One of the things that precipitated this book project was a seemingly idle question that came to me once while I was reading Romans 11 and arrived at verse 13: “I am speaking to you gentiles.” What, I wondered, would Paul’s non-Jewish readers have made of this term? People are not naturally inclined to think of themselves as the “other” to someone else’s “us.” It is unlikely that “barbarians” would have found anything appealing in a term being foisted on them by self-congratulatory Greeks; one would expect that non-Jews who were attracted to Christ would have found this Jewish term for the non-Jewish other to be similarly unappealing. Its probable lack of appeal notwithstanding, many gentiles were indeed attracted to the movement; once they had come to identify with Christ, they found themselves in an environment where this identity term was one that they could hardly avoid or ignore. What then did they make of it?
My initial probing of the material suggested that, while the term was not very significant for the most part in the earliest gentile Christian literature, a different picture emerged from the writings of Justin Martyr and other early apologists. Since student days I had been interested in (and frequently appalled by) the adversus Judaeos tradition of the early gentile church, and so I had some awareness of the place of the term ethnē—gentiles, (members of) the non-Jewish nations—in these arguments against the Jews. Coming at the material again from this particular angle, however, I was struck by both the sheer frequency of the term and its evident importance for the apologetic enterprise—not only for the troublesome question of how the gentile church might position itself with respect to Israel, the Jews, and Judaism, but also for their attempts to address Greco-Roman opinion makers more generally. These initial impressions led me to believe that a more thoroughgoing investigation was in order.
While this project built on my earlier work in a number of ways, it also led me into a number of areas where I could claim no special expertise (including ethnicity, social identity theory, postcolonialism, Greco-Roman ethnography, Roman imperial ideology, and ante-Nicene Christian literature to a certain extent). In an early conversation about the project with a respected senior scholar, I expressed some apprehension about the challenges it presented. His response stuck with me: “Don’t be afraid of heading into less familiar territory,” he told me; “that’s how you learn things.”
In the time since then, I have certainly learned a great deal. To be sure, specialists in these various areas will readily recognize the limits to my knowledge. In addition, since the parameters of the study encompass a broad array of ancient literature (Jewish, Greco-Roman, Christian), I have not been able to engage with the correspondingly broad array of pertinent secondary literature to the extent that would have been possible in a more circumscribed study. Nevertheless, despite these limits and constraints, I feel that because of the specific focus of the project—ethnē as an identity term—and because of the work I have already done in related areas, this book has some contribution to make to our understanding. Of course, it will fall to others to assess its value.
During the years in which I was engaged in this project, I had various opportunities to present aspects of my work in academic settings: in papers presented at the annual meetings of scholarly societies (Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Society of Biblical Literature, Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas); in invited lectures or papers at several institutions (Barnard College, University of Toronto, McMaster University, Baylor University); and, during a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, in papers presented in established seminars (New Testament Seminar; Hebrew, Jewish, Early Christian Studies Seminar). I am grateful to the organizers and conveners of these various sessions for the opportunity to share aspects of my research in progress. I also want to express my appreciation for the critical interaction that took place in these sessions and for those whose questions, comments, and learned critique helped to sharpen my own thinking in significant ways. Closer to home, students in my graduate seminar “Early Christian Self-Definition” have had the opportunity to read several chapters of the book, along with related papers, and have made their own contributions to the book in its final form.
My early thinking about this project was facilitated by a sabbatical cum administrative leave in 2011–12, eight months of which were spent at the University of Cambridge. The completion of this project provides me with another opportunity to express my thanks to Wycliffe College and the Toronto School of Theology for granting me this period of sustained research and reflection. I am also grateful to the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge for granting me a visiting fellowship, and especially to James Carleton Paget, Judith Lieu, and William Horbury for their assistance, hospitality, and various kindnesses. Thanks are also due to Clare Hall—a wonderful institution for visiting scholars—for accommodation and the chance to interact with a diverse and stimulating group of scholars and graduate students from around the world.
During this period, my work on this project was also supported and enhanced by two research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2009–13 and 2015–19), for which I am also grateful. Among other things, this funding allowed me to hire several research assistants—Adam Panacci, David Ney, Mari Leesment, and Bruce Worthington—who provided invaluable help, especially by carrying out preliminary surveys of primary literature. Bruce also checked all the primary and secondary references in chapters 1 through 6, thus relieving me of a lot of tedious work and saving me from a number of errors in the process. Any that remain, of course, need to be added to my account.
In addition, I want to express my appreciation to the staff at Eerdmans for their fine work at every stage of the process: to Michael Thomson, who sought me out when the project was in its early stages and provided continuing support in his regular visits to Toronto; to Trevor Thompson, who succeeded Michael as senior acquisitions editor and who accepted a manuscript that was considerably longer and somewhat later than was first envisioned; to Linda Bieze, who as project editor has guided the manuscript through the editorial and production stages with a sure hand; to Justin Howell, who as copy editor has helped me identify some imperfections and thus produce a more polished final version; and to Laura Hubers, who has overseen the design of the cover (with its effective use of the Peutinger Map) and the marketing material.
For support of a quite different kind, I am deeply grateful to my immediate family: to Lois first of all, my wife and life partner, for her unfailing wisdom, resourcefulness, support, and love; to our adult children Meredith (with her husband David) and Graeme (with his wife Amanda), for the many ways in which they enrich our lives; and to our grandchildren, Iver, Florence, and Elsie, for reawakening us to the joys of discovery and the wonder of the world.
Finally, I am dedicating this book to two of my early mentors, Larry Hurtado (in memoriam) and Richard Longenecker. Larry supervised my first piece of sustained research—a master’s thesis on Matthew’s Gospel and anti-Judaism—and taught me a great deal about Christian origins and the nature of research in the process. Dick, my doctoral supervisor, stimulated my interest in Second Temple Judaism and introduced me to ways of looking at early Christianity with Jewish questions in view. In different ways I learned a great deal from both of them and both continued to represent important models for me as I followed my own scholarly career.
Small portions drawn from the following articles and chapters have been adapted for reuse in the present work:
“‘We Gentiles’: Ethnicity and Identity in Justin’s Dialogue,” Early Christianity 4 (2013): 216–41. Incorporated material appears in chapters 1 and 7.
“‘Gentile Christianity’ as a Category in the Study of Christian Origins,” in Harvard Theological Review 106 (2013), 433–58. Incorporated material appears in chapter 3.
“Paul, Abraham’s Gentile ‘Offspring’ and the Torah,” in Torah Ethics and Early Christian Identity, ed. David M. Miller and Susan Wendel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 135–50. Incorporated material appears in chapter 3.
“‘Nations,’ ‘Non-Jewish Nations’ or ‘Non-Jewish Individuals’: Matt 28:19 Revisited,” in Matthew within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel, ed. Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner, Early Christianity and Its Literature (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 169–94. Incorporated material appears in chapters 3 and 4.
This material has been reused with the permission of the respective publishers, for which I am grateful.