For rabbinic Jews, it begins with the stories about Polycarp’s contemporary, Rabbi Akiva” (Boyarin, Dying for God, 95; see also 121). For Boyarin, claiming to be a Christian differs fundamentally from claiming to be a Jew because the former is illegal and the latter not: “it would have made as much sense to forbid someone to be a Jew as it would to forbid her to be a Greek” (188). While this difference is correct, given that the name “Jew” was never the target of persecution per se, his conclusion preserves the rift between ethnicity and religiosity in Christianity that I am holding up for question. By interpreting what they share in common as religious identities (Boyarin interprets, with Shaye Cohen, the one instance that appears parallel with the “Christianus sum,” in 2 Macc. 6:6, which refers to a moment when “people could not confess themselves to be Jews” as meaning that they could not confess their Jewish practices [189]), Boyarin seems to exclude the possibility that the identity being claimed in the assertion “Christianus sum” is simultaneously a religious and ethnic one.

100. The wavering Christians are noteworthy. Their presence in the narrative may seem less dramatic than the vivid tortures endured by Sanctus, Blandina, and some of the other steadfast Christians, but they are no less significant to the overall plot. They embody the fluidity of collective identification, both in their wavering and in their reaffiliation. John Curran also emphasizes the importance of less-than-committed converts to Christianity in analyzing the phenomenon of conversion. See John Curran, “The Conversion of Rome Revisited,” Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, 4–12.

101. This text is the earliest dated document from the Latin church (Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, xxii).

102. The offer by a Christian to instruct a Roman official in true religion is a trope in martyr narratives (for example, see M. Poly. 10.2).

103. See also M. Poly. 8.2; 9.2–3.

104. J. B. Rives insists on these point for the Carthaginian context. See J. B. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 169–170. Rives also helpfully underscores the internal diversity of Christianity in second- and third-century Carthage, which the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs does not indicate (Rives, Religion and Authority, 227–234). For another good example of internal Christian diversity noted in a martyr text, see the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which indicates tensions among New Prophecy (also known as “Phyrgian” and Montanist) Christians and the Christians identified with Polycarp and his followers (M. Poly. 4.1).

105. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Free Press, 1999), 80 (my emphasis).

106. John North, “The Development of Religious Pluralism,” in The Jews Among Pagans and Christians In the Roman Empire, ed. Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak (New York: Routledge, 1992), 178.

108. Michael Penn calls attention to this in his study of early Christian kissing. Penn suggests that “For early Christians, Athenagoras’s work does not remain an apologetic description but becomes a ritual script. By following his instructions, participants could perform Christian righteousness.” See Michael Penn, “Performing Family: Ritual Kissing and the Construction of Early Christian Kinship,” JECS 10 (2002): 172.

109. Lieu, “Race of the God-Fearers,” 493–500.

110. Katharina von Kellenbach, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 41.

111. See for example, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974), 239–245.

112. Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:42–43.

113. As Rudolf Bultmann puts it: “Primitive Christianity is quite uninterested in making the world a better place, it has no proposals for political or social reform. All must do their duty to the State. But they have no direct political responsibilities. After all, the Christian is a ‘citizen of heaven’ (Phil. 3.20).” See Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Settting, trans. R. H. Fuller (1956; repr., New York: Meridian, 1966), 206.

114. For example, see North, “Development of Religious Pluralism,” 180–181.

115. See also Buell, “Race and Universalism,” esp. 441–468.

116. Discussing Roman reactions to Bacchic worship in Rome, Beard, North, and Price write: “By the first decade of the second century [B.C.E.], this form of group cult, at odds with traditional modes of behaviour, was well established and widespread in Italy…. It was the group cult, depending on voluntary adherence, that was in the end to bring the most radical changes to Roman religious life. The Bacchic groups of Italy were the first example of the problems that could arise; later groups were to become more and more independent, to develop their own ideas and value-systems, to be more and more deeply in conflict with the established social and family structures”(Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:98). They describe the membership of the Bacchic cult group as having “cut across all the usual boundaries between social groups, for we know of devotees amongst slaves and free, among Romans, Latins, and allies, men and women, country people and city-dwellers, rich and poor.” (93–94).

117. Guy G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1999), 60.

118. As Jonathan Z. Smith has shown, this devaluing of ritual practices needs to be understood in the modern context of Protestant anti-Catholicism within scholarly interpretive frameworks, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1–35, 55–62.

1. Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1989), 196. Christian ethnic reasoning extends far beyond the limited instances of the phrase “third race”; this is only one particularly striking articulation.

2. For a discussion of Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian predecessors, see Droge, Homer or Moses?, 1–48. The remainder of the work examines the historiographical strategies of selected early Christian authors in greater detail (Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, and Clement of Alexandria).

3. Rachel Moriarty also explores how early Christians created a historical tradition, viewing early Christians as different from other ancient groups who actually “had” a past while Christians created a tradition “to help provide Christians with the past they lacked.” See Rachel Moriarty, “‘The Faith of Our Fathers’: The Making of the Early Christian Past,” in The Church Retrospective: Papers Read at the 1995 Summer Meeting and the 1996 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1997), 6. See now also Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 62–97.

4. Christopher P. Jones shows that this use of kinship in ancient political discourse was especially important during the Hellenistic period. Although he refrains from linking these arguments to ethnicity, his study repeatedly calls attention to the ways that appeals to kinship affected collective self-understandings and social-political practices. See Christopher P. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. 2–5, 66–80, 94–99.

5. In making this distinction, I am adapting Jonathan Z. Smith’s discussion of “uniqueness” in the study of Christian origins. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 36–53.

6. On all three points, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, 38–46. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offers the most comprehensive analysis of the limitations of interpreting the person and teachings of Jesus as ontologically unique. See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000). For a recent discussion of the gospel genre, see Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1990). For an extensive analysis of the category of eschatology, see Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” (Th.D. Diss., Harvard Divinity School, 2002).

7. David M. Olster, “Classical Ethnography and Early Christianity,” in The Formulation of Christianity by Conflict Through the Ages, ed. Katharine B. Free (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1995), 9–12.

8. Frances Young, “Greek Apologists of the Second Century,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire, ed. Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 103.

9. Indeed, this can be an explicit goal of historical-critical scholarship. One example of this is the use of historical criticism to demonstrate a precedent for women in leadership positions in the early church. On the other hand, appeal to historical disjuncture has been used to argue for reform as well (for example, to extend rights to gay men and lesbians and to oppose slavery).

10. Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (New York: Routledge, 2002).

11. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 24.

13. Young, “Greek Apologists,” 103, my emphasis.

15. To give due credit to Young, despite seeing Christian ethnic reasoning as enabling a definition of religion distinct from ethnicity, she offers an undeveloped but provocative conclusion. She suggests that after the legalization of Christianity, this trend changed dramatically “when the power relations were reversed and Christianity itself turned into an ethnic tradition” (Young, “Greek Apologists,” 104).

16. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, trans. Alan Sheridan and others, ed. with and introduction by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 262. Cited in Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), 87.

17. This view has been formulated by a range of critical theorists. See for example Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 87–96; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1–102; and Dipesh Chakrabartry, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 108–113.

18. Two things (at least) show this: first, the considerable variation in the name given to the collective identity (not necessarily “Christian,” but also “Hebrew” and “the immoveable genea,” among others); and second, considerable debate over what it means to be a member of any of these collective identities.

19. For example, see Young, “Greek Apologists,” 92–93; Droge, Homer or Moses?, 9–11; and Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 251.

20. See Apology 19.2; 21.1–2, 6.

21. The text also notes that the mothers of Abraham’s children differ, but it foregrounds as more significant the difference in Abraham’s knowledge of God.

22. In this respect, Recognitions differs significantly from Paul’s interpretation of Genesis in Galatians 4, where he stresses the saliency of the difference in status of Sarah (free) and Hagar (slave) for the character of Abraham’s two lineages.

23. F. Stanley Jones, in his translation of the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 160.

24. See Denise K. Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10:4 (2002): 446–450.

25. See Buell, “Race and Universalism,” JECS 10:4 (2002): 450–453.

26. Erich S. Gruen, “Jewish Perspectives on Greek Culture and Ethnicity,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin (Washington D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies/Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 362 (see 1 Macc. 12:20–23); see also Erich S. Gruen, “The Purported Jewish-Spartan Affiliation,” in Transitions to Empire: Essays in Greco-Roman History, 360–146 B.C., in Honor of E. Badian, ed. Robert W. Wallace and Edward M. Harris (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 254–269.

27. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy, 72–80.

28. Paul is here using a form of aggregative ethnic construction. See Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity, 47–51; see also 40–44. See also Denise Buell, “Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond,” Religious Studies Review 26 (2000): 248–249. This insight has since been developed in detail in Caroline Johnson Hodge, “‘If Sons, Then Heirs’: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in Paul’s Letters” (Ph.D. Diss., Brown University, 2002), 182–222. See also Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. 99, 107, 227, 239, 249.

29. Hodge, “‘If Sons, Then Heirs,’” 107–112, 117–123.

30. While the next chapter explores how Justin does this in the Dialogue with Trypho, see also Jeffrey Siker’s more comprehensive study: Jeffrey Siker, Disinheriting the Jews: Abraham in Early Christian Controversy (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1991).

31. Justin Martyr 1 Apol. 32.3; 53.2.

32. 1 Apol. 31.7; 40.7; 50.12; see also 32.4; 39.3; 53.3.

33. In his Apology, Tertullian invokes both the fluidity and fixity of identity to craft a universalizing argument for Christianity that recalls those of Justin’s logos theology. While Justin argues that all humans have the logos implanted in them, and are thus potentially Christian (and Christianness is the fullest expression of humanity), Tertullian claims that the human soul is “in its very nature Christian (animae naturaliter Christianae)” (Apol. 17.6); this assertion of the fixity of Christian essence in all human souls is balanced by the position that “Christians are made not born (fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani)” (18.4). That is, while all humans are potentially Christian, some kind of transformation must occur before one realizes this potential.

34. Droge, Homer or Moses?, 72 (see 69–79); emphasis in original.

35. Citations are taken from the Nag Hammadi Library copy of the text. One other copy has survived, in the Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, 3 (BG). These two copies are very similar. The critical edition I have used is by Douglas Parrott, which also contains editions of the other manuscripts, and the two surviving manuscripts of a closely related text, Eugnostos. See Eugnostos and the Sophia of Jesus Christ, in The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Vol. 3, ed. Douglas M. Parrott (1991; repr., Leiden: Brill, 2000).

36. See Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 446–450.

37. Elsewhere, Celsus makes the charge (via the Jewish interlocutor) that Christian teaching is unoriginal because it is derived from Jewish law and doctrine (Against Celsus 2.4; 2.5). For example, Origen writes “[Celsus’s] Jew disparages as stale stuff the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and of God’s judgment giving reward to the righteous but fire to the unrighteous. He thinks that he can overthrow Christianity by saying that in these matters Christians teach nothing new” (2.5). Celsus also used the charge of lack of novelty with respect to the organization of Jesus’s teachings—specifically, his selection of apostles which Celsus compares to the organization of other philosophical sects (1.62) and the figure of Jesus as a teacher (2.8). See Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 450–453.

38. Having linked all humanity to Seth, Theophilus explains the subsequent division of humanity as a consequence of two main factors: God’s division of the languages in response to the tower (of Babel), and migration.

39. TriTrac 133.67; and 132.4–15 and 132.28–133.14. The critical edition of the Tripartite Tractate that I am working from is The Tripartite Tractate, in The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, Vol. 1, ed., trans., and critical notes by Harold W. Attridge and Elaine H. Pagels (1985; repr., Leiden: Brill, 2000).

40. “Left” is linked with “hylic” and “right” with “psychic.” The fact that the first human is described as a mixture of all three components provides a basis for mitigating against the view that the differences between these three genē are necessary and original to humans. Instead, all three components are “native” to humans. As Pagels and Attridge observe, this tripartite understanding of the human soul is a “traditional doctrine of Platonism”; they further note, “there is no reason to assume that the souls of subsequent human beings differ from that of the first member of the race. This suggests that, for the TriTrac at least, the tripartition of human beings, mentioned in 118.14–58, is not determined by the constitution of different types of human souls. All souls are composed of all three types of substance deriving from the intermediate world” (XXIII: 412). So also Einar Thomassen in his commentary on the Tripartite Tractate, Le Traité Tripartite, critical ed., introduction and commentary by Einar Thomassen, trans. by Louis Painchaud and Einar Thomassen (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989), 428.

41. “Le mot genos (118:22.28.37; 119:9) … évoque non pas les constituantes génétiques des individus, mais des qualities religieuses, c’est-à-dire éthiques et intellectuelles” (Thomassen, Le Traité Tripartite, 428).

42. Thomassen, Le Traité Tripartite, 412; see also 446.

43. Attridge and Pagels, “The Tripartite Tractate,” XXIII: 447, my emphasis.

44. François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 6.

49. Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 40 (1994): 57–59.

50. Hartog, Memories of Odysseus, p. 163.

52. Aaron Johnson has demonstrated that Eusebius continues the kind of genealogical arguments we have seen in pre-Constantinian Christian ethnic reasoning. In his examination of Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica, Johnson shows how Christians are constructed as an ethnos. See Aaron P. Johnson, “Identity, Descent, and Polemic: Ethnic Argumentation in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica,” JECS 12 (2004): 23–56.

53. Marianne Palmer Bonz, The Past as Legacy: Luke-Acts and Ancient Epic (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), see esp. 39.

54. Antony Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness: a Lydian Case Study,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 375–400.

55. Spawforth makes the important point that modern scholars need to be cautious when using the concept of “Greekness” since it “impose[s] a misleading uniformity on the regionally and culturally differentiated populations of the Greek-speaking east” (Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness,” 375).

56. There is a considerable body of scholarship on the forms of and explanations for “archaism” or the “classicizing” tendency that characterizes second- and third-century C.E. Greek and Roman understandings and (in the case of “Greeks”) practices of “Greekness.” The most influential study in recent times has been Ewan L. Bowie’s “Greeks and their Past in the Second Sophistic,” Past and Present 46 (1970): 3–41, reprinted in Studies in Ancient Society, ed. Moses Finley London: Routledge, 1974, 166–209. See also Ewan L. Bowie, “Hellenes and Hellenism in Writers of the Second Sophistic,” in EΛΛHNIΣMOΣ: Quelques Jalons pour une Histoire de l’Identité Grecque, Actes de Colloque de Strasbourg 25–27 octobre 1989, ed. Suzanne Saïd (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 182–204; and David Konstan, “To Hellēnikon ethnos: Ethnicity and the Construction of Ancient Greek Identity,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 29–50, esp. 36–43. On the importance of this definition of Greekness for Roman self-definition, see Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman,” 116–143; and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “To Be Roman, Go Greek: Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome,” in Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, ed. Michel Austin, Jill Harries, and Christopher Smith (London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1998), 79–91.

57. Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness,” 380–383.

58. Ibid., 383. Strabo Geography 12.1.3; 13.4.5.

59. Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness,” 376.

63. Ibid., 385–386.

64. Ibid., 386. He continues: “This extraordinary claim was a source of particular pride, it seems, and explains why the Sardians preferred to give the name ‘Hellas’ to the Roman province of Achaia in public inscriptions” (386–387). For further analysis of the Sardian epigraphy see Peter Herrmann, “Inschriften von Sardis,” Chiron 23 (1993): 233–248.

65. Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness,” 387. Christopher Jones also makes this point about intracity rivalries while emphasizing that Sardian claims were consistent with a long legacy of city-state “kinship diplomacy,” now adapted to the imperial context (Jones, Kinship Diplomacy, 117–118). On these rivalries in Asia Minor, see also Steven J. Friesen, Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family (Leiden: Brill, 1993).

66. Jones notes that during another context of rivalry, this time especially between Sardis and Smyrna in bids for the right to house a temple of Tiberius, Livia, and the senate, Sardians appealed to their kinship with and descent from Etruscans. They argued that “Etruria had been colonized by the Lydian prince Tyrrhenus” (Jones, Kinship Diplomacy, 109). Jones goes on to say that it is not a surprise “that Etruria was worth claiming as kindred territory. Its history was intimately connected with that of Rome, and many members of the ruling class had Etruscan connections by birth or marriage. At the time of the Sardian plea, one of these influential Etruscans was none other than Tiberius’ all-powerful minister, Sejanus” (110). Although Sardis lost the bid for the temple, Jones suggests it was not due to suspicion about the arguments from kinship but rather other factors such as geographical location that prevailed (110).

67. For Diodorus’s skepticism, see 1.2.9.5.

68. Elias Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” Classical Philology 47 (1952): 78.

69. “Under the double impact of Greek power and Greek science, the barbarians, mostly ignorant of their own primitive history, as soon as they had become a bit hellenized, accepted the Greek schema of archaiologia. The Romans recognized Aeneas, the Callaeci acknowledge Teucer as their ancestors. The Tarentines, being colonists from Lacedaemon, ‘by flattery’ attributed the same origin to their powerful Samnite neighbors, exactly as some centuries later the Roman senate called the Aedui in Gaul ‘brothers and relations.’ By Cato’s time, the Spartan descent of the Sabini (Samnites) already had become a part of the latter’s national tradition. In the time of the Athenian domination, and, then again, after Alexander the Great, kinship with the dominant race was a trump not to be neglected” (Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” 73–74).

70. Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” 74–75. For more recent studies of this phenomenon, see Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness,” esp. 384–392; Erich S. Gruen, “The Purported Jewish-Spartan Affiliation,” in Transitions to Empire, 254–269; and Erich S. Gruen, “Jewish Perspectives on Greek Culture and Ethnicity,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 347–373.

71. Indeed, this is a point that Tertullian stresses in arguing that Christianity can and should be a universal movement (Apology 1.6.7; see also 18.4).

72. Irad Malkin, “Introduction,” Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 18.

75. Ibid. My emphasis.

76. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 192.

1. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:276.

2. See also, for example, J. B. Rives: “Judaism was in one key respect hardly suitable as a model for the creation of a common religious identity in the empire. Despite the fluctuating importance of proselytism, Judaism remained essentially an ethnic religion, the religion of a people, as it has continued to this day. There was, however, another tradition within the Roman Empire which, although sharing many features with Judaism, was emphatically not an ethnic religion. This was of course Christianity.” J. B. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 267. Emphasis mine.

3. The rabbinic innovation of the principle of matrilineal descent vividly illustrates how ways of reckoning descent are historically contingent. See Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 263–307.

4. The critical edition I have consulted is: Iustini Martyris, Dialogus cum Tryphone, ed. Miroslav Marcovich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997).

5. See Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), which was published after this book was completed; his interpretation of Justin’s Dialogue is used to illuminate and rethink rabbinical discourse. Boyarin views belief in the logos as the primary basis for Christian distinctiveness in the Dialogue. Boyarin argues that Justin appeals to belief in the logos to craft a “religious identity” on theological grounds (39). In my reading, this religious identity is simultaneously an ethnic one—it is misleading to distinguish between “religious” and “ethnic” in the Dialogue.

6. Dial. 44.1; see also 125.5 (where the ancestor in question is Jacob), 135.5–6, 140.2, and 25.1, which make a related point.

7. This claim is more fully elaborated in his two Apologies, especially through the concept of the logos being implanted in all human souls.

8. These first two techniques closely resemble those of historical ethnography we have seen in chapter 2. Justin draws from scripture to posit a universal human origin via Noah. And when linking Christians to Abraham and Jacob, Justin adapts the lineages privileged by other Jews for their own self-identification distinct from the rest of humanity.

10. Trypho poses questions that lead Justin to comment on the diversity of Christian views and practices. For example, see Dial. 34.8–35.8 (eating meat sacrificed to idols and the identification of authentic teachers); 47.1–3 (observing Mosaic law and believing in Christ); 48.1–4 (the nature of Christ); and 80.1–5 (the future of Jerusalem and resurrection of the dead).

11. Judith Lieu also notes that this characterizes Trypho’s Judaism. See Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 148.

12. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations Between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135–425), trans. H. McKeating (French orig. 1964; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xii–xviii, 63–64, 111, 135, 146–155, 271–305, 369. This view is the one adopted in Lieu, Image and Reality, 118, 121, 128, 286; and Graham Stanton, “Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho: Group Boundaries, ‘Proselytes’ and ‘God-fearers,’” in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 273, 275. This view has been criticized by Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

13. Throughout the lengthy Dialogue, Justin only uses forms of the term Ioudaioi (always in plural) seven times; Christianos (in singular and plural forms) appears twenty-three times (see Dialogus cum Tryphone, 336, 339). English translations frequently supply “Christian” and “Jew” where it does not appear in the Greek, giving the impression that these categories are clearer and more widely used than they actually are.

14. Although I disagree with Graham Stanton’s view that “tight social boundaries” divide Jews and Christians in Justin’s day, he quite rightly notes that the Dialogue is developed on the presupposition that boundaries between Jews and Christians are permeable. Chapter 8 introduces the main body of the text with Trypho and Justin exhorting each other to be persuaded to adopt their respective requirements for membership (Stanton, “Justin Martyr’s Dialogue,” 266–267).

15. As Daniel Boyarin puts it: “while both early rabbinic texts and Justin’s text are busy producing both a border between ‘Jews’ and ‘Christians’ and concomitantly one between the orthodox and the ‘heretics,’ these borders are actually not so clear as the ‘authors’ of these texts would want us to believe. Instead, then, of thinking of Justin … as reacting to a ‘Jewish’ model or, on the other hand, understanding the Rabbis as reacting to a Christian development, I would rather propose a complex process of mutual self-definition, of testing of borders and boundaries, definitions of what could be shared and what would be differential between the nascent formations that would, by the fourth century, truly become separate religions.” Daniel Boyarin, “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” Church History 70 (2001): 455–456. Seth Schwartz has recently offered a provocative challenge to focusing on the rabbis, arguing that what he calls the “late antique revival of Judaism” that begins in the fourth century C.E. was in not “in any way a product of rabbinic influence, though the revival may in the long run have contributed to the rabbis’ medieval rise.” Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16.

16. See Lieu, Image and Reality, 278–279. See also Ross S. Kraemer, “Jewish Tuna and Christian Fish: Identifying Religious Affiliation in Epigraphic Sources,” HTR 84 (1991): 141–162.

17. Boyarin convincingly notes that appeal to belief in the logos (which Justin equates with Christ) is not, in fact, unique to Christians. See Boyarin, Border Lines, 38. The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, a text that does not use the term “Christian” and almost never uses the term “Jew,” similarly insists that belief in Jesus as the eternal Christ is the only factor that separates the “people” or “nation” (1.43.2). The Syriac version states, “For concerning this alone is there a difference between us who believe in Jesus and those among our people who do not believe”; the Latin, “For only in this regard does there seem to be a difference between us who believe in Jesus and the unbelieving Jews.” See F. Stanley Jones, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 73. It is worth noting, however, that practices are at issue for both Justin and Pseudo-Clement. While the latter repeatedly condemns sacrifices, Justin especially criticizes circumcision.

18. See Dial. 48.1–49.1, where Justin notes that Christians differ in their views of Christ’s nature: “there are some of our race (genos) who confess that he is the Christ but claim that he is of human origin. I disagree with these, and would not agree even if it were the majority, who share my opinion, were to” (48.4). The Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions attributes to Peter the idea that the Christ is a human whom God appointed as “the chief over humans” (1.45.2).

19. Peter Richardson, Jeffrey Siker, and Judith Lieu are important exceptions to this blind spot. Each note briefly that Justin defines Christians as a race or people in this text. See Peter Richardson, Israel in the Apostolic Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 11; Jeffrey S. Siker, Disinheriting the Jews: Abraham in Early Christian Controversy (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 174–74; and Lieu, Image and Reality, 136.

20. Although he never cites Paul, Justin seems to build upon Paul’s arguments from Romans 9:6–8: “For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants; but ‘through Isaac shall your descendants be named’ [Gen. 21:12]. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned as his descendants.” But, unlike Paul, Justin formulates Christians as a distinct genos, even while also identifying Christians as the true Israel. See Caroline Johnson Hodge, “‘If Children, Then Heirs’ (Rom. 8:17 and Gal. 4:7): A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in Romans and Galatians” (Ph.D. Diss., Brown University, 2002), 112–117; 178–222.

21. Dial. 119.3–5.

23. Dial. 44.1, 119.3–5.

24. Dial. 64.2–3, 116.3, 120.2, 139.5.

25. Dial. 11.5; see also 123.8, 125.5, 135.3.

27. Dial. 119.3; see also 123.1, 124.1, 134.4.

28. Dial. 123.6, 130.3, 135.5–6.

29. Dial. 119.3–5.

31. For example, see Dial. 123.4–8, 135.4–6.

32. Tessa Rajak, “Talking at Trypho: Christian Apologetic as Anti-Judaism in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire, ed. Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price, in association with Christopher Rowland (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73.

33. As Peter Richardson and Judith Lieu note, Justin is the earliest extant Christian writer to call Christians “Israel” (Richardson, Israel in the Apostolic Church, ix; and Lieu, Image and Reality, 136). That is, unlike Paul, Justin uses the term “Christian” as a category distinct from Ioudaios.

34. Disobedience is quite a different criterion for defining a people than “seed,” ‘blood,” or lineage. Disobedience (and its converse obedience) is far more likely to serve as a marker of the fluidity of membership in a people than as a marker of fixity, unless defined as an invariable trait of a group. Justin repeatedly cites prophetic admonitions that God can revoke Israel’s chosenness for disobedience as proof that Christians are now God’s chosen (or the true Israel).

35. In other words, this competition extends to intra-Christian competition as well.

36. James Kugel writes that ancient exegetes of this last verse long interpreted this non-people to be the Samaritans (e.g., Sir. 50:25–26). Paul anticipates Justin in identifying the non-people with gentiles (Rom. 10:19; see also 11:11). See James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 423–424, 884. Clement of Alexandria offers a similar interpretation, explicitly drawing upon Paul’s interpretation, to identify the non-people as gentiles (Strom. 2.43.1–4).

37. Justin’s citation of Isaiah 62:12 takes it out of context. In Isaiah, the “holy people” are the reestablished Zion, Jerusalem (see Is. 62:12).

38. Recalling Justin, Clement of Alexandria also links faithfulness to a specific genealogical and ethnoracial identity: “If ‘Abraham’s faith was counted to him as righteousness,’ and we are, through what we have heard, the seed of Abraham, then we too must have faith. We are Israelites, not through physical marks, but because we have been open to persuasion through what we have heard” (Strom. 2.28.4).

39. The title of this section alludes to Daniel Boyarin’s article on Justin, which in turn references Wayne Meeks’s critique of the Birkhat ha-minim as a red herring in Johannine scholarship in addressing questions of the relationship between the Jesus followers and other Jews (see Boyarin, “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” 430).

40. See also Dial. 125.5 and 140.2. Dial. 25.1 does not use the phrase “according to the flesh” but refers to those who use appeals to be the children (tekna) of Abraham in order to “receive even a small part of the divine inheritance with us.”

41. Nonetheless, we should not equate a “neutral” statement with a literal or factual statement. What counts as descent or kinship “according to the flesh” is always context-specific and subject to revision or challenge. For example, such descent may be reckoned through the mother, the father, or both; or descent may require social institutions and practices (such as legal marriage or sacrifice) in order to be recognized at all. Furthermore, it may be possible to acquire such descent through adoption or other social rituals.

42. This argument echoes Paul’s views, despite Justin’s lack of explicit dependence upon Paul. For an analysis of Paul’s views, see Hodge, “If Sons, Then Heirs.”

43. Justin’s contrast is not identical with that found in Pauline and some early Christian writings, where descent kata sarka is paired with descent kata pneumatikon. The primary difference is that Justin does not emphasize “spirit” as his key for interpreting scripture or defining truth. Nonetheless, what these pairings share in common is an unequal binary pairing and a link between type of descent and authenticity of biblical interpretation.

44. “Circumcision of the flesh is the only mark by which you can be clearly distinguished from other humans” (Dial. 16.3; see also 92.3). As Justin points out (23.5), circumcision is a gender-specific practice, so obviously the only Jews who could be identified by circumcision would be male Jews.

45. For example, see Dial. 11.5 and 23.4.

47. For an excellent discussion of rabbinic self-definition articulating this point, see Joshua Levinson, “Bodies and Bo(a)rders: Emerging Fictions of Identity in Late Antiquity,” HTR 93 (2000), esp. 344–348.

48. See chapter 5 for further discussion of universalizing arguments such as these.

49. Appealing to a passage in Jeremiah about God’s plans to “make a new covenant with Israel” (Jer. 31:31–34) as evidence that Christ embodies this new covenant and that Christ’s followers embody Israel, Justin writes: “If, therefore, God predicted that he would make a new covenant, and this for a light to the gentiles (ethnē), and we see and are convinced that, through the name of the crucified Jesus Christ, people have turned to God, leaving idolatry and other sinful practices behind them and have kept the faith (homologia) and practiced piety (eusebeia) even to death, then everyone can clearly see from these deeds (erga) and the accompanying powerful miracles that he [Christ] is indeed the new law, the new covenant, and the expectation of those who, from every people (ethnē), have awaited the blessings of God. We have been led to God through this crucified Christ, and we are the true spiritual Israel, and the descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, who, though uncircumcised, was approved and blessed by God because of his faith and was called the father of many peoples (ethnē)” (Dial. 11.4–5).

50. We find Justin using this logic in relation to circumcision as well: “You who have the circumcision of the flesh are in great need of our circumcision” (Dial. 19.3).

51. This is the view Justin later attributes to Jews (Dial. 123.1). Someone might have understood circumcision to have the effect of making Justin (or any previously uncircumcised male) a descendant of Abraham kata sarka, but this is not the sole criteria for salvation.

52. Earlier in the Dialogue, he states that Christians “are instructed to forget the ancient customs (ethoi) of our ancestors” (63.5). See also his extended interpretation of Jacob’s marriages, where Leah is interpreted as “your people” and Rachel as “our Church” (134.3): “Jacob served Laban for his spotted and speckled sheep. Christ served his service even as far as the cross, for men of various colors and appearances out of every nation, purchasing them by blood and the mystery of the cross. Leah’s eyes were weak, and in truth, very weak are the eyes of your souls. Rachel stole the gods of Laban, and hid them until this present day, and similarly for us, have our ancestral and material gods perished” (134.5, my emphasis).

53. It is unnecessary to posit a distinct social group like “god-fearers” in order to support this reading, although such a group is compatible with this idea.

54. Dial. 47.2–3, 48.4, 80.2.

55. Dial. 35.2–8, 80.3, 4, 82.1–4. He also speaks of Jews “in name only” (80.4).

56. Trypho says that he knows “that there are many who profess faith in Jesus and are considered to be Christians, yet they claim there is no harm in eating meats sacrificed to idols” (Dial. 35.1). Justin’s reply primarily concerns false teachers and false doctrine rather than this specific issue.

57. Dial. 48.1. After Justin acknowledges that some of his genos think Jesus is the Christ but merely human (48.4), Trypho follows up by stating that he finds this view more reasonable than Justin’s.

59. On illegitimate Christians, see Dial. 35.2–6, 80.3–4. See also Boyarin, “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” 453–456.

60. See Dial. 11.5, 135.3.

61. See Dial. 119.3–5, 138.2–3.

62. Dial. 134.6; see also 119.4.

63. For example, “‘His name is forever; above the sun shall it spring up; and all the peoples (ethnē) shall be blessed in him’ (Psalms 72:17). But if all the ethnē are blessed in the Christ, and we out of all the ethnē believe in this man, then he is the Christ and we they that have been blessed by him. The sun indeed God had given formerly for worship … yet one cannot find any who ever endured death because of belief in the sun. But one can find people of every race (pantos genos anthrōpōn) who, because of the name of Jesus, have endured, and do endure, sufferings of all kinds for not denying him…. Now in his first coming, which was without honor and form, and was despised, he yet showed so much brilliancy and might that in no single people (genos) is he unknown: so that some among every one have repented of the old evil manner of life belonging to each race (genos).” (Dial. 121.1–2, 3, my emphasis).

64. For example, Dial. 124.4.

65. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 70.

1. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 198. For a more extended discussion, see introduction and chapter 1.

2. The concepts “gnosticism” and “gnostic” continue to receive scrutiny and criticism. The relationship of the texts classified as “gnostic” to Christianness is problematic, in part because “gnostic” functions as shorthand for “difference” from “standard” Christianness, even when it is recognized that no such “standard” existed in the time when these texts were composed. Furthermore, even among those who use the term heuristically, there is debate over which texts ought to be comprehended by the term. Bentley Layton favors keeping the term in play and classifying texts according to their use of Greek cognates related to gnosis. See for example, Bentley Layton, “Prolegomena to the Study of Gnosticism,” in The Social World of Early Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne Meeks (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 338–344. Michael Williams argues for getting rid of “gnostic” and “gnosticism” as terms of classification at all. See Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Karen L. King, while insisting on the modernity of these terms, offers a more nuanced analysis of the challenges and implications of the terms of scholarly classification. See Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. 149–190.

3. For example, Gedaliahu Stroumsa writes, “The Gnostics, who were fundamentally different from common humanity and who did not share its fate throughout history, considered themselves to belong to a race or seed that was different, being both immovable (ATKIM, asaleutos) and eternal.” Gedaliahu Stroumsa, Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 100.

4. King thoroughly analyzes the discourse of “gnosticism” in relation to “heresy” in King, What is Gnosticism? (see esp. chapter 2).

5. For example, Henry Alan Green cites Irenaeus to support an interpretation of gnosticism as a “stratified system that closely resembles a caste system. This system of stratification is a hierarchical ordering of salvation with inferior and superior grades that are eternally sustained. This hierarchical ordering is seen as being ontologically determined and anthropologically present in this world. Caste membership is by ascription only.” Henry Allen Green, “Suggested Sociological Themes in the Study of Gnosticism,” Vigiliae Christianae 31 (1977): 177.

6. James E. Davison, while suggesting that Clement in some ways resembles Valentinian Christians (who are sometimes categorized as “gnostic”), nonetheless seems to accept this characterization of Valentinian anthropology: “the Valentinians distinguished between three kinds of people—material (hylic), animal (psychic), and spiritual (pneumatic). The differences among them are absolute.” James Davison, “Structural Similarities and Dissimilarities in the Thought of Clement of Alexandria and the Valentinians,” Second Century 3 (1983), 206. This interpretation of the threefold classification leads Davison to conclude that one of the three major ways in which Clement differed from the Valentinians was that Clement had a universal vision for salvation, thinking that “all can be saved” while the Valentinians had an elitist vision: “As God has limited his relationship to the unwilled universe to the placing of pneumatic seed within it, his activity in the world is also confined within a very narrow range. Divine activity is exhausted in redeeming the ‘elect’” (215–216). Davison does not consider the possibility that “Valentinian” is itself a problematic category.

7. King, What Is Gnosticism? King also critiques the view that “gnostics are saved by nature” (see 191–200).

8. Luise Schottroff, “Animae naturaliter salvandae: Zum Problem der himmlischen Herkunft des Gnostikers,” in Christentum und Gnosis, ed. Walter Eltester (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1969), 65–97.

9. For example, see Elaine Pagels’s insightful study of Irenaeus’s tendentious anti-Valentinian rhetoric. Elaine Pagels, “Conflicting Versions of Valentinian Eschatology: Irenaeus’s Treatise vs. The Excerpts from Theodotus,” HTR 67 (1974): 35–53. Pagels draws attention to how Irenaeus repeatedly portrays the Valentinians’ idea of pneumatic seed in a divisive and deterministic manner, masking the unifying function of the seed and the transformative potential attributed to psychics elsewhere in Irenaeus’s writings as well as in the Excerpts of Theodotus.

10. The Apocryphon of John (all four extant MS traditions), The Sophia of Jesus Christ, Gospel of the Egyptians, The Three Steles of Seth, and Zostrianos. See Michael Williams, The Immovable Race: A Gnostic Designation and the Theme of Stability in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 1–4.

11. Williams, Immovable Race, 158–185. See also David Brakke, “The Seed of Seth at the Flood; Biblical Interpretation and Gnostic Theological Reflection” in Reading in Christian Communities: Essays on Interpretation in the Early Church, ed. Charles A. Bobertz and David Brakke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 41–62.

12. “The Tripartite Tractate,” ed., trans., and critical notes by Harold W. Attridge and Elaine H. Pagels, in The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, Vol. 1 (1985; repr., Leiden: Brill, 2000) XII:184–190. See also the discussion in chapter 2 above.

13. The scare quotes here mean that I do not think these categories transparently correspond to any social group or set of texts. The relationship between “Valentinian” and “gnostic” is a matter of dispute. Valentinus was a well-known early Christian teacher whose students and successors are referred to in ancient texts as either the followers of Valentinus or the school of Valentinus. But ancient sources also indicate that, as was the case with Clement and Origen who were also teachers, Valentinus carved out his authority as a teacher in the context of imagining a larger Christian community in which not all members were his students. The desire to distinguish Valentinians from gnostics may function to rehabilitate Valentinians within the spectrum of early Christian diversity, but it leaves intact the construct of “gnostic” and still positions Valentinians as an “offshoot” of this category. Bentley Layton, for example, offers a view very similar to that of the second-century heresiologist Irenaeus. Both view Valentinus as having developed a system out of “gnostic” materials. Layton writes: “the structure of the Gnostic type of myth also has striking parallels in Valentinian mythography, just as Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. 1.11.1) states that the Valentinian hairesis derived historically from the Gnostic hairesis. But many aspects of Valentinian mythography are also significantly different from Schenke’s Gnostic type of myth, so that Valentinus and his followers can best be kept apart as a distinct mutation, or reformed offshoot, of the original Gnostics.” In Layton, “Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Gnosticism,” 343. It is important to note, however, that Irenaeus explicitly seeks to discredit the Christianity articulated by Valentinus and his followers, and to offer his own as the authoritative one. A central way that Irenaeus can discredit Valentinians is to claim that they are the “descendants” of “heretics” and thus heretics themselves, not the authentic Christians they understand themselves to be. Irenaeus ends the first book of his five-volume treatise (Against all Heresies), which has Valentinians as its special target (see 1.1.2), by making this argument explicit: “It was necessary to prove that, as their very opinions and regulations show, those who are of the school of Valentinus derive their origin from such mothers, fathers, and ancestors [i.e., Gnostics]” (1.31.3). Irenaeus clearly communicates that he represents those who derive their origin from better ancestors—who can trace their authority to God—by stating that his humble aim is to “convert” Valentinians back to the truth. He says that he writes “with the hope that perchance some of them, exercising repentance and returning to the only creator, and for the shaper of the universe, may obtain salvation and that others may not henceforth be drawn away by their wicked, although plausible, persuasions …” (1.31.3). For further discussion of the implications and problems of classifying Valentinus and Valentinians, see King, What Is Gnosticism?, 154–156, 162–164.

14. The very mention of insiders and outsiders raises the question of social groups and their relation to the surviving texts. See the conclusion of this chapter for further discussion.

15. Although Clement is traditionally associated with an “official” school of the main Alexandrian church, there is no basis for either a single “main” Alexandrian church or an “official” school in his day.

16. Indeed, as David Brakke has noted, the model of study circles—of Christian teachers with their students—seems to have been the most ancient form of Christian organization in Alexandria. See David Brakke, “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter,” HTR 87 (1994): 399–405.

17. The quotation in this section’s heading is from Strom. 2.115.2.

18. I have only selected a few of the many possible examples to illustrate my points. Another fruitful context for study would be Clement’s critique of so-called Valentinian ideas in the larger context of discussing martyrdom and death (see Strom. 4.89.1–94.4).

19. Not only was the practice of adoption widespread in antiquity, but the idea of being adopted as a son of God is used by Philo and Paul to speak about the consequences of righteous action. Philo states that only the wise person like Abraham can become God’s friend: “For wisdom is God’s friend rather than his slave. And thus he says plainly of Abraham, ‘shall I hide anything from my friend Abraham?’ (Gen. 18:17). The one who has this portion has passed beyond the bounds of human happiness. This one alone is well-born, for he has registered God as his father and become by adoption his only son …” (Philo, On Sobriety 55–56). See also Rom. 8:23 and 9:4; Gal. 4:5; and Eph. 1:5. Irenaeus also plays with fixed and fluid meanings of sonship: “‘Son’ … has a twofold meaning: one in the order of nature, because he was born a son; the other, in that he was made so … whether with respect to his creation or by the teaching of his doctrine. For when any person has been taught from the mouth of another, he is termed the son of him who instructs him, and the latter [is called] his father. According to nature … we are all sons of God, because we have all been created by God. But with respect to obedience and doctrine we are not all the sons of God; those only are so who believe in him and do his will. And those who do not believe, and do not obey his will, are sons and angels of the devil, because they do the works of the devil…. For as, among humans, those sons who disobey their father, being disinherited, are still sons in the course of nature, but by law are disinherited … so in the same way is it with God—those who do not obey him are disinherited by him and have ceased to be his sons” (Adv. Haer. 4.41.2–3). This passage comes after Irenaeus’s strong objection to the notion that humans have different natures and that some are by nature good or bad. He emphasizes that all humans have free will, and the equal capacity to be good or bad. Unlike Clement, Irenaeus insists that all humans are God’s children “by nature.” Although this assertion qualifies him for status as a “founder of a heresy” according to Clement’s argument, Irenaeus makes clear that being God’s son “by nature” is not sufficient to ensure salvation. One must also become a son by action—a view shared by Clement. This is a sleight of hand argument because it implies that his rivals offer more limited and fixed interpretations of salvation—either appealing to a natural relation to God for only a few or by appealing to intrinsically good or bad natures (thereby denying free will or the relevance of action). Nonetheless, Irenaeus is able to preserve his own idea of fixity—all are “by nature” sons of God—while insisting that the kinship that really matters for the purposes of salvation must be acquired (is fluid). He implicitly denies that his rivals could hold an equally subtle understanding of the relation between kinship and salvation. Luther Martin, for example, suggests that adoption is the model for understanding how many become “Sethites,” the saved “insiders” of the Apocalypse of Adam. See Luther Martin, “Genealogy and Sociology in the Apocalypse of Adam,” in Gnosticism and the Early Christian World: In Honor of James M. Robinson, eds. James E. Goehring, et al. (Sonoma, CA; Polebridge, 1990), 34–35.

20. Clement further notes that Adam is an example of one who did not make a good choice, in contrast to Noah, Abraham, and the younger son of Isaac (Jacob) (Strom. 2.98.3–99.3).

21. See note 19 above for how closely this resembles Philo’s reference to adoption.

22. See for example, Strom. 3.70.1–2, 6.39.4–42.2, 6.106.4–107.1.

23. For a thorough discussion, see Denise Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) esp. 50–68, 117–179.

24. See for example, Strom. 3.1.1, 3.29.3, 3.59.3. 4.

25. Physiognomy, the study of the character from behavior, voice, and looks, was well established in antiquity and adapted by Christians in their characterizations of holy people. See Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 134–170.

26. This section may also indicate competition over how to interpret Paul, since Origen is alluding to Romans 9:20–21.

27. This translation follows the Greek text. In the Latin, the text differs, reading: “enter into the Church of the Lord, on the day of revelation, they become vessels of honor.” Clement of Alexandria also describes the highest level of Christian, the gnostic Christian, as one who has also become an Israelite (Strom. 4.169.1). In her notes to the French-Greek critical edition, Annewies van den Hoek notes Philo’s likely influence on this imagery. See Clément d’Alexandrie, Les Stromates: Stromate IV, introduction, critical text, and notes by Annewies van den Hoek, Claude Mondésert, trans. (Paris: du Cerf, 2001), 338 n. 3.

28. Origen omits the category of “psychics” or soul-endowed, which is usually associated with “Valentinian” anthropology. This omission is also found in the Valentinian Exposition (NHC XI, 2), which only includes a twofold division of pneumatic and “fleshly” (sarkikos). See Einar Thomassen, “The Valentinianism of the Valentinian Exposition (NHC XI, 2),” Muséon 102 (1989): 233–235. Elaine Pagels notes that the catchphrase “those who introduce the doctrine of natures” is especially used by Origen when criticizing Valentinians. See Elaine Pagels, “A Valentinian Interpretation of Baptism and Eucharist—And its Critique of ‘Orthodox’ Sacramental Theology and Practice,” HTR 65 (1972): 154.

29. Before the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, scholars had to reconstruct ideas attributed to “Valentinian” Christians primarily from citations embedded within the writings of their Christian rivals, including Clement and Origen. For an English translation of this collection, see The Nag Hammadi Library in English, revised ed., James Robinson, ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977).

30. Wesley Isenberg, “The Gospel According to Philip,” in the Coptic Gnostic Library, Vol. II (1989; repr. Leiden: Brill, 2000), 131. Thus, it cannot be presumed that Clement or Origen knew these writings. I am not arguing for any causal connections among these texts.

31. TriTrac 133.67, 132.4–15, and 132.28–133.14.

32. From Attridge and Pagels’s notes to The Tripartite Tractate, in The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices. Vol. 1. Ed., trans., and critical notes by Harold W. Attridge and Elaine H. Pagels. (1985; repr., Leiden: Brill, 2000): XXIII:446.

34. From Einar Thomassen’s commentary in Le Traité Tripartite. Ed., introduction, and commentary by Einar Thomassen, Louis Painchaud and Einar Thomassen, trans. (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989), 428–429.

35. It is interesting that the Gospel of Philip follows the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi library. As Isenberg notes, “this resemblance may have suggested the sequence to the copyist of the Coptic manuscript.” See Wesley Isenberg, “The Gospel According to Philip,” 138.

36. April de Conick, “The True Mysteries: Sacramentalism in the Gospel of Philip,” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001): 237 (my emphasis).

37. Of all the texts contained in the surviving Nag Hammadi collection, only the Gospel of Philip and the Testimony of Truth use the term “Christian” as an insider term. See Martha Lee Turner, The Gospel According to Philip: The Sources and Coherence of an Early Christian Collection (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 7, 146.

38. For example, “If you say, ‘I am a Jew,’ no one will tremble. If you say, ‘I am a Roman,’ no one will be bothered. If you say, ‘I am a Greek—or a barbarian, a slave, free’ no one will be disturbed. If you [say], ‘I am a Christian,’ the [ … ] will shake” (GosPhil 62.26–32). While this passage uses ethnoracial and status language to differentiate Christians from others, other passages speak about the transformation of the individual as changing one’s collective identification: “When we were Hebrews we were orphans, with (only) our mother, but when we became Christians we got father and mother” (52.21–24).

39. Martha Turner writes, “The terms ‘Christian,’ ‘apostle,’ ‘perfect,’ ‘Hebrew,’ ‘Jew,’ and gentile’ are all restricted to the first three quarters of the Gospel According to Philip” (Turner, Gospel According to Philip, 146). Turner proposes that the GosPhil be viewed in two major chunks. The first three quarters of the text (up to 77.15) is collected from at least three major early Christian traditions (those of “Thomas” Christianity, “classic” gnosticism, and “Valentinian” Christianity), whereas the material from 77.15 to the end is drawn from one source or viewpoint, which she characterizes as a “primitive” Valentinian one, very close to the teachings of the Gospel of Truth (see Turner, Gospel According to Philip, 184–205). She asserts that “themes, interests, and approaches which characterize the first three-quarters of the document vanish when we cross that divide … [and] something like a single voice emerges” (135). Because Turner reads the interests of the collector largely through the last quarter of the document, she deems the absence of most of these collective terms as a sign of their overall insignificance (259): “The issues of group identity to which they point are of interest to at least some of the sources of that material; these are absent from the final quarter of the document.” (146).

Turner’s suggestion that “modes of existence” are central to the entire gospel is generally persuasive (although she masks her own interpretive contributions by attributing her reading to the “compiler’s” intent.) In her view, the compiler chose materials that could address “two interrelated problems—the origin and nature of evil in the world, and the nature of the highest possibilities open to human beings” (261). She further suggests that the “collector” selected this material for positive use (not simply to rebut it): “The collector of the Gospel According to Philip … seems to have had little or no interest in refuting the material collected: while he or she could hardly have agreed with every opinion expressed, each excerpt seems to have been selected for its positive value” (258). It follows from her hypothesis, then, that any use of identity terms, including ethnoracial ones, must be comprehensible as relevant to addressing these problems. It makes more sense that the author/compiler viewed these collective terms of identification in the first three quarters of the text as consonant with the ideas conveyed in different language later in the Gospel than that these concepts cease to be relevant. If the author has one (or more) underlying concerns or questions that have motivated this selection of diverse materials, and especially if we agree that these concerns pertain at least to modes of existence, then Turner’s categorical distinction about the relevance of terms of collective identity for the first three quarters and not for the last quarter is illogical. She mistakes the absence of terms such as “Hebrew” for the absence of the function they serve. The function of these identity categories in the first three quarters of the text are fulfilled in the last quarter by terms such as “the perfect” and pairings such as “bridegroom” and “child of the bridegroom.”

40. Turner, Gospel According to Philip, 146. In particular, she notes that “apostle” appears with both strongly positive and strongly negative connotations in the Gospel. The Gospel of Philip contains two negative uses of the term “apostle,” the first of which links it also to “Hebrew”: “Her [Mary’s] existence is anathema to the Hebrews, meaning the apostles and apostolic persons” (55.28–30); and the second links the apostles with “the fallen nature of Sophia” (152): “The apostles said to the disciples, ‘May all of our offerings get salt!’ They were referring [to wisdom] as ‘salt.’ Without it, no offering is acceptable. Now wisdom [is] barren, [without] offspring. For this reason, [she] is called ‘[ … ] … of the salt.’ Wherever [ … ] can [ … ] like them, the Holy Spirit [ … ], [and] many are her offspring” (GosPhil 59.27–60.1). Turner also notes passages that seem to attribute ideas unproblematically to apostles (62.7, 67.24, 73.8) and one very positive one: “it was because of chrism (anointing) that the Christ (the anointed) was named, for the Father anointed the Son; and the Son anointed the apostles, and the apostles anointed us. Whoever has been anointed has everything …” (74.15–18) (151–154).

41. There is scholarly consensus that the Gospel of Philip draws from a range of different sources but considerable disagreement about how to read it. A number of scholars focus on its constituent units while others seek to interpret it as a unified whole. Proponents of composite structure: Hans-Martin Schenke, Isenberg, A. H. C. van Eijk, and Martha Lee Turner. Proponents of treating the text as a unified whole: J.-E. Ménard, Robert McL. Wilson, Y. Janssens, G. S. Gasparro, S. Giversen, and Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley. The two main interpretive options—the “florilegium” (notebook collecting a list of sayings from disparate sources) versus coherent, systematic (Valentinian) unity—offer a false choice. That the text shares some features with other ancient writing collections, of which there is a wide variety, does not contraindicate coherency. That the text’s coherency can be read in divergent ways (from an emphasis on sacraments to links with Jewish mysticism to Valentinian theology) indicates both the inevitable role of the interpreter in the process and the interpretive fungibility of the non-narrative structure. I find convincing the view that the author drew from a range of earlier Christian traditions and produced a text whose non-narrative composition can sustain many readings.

42. Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley has developed a complementary analysis of the Gospel’s understanding of language (especially of names). She writes: “Once [the author] has broken down the habitual scheme of dichotomies, the author is ready to inform his readers that names are as ‘unreal’ as conventional categories of opposition. Names do not capture reality; contrasting concepts have no external—only illusory—referents. Virtually in the same breath, the writer destroys conceptual dualism and the naïve idea of correspondence between names and referents, whether palpable or purely mental. On closer inspection, however, the author has annulled one kind of dualism, but he introduces another, by denying the ‘correspondence theory’ regarding names. So, in the case of names, there is a true, though deceptive, dualism: an almost jaunty dialectic is at work. Very neatly, the Gospel of Philip has undermined two traditional—but to the text philosophically immature—modes of understanding. However, the two kinds of polemics are related, even providing the same message. This is so because the ideas of ‘original nature,’ of ‘the indissoluble eternal’ ones ‘exalted above the world’ relate to the teaching about names. Just as the dualistic concepts hide the ‘original nature,’ so deceptive names do refer, however obliquely, to the immutable reality in the upper world. The Gospel of Philip in both cases proposes a synthetic, but paradoxical, view in which customary dualistic and nominalistic modes of though are given a jolt.” Jorunn Buckley, “Conceptual Models and Polemical Issues in the Gospel of Philip,” ANRW II 22.5 (1998): 4174–4175.

43. The rest of the brief unit is fragmentary, but may imply that the contrast is between beings that make others like themselves and beings that do not: “exist just as they … and make others like themselves, while … simply exist” (GosPhil 51.33–52.1).

44. Turner, The Gospel According to Philip, 242. As Turner notes, “while pairs of opposites are not infrequent in the material contained in the Gospel according to Philip, this section is by a very wide margin the densest concatenation of paired oppositions anywhere in the document” (244). She provides a helpful schematic chart of these passages (242–244).

45. This passage also recalls the Excerpts of Theodotos. Clement’s notes speak not only of seed as having been sown into psychics and pneumatics, but also distinguishes between seed in gendered terms. Early in the notebook, Clement speaks about Sophia having produced male and female seed, “elect” and “called” respectively, which are different but ultimately both reunited with the logos (Exc. Theod. 21.1–3). The difference between them is glossed later in the text in terms of parentage: the “male” seed is produced by Sophia together with her male counterpart, whereas the “female” seed is produced by Sophia alone (i.e., her feminine component: see 39–40). In the last portion of the text, the plan of salvation is described as the savior’s descent to gather up and transform those who “were children of the female only” (68); slightly later: “so long then, they say, as the seed is yet unformed, it is the offspring of the female, but when it was formed, it was changed to a man and becomes a son of the bridegroom” (79). The Excerpts of Theodotos does not use a Hebrew/Christian distinction and refers more explicitly to cosmological prehistory, but the similarities between baptismal, bridal chamber, and transformation indicate a similar way of thinking.

46. The passage that Siker uses to support this position showcases how we scholars bring our own lenses to any reading because of the fragmentary nature of the surviving manuscript. This passage contains tantalizing terms and phrases, including: “elect genos,” “true genos,” “Christians,” “Greeks,” and “Jews” (GosPhil 75.30–32). For Siker, the presence of the term “Jew” is highly significant. He suggests that it must have a categorically different meaning from “Hebrew” because of the passage that Christians were once Hebrews. Although Siker rightly cautions that this passage is so fragmentary as to be subject to all manner of reconstructions according to the sense that the modern editor finds most reasonable, he follows Welsey Isenberg’s reconstruction: “No Jew [was ever born] to Greek parents [as long as the world] has existed. And [as a] Christian [people], we [ourselves do not descend] from the Jews.” Jeffrey Siker, “Gnostic Views on Jews and Christians in the Gospel of Philip,” Novum Testamentum 31 (1989): 278. Siker supports his preference as follows: “elsewhere in the Gospel of Philip the affirmation is not that Gnostic-Christians were ‘Jews,’ but that they were once ‘Hebrews,’ which appears to have a religious significance, unlike ‘Jews,’ which refers to a race or class” (278 n. 5, my emphasis). Siker and Isenberg seem to read the distinction between “Jews” and “Christians” in this text as immutable, which is only supportable through the textual emendation and insertion in the fragmentary passage and based on a modern notion that race is immutable. Furthermore, these scholars correlate these terms with historical social groups, which seems far from secure.

47. Siker, “Gnostic Views,” 277.

48. Martha Turner also entertains the possibility that Hebrew designates “another kind of Christian” in the other three passages in which the term appears (Turner, The Gospel According to Philip, 151).

49. For passages referring to the perfect, see GosPhil 76.23–36 and 80.1–22; for child of the bridal chamber, see GosPhil 86.4–18.

50. GosPhil 78.25–79.13.

51. GosPhil 83.8–25; or being weeded: 85.29–31 (cf. Matt. 15:13).

52. GosPhil 83.25–84.13; 85.24–29.

53. While this passage classifies all humans as members of one genos, other passages differentiate among kinds of humans.

54. Buckley, “Conceptual Models and Polemical Issues,” 4170.

55. “Christian” appears seven times in the Gospel of Philip. Turner parses its appearances as follows: four times as positive term of self-designation (52.21–24, 62.26–34, 74.13–14, 75.25–76.2) (Turner, The Gospel According to Philip, 147–148); twice in ways “which question other people’s claim to this term” and have to do with baptism (148–49); and once in such a degraded portion of the manuscript that it is too “lacunose” to interpret (74.24–75.1) (150). Of the two examples she cites pertaining to baptism, I think the polemic is only clear in the first (64.22–29), and even here, the polemic clearly positions “Christian” as a term claimed by the Gospel of Philip for insiders. In the second instance, the passage’s reference to “no longer a Christian but a Christ” (67.19–27) does not need to be read as rejecting a positive sense of the term “Christian,” as I have noted. Finally, I agree with Turner that the tantalizing passage in which Christian appears in the same unit as Ioudaioi and the phrase “the true genos” is too incomplete to interpret definitively.

56. See also GosPhil 61.34–35.

57. The fragmentary end of this unit seems to contrast things that “make others” (perhaps meaning others like themselves) with things that “simply exist.” It is too fragmentary, however, to make draw any definitive analysis.

58. See also “A horse sires (jpō) a horse, a man begets a man, a god brings forth a god” (GosPhil 75.25–27). This passage reinforces an understanding of “Hebrews” as an “insider” of a lower rank, recalling the opening passage in which a Hebrew is said to be able to replicate (that is, to be able to make another Hebrew).

59. We also do not know the contexts from which Clement draws his citations.

60. Elaine Pagels makes this point with respect to Irenaeus. She notes that Irenaeus distinguishes between two types of humans—those who will be saved and those who will not (Pagels, “Conflicting Versions,” 51). Although he stresses that the Valentinians divide humans into three kinds, she convincingly argues that Irenaeus misconstrues the fluidity between the Valentinian “psychic” and “pneumatic” (44–53).

61. For a discussion of Valentinian polemic against non-Valentinians, see Elaine Pagels, “A Valentinian Interpretation of Baptism and Eucharist,” 153–169.

1. For analysis of this verse and Paul’s use of ethnic reasoning, see Denise K. Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge, “The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul,” JBL 123 (2004): 235–252.

2. The critical edition consulted for the sixth book of Clement’s Strōmateis is Clément d’Alexandrie, Les Stromates: Stromate VI, introduction, critical ed., trans., and notes by Patrick Descourtieux (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999). I read this passage to make different points in Denise K. Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” HTR 94 (2001): 461–462. This interpretation is adapted from Denise Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10:4 (2002): 429–431.

3. See Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race,” 462.

4. Throughout his corpus, Clement of Alexandria portrays Christians as a periousios laos (“special” or “abundant people;” Ex. 19:5) who have been formed out of those from “either” or “both” race(s) by which he means “Jews” or “Greeks” (or “gentiles”) or “barbarians” and “Greeks” (where Jews are including under the category of barbarian). See for example, Strom. 3.70.1–2, 6.13.106.4, 6.17.159.8–9, and Prot. 12.120.2. Clement asserts quite programmatically, “Of humans, all are either Greek or barbarian,” a point which he uses to claim the universality of the Christian God (Strom. 5.133.8).

5. For a more extended discussion of aggregative ethnic reasoning, see Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 441–445.

6. See Acta Andreae, edited with French translation by Jean-Marc Prieur (Brepols: Turnhout, 1989). The Greek manuscript known as Vatican, gr. 808 (BHG 95) contains the relevant ethnoracial terms discussed in this section. I have followed Prieur’s numbering of sections; the latter number corresponds to the Vat. 808 ms. This narrative does not use the term “Christian” for insiders.

7. The text contains another perspective, represented by Stratocles, one of Andrew’s followers. Stratocles seems to understand himself not to have been reminded of his own saved nature so much as to have received vital “seeds” from Andrew necessary for salvation: “when you were the sower I received the seeds of the words of salvation. And for these to sprout and grow up there is need of no other than yourself, most blessed Andrew. And what else have I to say to you than this, servant of God? I need the great mercy and help that comes from you, to be able to be worthy of the seed I have from you, which will only grow permanently and emerge into the light if you wish it and pray for it and for my whole self” (AA 44.9–16 [12], my emphasis). Andrew’s words of salvation are described as “seeds” that he implants in the souls of his hearers. For more on this agricultural trope, see Denise K. Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31–78. Despite Andrew’s claim that he reminds, not teaches, this passage portrays his words as capable of producing a new life, not merely as a catalyst for an already incipient one. Here, conversion is likened to the slow process of cultivation, not just a sudden awakening or realization of one’s true nature.

8. See for example, Andrew’s closing speech: “Siblings, I was sent as an apostle by the Lord into these parts, of which my Lord thought me worthy, not indeed to teach anyone, but to remind everyone who is akin (sungenēs) to these words that they live in transient evils while they enjoy their harmful delusions. From which things I always exhorted you to keep clear and to press toward the things that are permanent and to take flight from all that is transient. For you see that not one of you stands firm, but everything, including human ways, is changeable. And this is the case because the soul is untrained and has gone astray in nature (physis) and retains pledges corresponding to its error. I therefore hold blessed (makarios) those who obey the words preached to them and who through them see, as in a mirror, the mysteries of their own nature, for the sake of which all things were built.” (AA 47 [15]).

9. Andrew further exhorts Maximilla to “keep yourself, from now on, chaste and pure, holy, undefiled, sincere, free from adultery, unwilling for relationship with him who is a stranger to us, unbent, unbroken, tearless, unhurt, immovable in storms, undivided, free from offense, and without sympathy for the works of Cain. For if you do not give yourself over, Maximilla, to the things that are the opposites of these, I shall rest, being thus compelled to give up this life for your sake, that is for my own sake. But if I, who am perhaps even able to help others akin to me (sungeneis) through you, am driven away from here and if you are persuaded by your relationship with Aegeates and by the flatteries of his father, the serpent, to return to your earlier ways, know that I shall be punished on your account until you would understand that I spurned life for the sake of a soul that was unworthy” (AA 40.5–17 [8]). This passage associates insiders and outsiders not only with kinship language (kin versus strangers) but reinforces the danger of the outsiders by linking them with the biblical troublemakers of Cain (an insider gone bad) and the serpent (who seeks to make insiders into outsiders). In response to this rather strong-armed appeal to an ethics of mutual accountability, Maximilla departs. The narrative describes her resolve to follow Andrew’s advice in a striking manner which echoes Stratocles’ view that Andrew has sown transformative seeds in him: “For when she had heard what he had answered her and had been in some way impressed by it and had become what the words signified (genomenē touto hoper hoi logoi edeiknuon), she went out, neither rashly nor without set purpose, and went to the praetorium” (46.2–5 [14]). For an analysis of the performative effects of language in this passage, see Laura Nasrallah, “‘She Became What the Words Signified’: The Greek Acts of Andrew’s Construction of the Reader-Disciple,” in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, ed. François Bovon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 233–258.

10. Michael A. Williams, The Immovable Race: A Gnostic Designation and the Theme of Stability in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1985): 181–182.

11. Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” JECS 6 (1998): 207.

12. The struggle over the concept of resurrection has been vividly shown by Elaine Pagels, Gnostic Gospels (1979; repr., New York: Vintage, 1981), 3–32.

13. My interpretation of Hermas is adapted from Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 453–461, 466. For a broad-ranging examination of color symbolism in early Christian texts see Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002).

14. Carolyn Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary. Ed. Helmut Koester. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 1.

15. Byron notes that Hermas uses color symbolism to define vices and virtues; blackness epitomizes vice while whiteness signifies virtue. This symbolism becomes even more vivid later in this unit, where two groups of women are distinguished by their white and black clothing (Herm. Sim. 9.15.1–3) and the first and twelfth mountains are correlated with bad and perfect believers (9.19.1). See Byron, Symbolic Blackness, 67–69.

16. The Gospel of Philip also uses this metaphor of color transformation. Although the terms of the analogy differ, this example also features the transformation of various colors into white: “The Lord went into the dye works of Levi. He took seventy-two different colors and threw them into the vat. He took them all out white. And he said, ‘Even so has the son of man come [as] a dyer’” (GosPhil 63.25–30).

17. In Hermas’s vision, the “Lord of the tower” arrives to do this testing: “He felt each stone and he held a staff in his hand and hit each individual stone used in the building. And as he struck, some of them became as black as pitch, and some rotten, and some with cracks, and some short, and some neither white nor black, and some rough and not fitting in with the other stones and some with many stains” (Herm. Sim. 9.6.3–4).

18. The replacement stones are subsequently explained as the “roots” of the twelfth mountain. See below for further discussion. It is also important to note that not all of the stones that fail the test are permanently excluded from the tower. The text gives two levels of explanation for this: in the vision, the rejected stones are cleaned (Herm. Sim. 9.7.2, 6) and those that are successfully cleaned are put back into the tower; in the subsequent interpretation of the vision, the rejected stones are explained as Christians who have succumbed to various sins (9.13.6–9) and are able to rejoin the tower if they repent (9.14.1–2).

19. See also Byron, Symbolic Blackness, 66–67, 69.

20. The rejected stones, although they “all bore the name of the Son of God, and they also received the power of the virgins … were made disobedient by the women whom you saw clothed in black clothing…. When they saw them they desired them, and put on their power, and put off the clothing and power of the virgins” (Herm. Sim. 9.13.7, 8).

21. The spectrum of varieties of believers and unbelievers is consistent with the classifications of people given throughout the rest of the text. As Osiek notes, the mountains correlate with “the following kinds of people: 1. Apostates, blasphemers, and betrayers (Herm. Sim. 19.1); 2. Hypocrites and false teachers (19.2); 3. Wealthy and those choked with business concerns (20); 4. Doubleminded (21); 5. Slow learners and arrogant (22); 6. Quarrelers (23); 7. Simple, without guile (24); 8. Apostles and teachers (25); 9. Bad pastors and deniers (26); 10. Bishops and givers of hospitality (27); 11. Those who suffer for the name (28); 12. Innocent ones (29)” (Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 244).

22. See Herm. Sim. 9. 19–29 and Herm. Vis. 4.3.2–5. See also Byron, Symbolic Blackness, 66–67, and David Brakke, “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 501–535.

23. Unlike Origen and Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas gives no attention to the religious customs of the mountain/races when they are interpreted as the pre-Christian sources for the Christian race. Nevertheless, because the description of the nation mountains explains ethnic variation among non-Christians in terms of “differences of mind and way of thinking” (Herm. Sim. 9.17.2), this text produces an unsteady connection between the nations from which Christians come and the quality of their beliefs.

24. A vivid example of this logic appears in the nineteenth-century British scholar J. B. Lightfoot’s study of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, reprinted multiple times in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this work, Lightfoot uses the ethnoracial background of the Galatians (read as Celtic/Gallic) to explain the tone of Paul’s letter and the Galatians’ “backsliding” from Paul’s Gospel. Lightfoot uses the notion that religious attitudes form part of one’s ethnoracial character that is transmitted from one generation to the next to describe the Galatians as racially unsuited to preserve Paul’s Gospel. He also projects this “innate racial failing” forward into Christian history: “The fragmentary notices of its subsequent career reflect some light on the temper and disposition of the Galatian Church in St. Paul’s day. To Catholic writers of a later day indeed the failings of its infancy seemed to be so faithfully reproduced in its mature age, that they invested the Apostle’s rebuke with a prophetic import. Asia Minor was the nursery of heresy, and of all the Asiatic Churches it was nowhere so rife as in Galatia. The Galatian capital was the stronghold of the Montanist revival, which lingered on for more than two centuries, splitting into diverse sects, each distinguished by some fantastic gesture or minute ritual observance. Here too were to be found Ophites, Manichaeans, sectarians of all kinds.” See J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations; 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1881), 32–33.

25. Because modern readers are especially attuned to the construction of Christian universal claims over and against an understanding of Jewishness as particular, it is worth noting the invisibility of Judaism in Hermas as well as the absence of the term “Christian” for insiders. While the text is clearly indebted to biblical imagery (twelve mountains as twelve phylai, and perhaps also the sense of a special lineage of Christians exemplified by the blessed genos of the roots of the white mountain), it appropriates this imagery without explicit reference to Jews or Israel. The clearest connection appears in the interpretation of the foundation stones for the tower, from the “certain deep place,” which include the first and second generation of “righteous men” and the “prophets of God”; these biblical figures are not, however, explicitly tied to Israel.

26. This imagery may be an adaptation of the notion of a priestly lineage within Israel (see for example, Lev. 21:7; Josephus, Against Apion 1.30–36). Thanks to Caroline Johnson Hodge for this observation.

27. As we have seen above, Justin also makes an argument for Christians before Christ, using the concept of a lineage produced by the logos spermatikos (2 Apol. 8.1–3; 13.2–6).

28. Clement of Alexandria, for example, uses the image of a symphony to depict diversity within an overarching unity in the logos (Prot. 9.88.2–3). See Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 448.

29. Although possible, such a context need not be limited to the second-century Roman setting that Osiek suggests: “Depending on the date of the final edition of the text, it is possible that Valentinus, Cerdo, Marcion, and Marcellina had all arrived in Rome and were teaching there, as was Justin. References to false, evil, and would-be teachers, and differences with regard to the morality of the flesh indicate theological tensions in the church” (Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 22).

30. Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 88.

31. Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 54 (emphasis in original). Like Stoler’s concept of race, Balibar understands theoretical racism as consisting of “the ideal synthesis of transformation and fixity, or repetition and destiny. The ‘secret,’ the discovery of which it endlessly rehearses, is that of a humanity eternally leaving animality behind and eternally threatened with falling into the grasp of animality. That is why, when it substitutes the signifier of culture for that of race, it has always to attach this to a ‘heritage,’ and ‘ancestry,’ a ‘rootedness,’ all signifiers of the imaginary face-to-face relations between man and his origins” (57). Balibar convincingly argues that, in the discourse of nationalism, this theoretical racism produces both supernationalism and supranationalism or universalism. On the latter, he writes: “there actually is a racist ‘internationalism’ or ‘supranationalism’ which tends to idealize timeless or transhistorical communities such as the ‘Indo-Europeans,’ ‘the West,’ ‘Judaeo-Christian civilization,’ and therefore communities which are at the same time both closed and open, which have no frontiers or whose only frontiers are … ‘internal’ ones, inseparable from the individual individuals themselves or … from their ‘essence.’ In fact these are the frontiers of an ideal humanity. Here the excess of racism over nationalism … stretches it out to the dimensions of an infinite totality” (61–62).

32. This section is adapted from Buell, “Race and Universalism,” 462–464.

33. Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55. I take his use of “men” in this citation as a sign of the gendered limits of this universal ideal even though he does not comment on this point.

34. Ibid., 57; see 56–58.

36. Indeed the very establishment of regionally organized cults was itself a departure from city-run cults, as Steve Friesen writes: “no Greek or Roman cults, either for rulers or for others, had been organized on a regional basis [before the early Augustan period]. The unprecedented spread of such institutions in the second century indicates that new social relationships were in formation.” Steven J. Friesen, Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 144.

37. Cited from Friesen, Twice Neokoros, 151. Translation by Charles Behr, P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 2:96.

38. Friesen, Twice Neokoros, 154–155.

39. Jaś Elsner suggests that it is not only Christians who engage in this kind of resituating (his primary example is Pseudo-Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, but he also extends this to Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana) See “Describing Self in the language of Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the Temple of Hierapolis,” in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159–162. To what extent can we view Christian universalism as a discourse that mimics and refracts imperial discourse and practices in seeking to produce a collective subject-position with alternative universal ideals? Andrew Jacobs suggests that postcolonial theory may shed light on this question. See Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

40. These pursuits paradoxically could potentially confer on one the status of world citizen. For example, see Simon Swain, “Defending Hellenism: Philostratus, In Honour of Apollonius,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price, in association with Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 157–196.

41. For a terrific example of local negotiation of Greekness in Asia Minor, see Antony Spawforth, “Shades of Greekness: a Lydian Case Study,” in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, ed. Irad Malkin (Washington D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies/Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 375–400 (discussed in Chapter 2).

42. Other Christian works would benefit from comparable analysis. For some initial reflections on Justin Martyr’s relationship to strategies employed by inhabitants of Asia Minor, see Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race,” 464–466.

43. See Denise K. Buell, “Ambiguous Legacy: A Feminist Commentary on Clement of Alexandria’s Works,” in The Feminist Companion to Early Gnostic and Patristic Thought, ed. Amy-Jill Levine (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, forthcoming).

44. For example, “Of humans, all are either Greek or barbarian”—a point Clement uses to claim the universality of the Christian God (Strom. 5.133.8). Occasionally, Clement uses the adjective “barbarian” to refer to Christian teachings, but more frequently he insists that Christianity makes barbarians and Greeks into one people (for example, see Strom. 6.159.8–9; Prot. 12.120.2).

45. As I showed in chapter 1, Athenagoras uses this connection between religion and ethnicity to argue that Christians deserve protection under the law to worship their own God, as the Romans grant to other peoples and cities.

46. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:336. For a comprehensive analysis, see J. B. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

47. Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:333.

48. Because Alexandria was viewed as somewhat distinct from the rest of Egypt, I am commenting only on the situation in Alexandria. For the rest of Egypt, while Romans did not abolish the traditional and powerful Egyptian priesthoods, they did establish offices and procedures for regulating and overseeing them. Non-Roman religious practices in Egypt—Judaism, the cult of Sarapis, and the traditional Egyptian religion—each offered a vehicle for resistance to imperial control by standing for a group’s distinctiveness apart from Romanness, not primarily as a means of negotiation with and adaptation to it. Opposition to Roman rule was expressed and interpreted simultaneously as religious and ethnic rebellion in Egypt, as was the case in Judea. The most striking, although tantalizingly brief, account of such a confluence of religion and ethnicity in rebellion against Rome allegedly occurred in 172–173 C.E. Cassius Dio reports an uprising of Egyptian peasants of the upper Nile delta led by an Egyptian priest (Cassio Dio LXXII.4). In addition, there is the well-known Oracle of the Potter, which contains pro-Egyptian and antiforeigner rhetoric couched in religious terms. Beard, North, and Price give examples for Thrace and Gaul as well (Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, 1:347–348).

49. Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 31–32.

50. This paragraph has been adapted from Buell, “Ambiguous Legacy.”

51. See William D. Whitney, “On the So-Called Science of Religion,” Princeton Review (1881): 451: “Christianity belongs in the same class with [religions proceeding from an individual founder: Zoroastrianism, Mohammadanism, and Buddhism], as being an individual and universal religion, growing out of one that was limited to a race” (My emphasis). Also: “Most religions limit themselves to a particular people or nationality, and if they spread and are accepted by other nations, it is as part and parcel of the civilisation to which they belong; but these two alone [Buddhism and Christianity] address themselves, not to a single people, but to all men and to every nation in its own language…. In short, Buddhism and Christianity are universalistic in character, while all other ethical religions are in the main particularistic.” Cornelius P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 1:125–126.

52. In his 1829 Appeal, which was banned in the South, the African-American Bostonian businessman David Walker writes: “Surely the Americans must believe that God is partial, notwithstanding his apostle Peter, declared before Cornelius and other that he has no respect for persons [Acts 10:34–35], but in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted with him…. Have not the Americans the Bible in their hands? Do they believe it? Surely they do not. See how they treat us in open violation of the Bible!!” David Walker, “Excerpts from Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America,” in Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, ed. Milton C. Sernett (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985), 190–191. Slightly later, he continues: “How can preachers and people of America believe the Bible? Does it teach them any distinction on account of a man’s color? Hearken, Americans! To the injunctions of our Lord and Master, to his humble followers: ‘And Jesus came and spake unto them saying, “all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” ’ [Mt. 28: 18, 19, 20]…. Do you understand the above, Americans? We are a people, notwithstanding many of you doubt it.” (194).

To use a more recent example, consider the experiences of Korean-American Christian immigrants to the United States: “A large number of Christian immigrants came to the United States from Asia … and they have built their own Christian communities and sought a fellowship with the existing U.S. Christian establishment by joining their denominations. However, because they are from cultures very different from the dominant U.S. culture, they have received a very cool reception…. The U.S. establishment is not willing to accept culturally different immigrants unless they are totally acculturated into American life. They seem to have forgotten the fact that right from the beginning, the Christian community has been as diverse as twentieth-century America in respect to its cultural mix and ethnic composition…. This early Christian community accepted the cultural and ethnic diversity among its membership as a norm; it accepted ethnically as well as culturally diverse gentile Christians into its fellowship without asking them to follow the religious practice of a particular group. Peter realized that this was God’s intention (referring to Acts 10:1–11:18).” Chan-Hi Kim, “Reading the Cornelius Story from an Asian Immigrant Perspective,” in Reading from this Place, volume 1. Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and MaryAnn Tolbert (Minneapolis; Fortress, 1995), 171–172.

53. For example, see Sze-Kar Wan, “Does Diaspora Identity Imply Some Sort of Universality? An Asian-American Reading of Galatians,” in Interpreting Beyond Borders, ed. Fernando F. Segovia (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 128–129.

54. Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 55; my emphasis.

55. Wan, “Does Diaspora Identity Imply Some Sort of Universality?”, 115.

56. For example, see Scarlett Freund and Teofilo Ruiz, “Jews, Conversos, and the Inquisition in Spain, 1391–1492: The Ambiguities of History,” in Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue, ed. Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 169–195; Sander L. Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 69; and David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 14–16.

57. Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (1933; repr., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 3–16.

58. Thomas M. Finn, From Death to Rebirth: Ritual and Conversion in Antiquity (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1997), 34–35.

59. Ibid., 9, 19, 30, 239.

60. Wayne A. Meeks, First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 77.

61. John Curran, “The Conversion of Rome Revisited,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatex (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000), 8.

63. Other sometimes intersecting strategies include conceptualizing conversion as a change in kinship, status, and philosophical affiliation.

64. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), xvii.

65. Ibid., xvi–xvii.

66. Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud, 69.

68. For a recent discussion of this debate, see Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

69. Shaye Cohen most fully argues for this shift in Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), especially 109–139. See also Thomas Finn, “When the exiles returned from Babylonia (beginning in 539 B.C.E.) and built the second temple, a shift in Israelite identity from ethnicity to religion occurred; a Gentile could become a Jew” (Finn, From Death to Rebirth, 12–13). Casting ethnicity as the fixed “before” category, in which transformation from outsider to insider is either impossible or can only occur through appeals to kinship and shared descent, also appears in some recent arguments about changing definitions of Greekness. Here too, cultural identity serves as the “after,” intended to signal the widening criteria for being defined as Greek in the Hellenistic period. The title of Jonathan Hall’s recent book, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, nuances this claim slightly by suggesting a blurring rather than a sharp break and helpfully locating ethnicity as one aspect of cultural identity. Nonetheless, he argues for a movement in Hellene self-definition from “ethnic” to a greater emphasis on other cultural factors.

70. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness, 109–110.

71. For further analysis of Cohen’s work, see Denise K. Buell, “Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond,” Religious Studies Review 26 (2000): 245–246.

72. Marcel Simon was an early champion of this position (in his Verus Israel), which has been more recently forwarded by Martin Goodman.

73. John North, “Development of Religious Pluralism,” in The Jews Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, ed. Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak (New York: Routledge, 1992), 191.

74. Joshua Levinson, “Bodies and Bo(a)rders: Emerging Fictions of Identity in Late Antiquity,” HTR 93 (2000): 344.

75. Ibid., 345–346.

77. See Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 88. In the latter case, as Regina Schwartz notes, it is attachment to Yahweh that determines membership in a people. This membership is portrayed as mutable—by “attaching” oneself to Yahweh, one can move from being a “foreigner” to one of Yahweh’s people: “Let no foreigner who has attached himself to Yahweh say, ‘Yahweh will surely exclude me from his people.’ … For my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Is. 56:3, 7).

78. Instead of viewing “rebirth” as a metaphorical nod to the “real” thing, why not view the symbolic function of both birth and rebirth in identity and conversion talk as indicating the “fixity” established through change? What one becomes as a result of birth/rebirth can be framed in multiple ways—kin, coreligionist, and member of an ethnoracial group.

79. See Jon D. Levenson’s useful discussion of the different kinds of universalisms that religious traditions formulate. Jon D. Levenson, “The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism,” in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark G. Brett (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 143–145.

80. Byron, Symbolic Blackness, 104–120. See also her clear remarks in the concluding chapter: “No longer is it acceptable to dismiss the possibility that ethnic and color difference played a significant role in … early Christianity” (124). “Assumptions about ethnic groups, geographical locations, and color differences in antiquity influenced the way that early Christians shaped their stories about the theological, ecclesiological, and political developments in their communities. As a result, Egyptians/Egypt, Ethiopians/Ethiopia, and Blacks/blackness became associated with the threats and dangers that could potentially destroy the development of a certain ‘orthodox’ brand of Christianity. In spite of the basic contention that Christianity was to extend to all peoples—even the remote Ethiopians—it is clear that certain groups of Christians were marginalized and rendered invisible and silent through ethnic and color-coded language…. Ethnic and color differences came to symbolize theological, ideological, and political intra-Christian controversies and challenges” (123, emphasis in original).

81. Byron, Symbolic Blackness, 124.

1. See also Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 310.

2. The distinctions among race, ethnicity, nationality, civic identity, and religious identity today are also often blurry, as evidenced in the way that one’s geographical origin or chosen homeplace, one’s nationality, and one’s assigned or claimed race and ethnicity are often interpreted by others (if not also by oneself) as being inextricably linked with a particular religious identity. In the United States, being an American citizen cannot be automatically interpreted in terms of membership in a particular religious community. Nonetheless, many Americans make assumptions about religious affiliation based on one’s name (an O’Malley is likely to be Catholic while an Ahmed is likely to be Muslim), presumed racial or ethnic background (that a French-Canadian is likely to be Catholic), or a combination of geography and presumed ethnoracial identity (that an African American from the Northeast is likely to be Protestant while an African American from New Orleans is likely to be Catholic).

3. Shawn Kelley has diagnosed a comparable problem in the scholarship on the historical Jesus, arguing that “much modern biblical scholarship, influenced by German philosophy (especially by Herder, Hegel, and Heidegger), has functioned within the orbit of völkisch Romanticism, which is a form of aestheticized and racialized nationalism. In other words, much biblical scholarship has implicitly fallen under the sway of Romantic aesthetic ideology of organicity …” Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (New York: Routledge, 2002), 216.

4. Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 233.

5. Ibid., 233–234.

6. See Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), especially 17–102, 195–198.

7. See Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, 199–200. This approach also resembles what Kelley, referencing Derrida, describes as a practice of “double-readings—double-readings of the (racialized) heritage of modernity and double-readings of the biblical text itself” (Kelley, Racializing Jesus, 222).

8. Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002), 123.

9. This is a longstanding theme within African American theology (from early-nineteenth-century voices such as Maria Miller Stewart and David Walker to twentieth-century ones such as Reverdy Ransom and Cornel West) and one with continued relevance (see, for example, Ending Racism in the Churches, ed. Susan E. Davies and Sister Paul Teresa Hennessee [Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1998]).

10. Karen King has argued that one of the major ways in which scholars have rein-scribed early Christian polemical framing devices is to define Christian normativity, heterodoxy, and heresy in relation to Jewishness. “Jewish-Christian” texts are heterodox because they are deemed “too Jewish”; “gnostic” texts are heretical because they are deemed “not Jewish enough” (King, What Is Gnosticism?, 4, 38–47, 175–190). According to this logic, so-called normative or orthodox Christianity, like Goldilocks’s third attempt at eating, sitting, and sleeping, contains just the right proportions of Jewishness. As King has also noted, Christian relations to non-Jewish “others” have also been instrumental for how early Christians defined themselves and how modern scholars classify forms of Christianness. While “Jew” and “Hellene” or “Roman” (and later “pagan”) exemplify “not-Christian” (or potential Christian) in many early Christian texts, so too have scholars labeled as heterodox (especially “gnostic”) forms of Christianness that seem to embody too much Greekness or alleged “pagan” influence. King shows that modern scholars have also defined “gnosticism” in terms of “an outside contamination of pure Christianity” (4), including too much “Hellenistic” influence (55–70) and “oriental” influences (71–109).

11. I do not mean to suggest that the rhetorical functions of ethnic reasoning do not change over time. But I am wary of the claim that in the post-legalization period Christianity becomes a “religion,” defined as a category explicitly separated from “ethnicity and language,” because, like all tales of origins, this claim deflects attention both from the function of telling such a tale and from the complexity of Christian self-definition before and after legalization. See Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 202–206. For Boyarin, one crucial function of locating the origins of “religion” in late fourth- and early fifth-century Christian discourse is to support his argument that the rabbis, in response to Christian self-definition as a religion and its creation of the notion of Jewish orthodoxy in the process, rejected this logic such that “Judaism refused to be, in the end, a religion” (224, emphasis in original). I agree that the concept of “religion” as culturally disembedded is Christian-inflected, but would argue that this notion exists in tension with rhetorical and material practices, including ethnic reasoning.