Why do we need another book on early Christian self-definition? Many excellent studies already argue that early Christians defined themselves using a range of categories and strategies, comparing themselves with philosophical schools, households, other Jews, and modes of government. These studies all insist on interpreting early articulations of who and what Christians are in their specific historical, cultural, and political settings.
In part, this book is a variation on such studies. Scant attention has been paid to the ways that Christians defined themselves in terms of larger corporate collectives, which have been variously called “ethnic groups,” “races,” or “nations” (“barbarian,” “gentile,” as well as Greek, Roman, Jew, Egyptian, etc.). I call this mode of self-definition “ethnic reasoning.” Early Christians developed ethnic self-comparisons in relation to other kinds of self-comparisons, including familial and civic ones. Ethnic reasoning helps us to explain early Christian self-definition in ways that contribute to current scholarly attempts to rethink both how we understand the relationship between “Christians” and “Jews” in Roman antiquity and how we understand early Christian participation in ancient ways of thinking about identity and difference.
But I do not merely seek to situate early Christians more fully in their ancient context. By itself, this goal is problematic because it does not ask how the interpreter knows when (or that) she understands the ancient context and how she makes sense of materials from a different time and place. To address this concern, I also turn the spotlight on the interpretive framework. In my view, contemporary methodological as well as sociopolitical circumstances help to explain the reasons why most historians steer clear of speaking about “ethnicity” with respect to early Christians and strongly resist the applicability of “race” for antiquity overall. The presuppositions and frameworks that continue to dominate mainstream reconstructions of Christian origins have both racist and anti-Jewish consequences—even when interpreters explicitly seek to avoid these consequences.1 We need to change our ways of thinking about early Christian history, which means also changing our ways of thinking about what race, ethnicity, and religion are.
At the same time, my methodological and sociopolitical commitments also condition the possibilities for and importance of interpreting some forms of early Christian imagination and practice as “ethnic reasoning.” I argue that by strategically using the modern categories of race and ethnicity to speak about early Christian self-definition, we will be better able to resolve a problematic paradox in the way these concepts have informed historical reconstructions of early Christians. Specifically, I challenge the view that ethnicity and race were irrelevant to early Christians—an argument that has been used to accomplish important modern antiracist work yet relies on and perpetuates anti-Judaism in the process. To support an interpretation of Christianity that can help end both racism and anti-Judaism, I revisit scholarship and early Christian texts that destabilize the prevailing view that Christian universalism can be understood as mutually exclusive with “particularity”—a split that is often correlated with the nonethnic/ ethnic binary.
In sharing drafts of this project, I regularly encountered two kinds of responses, both of which underscore the point that studying early Christian history and self-definition has much contemporary relevance. To paraphrase the first kind of response: “Why has no one said this before? It seems so obvious now.” This suggests that my argument emerges out of and seems useful for tackling issues perceived to be of pressing concern today, especially regarding Christian anti-Judaism (in the past and present) and the complicated ways that Christianity has been shaped both to resist and be complicit with racism, especially in North America.
The second kind of response is quite different: “Why on earth are you using the category of ‘race’?” European respondents in particular have viewed this as a highly problematic recuperation of a category that is spurious, has caused too much death and suffering already, and is anyway a modern concept. North American responses in this vein tend to emphasize the last factor, its modernity. I am not naïve about the modernity of the concept. It is no coincidence that it is race, not other modern concepts central to this book—ethnicity and religion—that evokes the strongest reaction. This selective response indicates how loaded “race” remains in our current lives. Far from seeking to rehabilitate the concept, I use it precisely because of the damage this modern concept has wrought and continues to wreak. If we want to get beyond race, we have to grapple with how it informs historical interpretation even when it is excluded. By provocatively using race interchangeably with ethnicity in this book, I am challenging readers to be accountable to the terms we use for interpreting cultural differences in antiquity.
To understand the elusive but entrenched presence of race in contemporary scholarly models, we need to cultivate a prismatic vision that can reimagine the relevance of race and ethnicity to ancient articulations of Christianness in light of the continued political, social, ideological, and theological challenges posed by modern racism and anti-Judaism.2 To aim for diffraction in how one sees—to see prismatically—is to value the production of patterns of difference and to resist the “false choice between realism and relativism.”3 By taking into account not just our own social and ideological locations and the early Christian texts under consideration but also the history and locatedness of the fields in which we work, we move from a double vision (now versus then) to at least a triple vision. That is, we need to modulate between a critical consideration of the present, for how our commitments and social location condition our historical analyses; of the recent historical past, for how it has shaped and constrained both our interpretive frameworks and our present commitments; and of the ancient historical period in which early Christian texts were produced, to gauge their interests and constraints. This approach builds on Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s call to develop an “ethics of interpretation” and her analysis that embraces “the rhetoric of interpretation in the present and the rhetoric of interpretation in the past.”4 In so doing, we can recognize how the practices of historical interpretation have implications for the present and evaluate their adequacy both in terms of the limits of the material under consideration and in terms of the approach used to make sense of this material.
I bring together a range of scholarship where related but often independent conversations are taking place (contemporary feminist theory, critical race theory, cultural anthropology, postcolonial theory, Jewish studies, ancient history, classical studies, as well as the study of religion). These fields all include scholars who attend to the relation of self/other and relations of power, often with explicit aims for transforming how we think (if not also how we live). For example, a recent work in classics offers a perspective that resembles aspects of Schüssler Fiorenza’s complex approach. Simon Goldhill argues that studies of ancient “Greekness” tell us more about the fluidity and complexity of both scholarly method and cultural identity than about the precise content of Greekness:
There have always been writers, ancient and modern, who have thought that there is an essence of Greekness. That there is evident and wholesale disagreement about what such an essence is, makes it easy enough, these days, to concede that the idea of Greekness is differently constructed by different writers in different eras (including in ancient Greece). But that cautious relativism has far-reaching implications for contemporary historians, who cannot help finding their own reconstructions of those differences becoming part of the history being related…. Especially on a topic like ‘cultural identity,’ the historian’s narration has to go back and forth between present and past, like a weaver’s shuttle, to make up a picture.5
Contemporary discussions about early Christian self-definition are also linked with questions of cultural identity in the present. The classification of Christianity in relation to modern categories like religion, nation, race, or ethnicity does not tell us what the essence of Christianity is. This insight about the complex interrelation of interpreter to interpreted has been voiced in a number of earlier forms, from early hermeneutics to contemporary feminist and postcolonial theory. The latter two kinds of critical stances differ from Goldhill’s perspective because feminist and postcolonial critics insist that attention to the complexity and fluidity of historical analysis and cultural identities requires us to go beyond a recognition of one’s own role in reconstruction to the defense of particular, historically specific interpretations. In other words, it is possible not only to acknowledge the specificity and limitations of one’s interpretation, but also to advocate for it—even provisionally—on the basis of its particular, contingent implications for the present and future.
As a historian of early Christianity, I am convinced that the way we retell the origins of Christianity matters for those struggling for racial justice and for overcoming anti-Judaism in the present. This claim builds upon traditions of abolitionist, civil rights, and Jewish-Christian dialogue in America. But I am insisting that we need to bring together two kinds of discussions that have largely been kept distinct: discussions about the relationship between Jewishness and Christianness and discussions about the relationship between Christianity and race, which in America especially has been dominated by a black/white binary.6 In so doing, I question the value of distinguishing ethnicity from race and assess how the present informs historical analysis.7
I am equally concerned to show why those interested in Christian origins need to consider questions of race and ethnicity more thoroughly than we have and how both scholarship and activism can benefit from doing so. This call is directed primarily to mainstream theology and historical scholarship on Christianity, which still has much to gain from the challenges and visions offered by voices marginalized by ideology and/or social location.8
I offer an interpretation of early Christian strategies of self-definition that resonates both with ancient interpretations of cultural difference and modern ones. My hope is that contemporary readers will find this interpretation valuable for rethinking the metaphors and methods that continue to influence reconstructions of early Christianness and for rethinking how to grapple with ongoing efforts to address Christian anti-Judaism and racism. If future generations of readers find that this project no longer speaks to their contemporary situation, I hope it will be because we will have transformed our world for the better.
This book would not have been possible without generous support, encouragement, and sometimes prodding from many people and institutions. I owe a great debt to my teachers John Gager, Bernadette Brooten, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza for the ways they sparked my thinking about Christian anti-Judaism and its implications for historical analysis. My colleague Denise McCoskey helped enormously in the early phases of imagining how and why we need to bring critical race theory into conversation with antiquity. There is no substitute for colleagues and friends who understood what I was attempting and pushed me in just the right ways. Caroline Johnson Hodge, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, and Laura Muench-Nasrallah know this project from the inside out; one could not ask for better friends (and colleagues). Special thanks for enthusiasm, support, and valuable feedback to: Gay Byron, Elizabeth Castelli, Karen King, Wendy Lochner, Larry Wills, and my anonymous reader from Columbia University Press.
I was able to benefit from feedback on specific portions of the book-in-progress, thanks to opportunities to present my work at Colgate University, Harvard Divinity School, and Occidental College, as well as the North American Patristics Society, the American Philological Association, and the Society for Biblical Literature. More intimate settings also provided timely and valuable input; for this, I warmly thank all the participants in the Brown University Seminar on Culture and Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World, the Models of Piety in Late Antiquity Group, the Boston Patristics Group, and the Oakley Faculty Seminar on Martyrdom in the Ancient Mediterranean World at Williams College.
Much of my early writing was made possible by the support and community of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where I held a fellowship in 2000 and 2001; Cathy Silber, Francesca Sawaya, Augusta Rohrbach, and Lisa Herschbach, fellow members of an intrepid writing group, valiantly read early versions of a number of chapters. An additional semester’s leave from Williams College allowed me to maintain my writing momentum at a crucial time. Ideas in the book have appeared in two earlier articles: “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity”9 and “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition.”10 Thanks to the journals for permission to reprint portions of the articles here.
