As has been indicated, I propose to carry out my investigation into the construction of early gentile Christian identity in conversation with three contiguous fields of discourse: the historical process commonly described as the “parting of the ways”; the social-scientific study of ethnicity and identity; and the dynamics of identity construction in the Roman Empire.
Questions about the development of a distinct identity among gentile Christ-believers in the first two or three centuries after Christ inevitably spill over into questions about what has often been described as the parting of the ways—the process by which “Christianity” emerged from its Jewish matrix and became recognizably distinct from “Judaism.” By the time Judaism and Christianity had become distinct socioreligious entities—that is, by the time it becomes appropriate to remove the quotation marks from the terms—the group that identified itself as Christianity was ethnically non-Jewish. Further, as we have seen, this group was prepared to identify itself also as gentile; we Christians were also we gentiles. Thus one cannot ask about the development of gentile Christian identity without also asking about the parting of the ways; the one is a significant aspect of the other.
To be sure, the two sets of questions cannot simply be collapsed into one without remainder. For one thing, presumably it is possible to speak of a distinct sense of identity among groups of gentile believers in the early stages of the movement, when the phenomenon of Christ-belief was still perceived on all sides as existing within a Jewish context. For another, even when gentile Christianity had emerged as a distinct entity, sociologically distinct from the Jewish world and characterized by its own developing institutional structures, the ways had certainly not yet fully parted for those various groups of Jewish Christ-believers who continued to identify themselves in some manner with the world of Judaism. In addition, as we have already seen, gentile Christian identity formation also involved a negotiation with patterns of identity found within the larger Greco-Roman world. While this negotiation inevitably had to address questions about the relationship between the Christian movement and the Jewish world in which it originated, its scope was certainly larger than this. Nevertheless, the two processes—the development of gentile Christian identity and the parting of the ways—overlap and intertwine significantly. To pursue our question, then, it will be important to situate it with respect to this related process.
The parting of the ways is generally understood as referring to a construction of Christian origins that was widely adopted in the years after the Second World War and has remained dominant until relatively recently. Perhaps the earliest occurrence of the term was in James Parkes’s 1934 book The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue.1 The occurrence was not incidental; Parkes’s work was in many ways a precursor of the later approach. As an Anglican priest involved in Continental relief work after World War I, Parkes became puzzled and disturbed by the pervasive and deeply rooted strains of anti-Semitism that he encountered in Christian Europe. His attempts to discern “the causes of anti-Semitism” led him eventually to the adversus Judaeos tradition of the early church fathers, an anti-Judaic construction that (as he perceived the process) emerged in the work of the second-century apologists just as the separation between Judaism and Christianity had become complete.2 “The Parting of the Ways” appears as the title of the chapter in which he traces this process of separation—from the death of Paul, at which point “Christianity was still a Jewish sect,” to “the middle of the second century,” when it had become “a separate religion busily engaged in apologetics to the Greek and Roman world, and anxious to establish its antiquity, respectability and loyalty.”3
Parkes’s work is marked by many of the features that came to characterize the later approach: a concern to provide a sympathetic portrayal of first-century Judaism;4 an emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus and the early church;5 a recognition of both the vitality and the diversity of first-century Judaism, together with a belief that the early Christians need to be seen as constituting a group or movement within a variegated Judaism;6 the significant role in the parting of the ways played by the wars with Rome in 66–70 and 132–35 CE,7 which resulted in the end of the temple-centered Jewish state, the emergence of Pharisaism/rabbinism as the dominant form of Judaism, and the resultant concern to define the boundaries of the Jewish community more narrowly and sharply; the success of the gentile mission as the other most significant factor in the separation of Christianity from its Jewish matrix; the creation of various measures of exclusion (the Birkat Haminim, official letters), by which Jewish Christians were pushed to the margins and beyond the boundaries;8 the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt as the date by which the separation can be said to be complete;9 on the Christian side, the development of an anti-Jewish interpretation of Scripture and recent history by which it defended its claim to be the true Israel and the inheritor of all that was of value in Israel’s tradition;10 and the significance of this adversus Judaeos tradition for the subsequent development of anti-Semitism within the Christian world, whose main roots thus need to be found in Christian apologetic and theology, rather than (say) in negative Greco-Roman attitudes toward Jews and Judaism.11
The significance of Parkes’s work can readily be seen in its contrast with earlier constructions of the process, which all too often have been fraught with theological assumptions, ideological agendas, triumphalistic historiography (especially on the Christian side of things), and apologetics in the guise of scholarship (on both sides).12 Here we must content ourselves with some broad characterizations rather than anything like a thorough account. In the spirit of Parkes’s parting of the ways, it will be convenient to use other spatial imagery as a way of constructing a rudimentary typology.
The first two categories to be identified represent approaches that received their classical formulation in the early centuries of the Christian movement and, in their unreconstructed forms, continued to represent dominant Christian belief up to the beginning of the modern period, when the emergence of more critical biblical and historical scholarship led to new approaches.13 The more widespread of the two is centered on the idea of replacement, a model in which something seen to be defective or outmoded is replaced by something better. As we have had occasion to see already, this model was essential for Eusebius, who understands Christ to have revealed and brought into being the true form of religion, a form of religion that replaced the law of Moses, which had had a certain preparatory role to play both in warning Israel away from polytheistic error and in pointing ahead by means of “symbols and shadows” to the realities of Christ. This model was by no means unique to Eusebius, of course; as Parkes has shown, it represented the “official attitude to Judaism” that was hammered out in the adversus Judaeos tradition of the early centuries of the movement. This model is often described today as supersessionism, a term that originally was used in a positive sense by Christian apologists but increasingly functions as a negative characterization of the model.14 In this approach, the destruction of the temple and the resultant dispersion of the Jews is taken as a divine demonstration of the supersession—either as bringing the temple-centered old covenant to an end, or as punishment for the sin of rejecting the Messiah, or both.15 With respect to the emergence of gentile Christianity—which, along with the destruction of the temple, figures prominently in parting-of-the-ways approaches—the non-Jewish character of the church is virtually axiomatic in this approach. The emphasis falls on the rejection of the Jews and their replacement by the Christians, seen as the new Israel but assumed without question to be non-Jewish.
The concept of supersession or replacement, however, concedes a certain positive value to the entity that is being superseded or replaced, something that Christian proponents have often been reluctant to do. Again, as we have seen, Eusebius, for example, made a distinction between Jews, on the one hand, and the Hebrews, on the other. Jews and Judaism were characterized by the law of Moses, which, except for its value as symbolic prophecy, had the purely negative role of curbing the polytheistic excesses that the descendants of Jacob/Israel picked up in Egypt. The Hebrews, by contrast, a group that comprised the patriarchs of Genesis and the spiritual heroes of the Old Testament, were in effect Christians before Christ, in that they recognized the truth of monotheistic worship from the outset and, later, perceived the true symbolic meaning of the Scriptures. Rather than constituting new Israel, the church in this construction represented true Israel, a form of religion or belief that existed from the beginning and that could readily be differentiated from the Jews or “Israel according to the flesh.” The official attitude to Judaism contained a strain, then, that construed the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in more antithetical terms; one might describe it as an antipodal model.16 Within proto-orthodox forms of Christianity and consequently up to the modern period, the antipodal model coexisted (somewhat awkwardly) with replacement approaches.
Under the impact of the Enlightenment and the emergence of historical-critical forms of scholarship, other models appeared. The architects of these historical-critical reconstructions of early Christianity usually saw their work as representing a sharp departure from the dogmatic approaches of an earlier period—and so it was, in many ways. At the same time, however, looking back on the period with our postmodern sensibilities, we can also perceive the extent to which these new models also represent versions of the replacement and antipodal models, albeit transposed into a historical key and covered with a thin veneer of supposed objectivity.
In one common model, Christianity and Judaism are understood in essentialist terms, the essences in question being non-ethnic universalism and ethnic particularism. Although Christianity emerged from within Judaism, its genius (so this model assumes) was the recognition that religion was not to be confined within ethnic boundaries and tied to specific cultic sites and practices, but instead, to use the language of F. C. Baur, was to be “placed in a freer, more universal, and purely spiritual sphere, where the absolute importance which Judaism had claimed till then was at once obliterated.”17 Baur himself provides the image of a breakthrough—Christianity by virtue of its essential character being able to break through the limiting walls of Judaism in order to become a wider, universal religion:
How these bounds were broken through, how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism, although a progressive one, asserted itself as a separate, independent principle, broke loose from it and took its stand as a new enfranchised form of religious thought and life, essentially different from all the national peculiarities of Judaism is the ultimate, most important point of the primitive history of Christianity.18
While Baur’s reconstruction was built on the foundations of German Idealism, the idea of a breakthrough from ethnic particularism to unrestricted universalism is a model that is much more widely distributed within modern scholarship.
Overlapping to a certain extent but placing more emphasis on aspects of Israel’s past is an approach that sees Christianity as the continuation of one side of a bifurcation already present within Judaism. One might think of this as a historicized adaptation of the antipodal model. The classical liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, often sought biblical underpinnings for itself by positing the presence within the religion of Israel of two antithetical movements—one priestly and cultic, the other prophetic and ethical. For Walter Rauschenbusch, although the two movements “[grew] side by side, on the same national soil and from the same historic convictions, … they are two distinct and antagonistic religions.” Needless to say, in his view, the religion of Jesus, properly understood, is a continuation of the prophetic form.19 Harnack’s reconstruction of first-century Judaism, in which it appears as an entity divided between the fierce nationalism of the Maccabees and their spiritual successors (apocalypticists, Zealots, Shammai), on the one hand, and the universalistic spirit of second Isaiah and his successors, on the other (Hellenistic Judaism, diaspora missionary activity, Philo, Hillel, etc.), is another example.20 Once again, Jesus, together with most of his disciples and followers, represent the continuation of the more progressive stream (though proponents of this approach often portray their own contemporary opponents as latter-day manifestations of the other side of the bifurcation).
Bifurcation models could be constructed by drawing different lines of demarcation, however. Albert Schweitzer, for example, who strongly criticized many of the Idealist reconstructions of his teachers, nevertheless carried out his own reconstruction on the basis of an equally bifurcated view of Judaism. In his case, the line was to be drawn between the legalism of the rabbis and the eschatology of the apocalyptic movement. In his vivid and inimitable style, he contrasts the “green and fresh” grass of the apocalyptic writers with the “yellow wilted grass” on a “sun-scorched plain” that we find in the rabbinic writings.21 In works of enduring significance despite their idiosyncratic elements, he locates both Jesus and Paul within the supposedly lush fields of apocalyptic and thus portrays early Christianity, in its best and early manifestations, as the continuation of one of these two streams that flowed through the Jewish world of the first century.22
In his work on Paul, Schweitzer sets himself in opposition to approaches that would understand Paul, and the gentile churches that he founded, as representing a translation of early Christian preaching into the thought forms and religious patterns of the Hellenistic world. He concedes that this was something that occurred eventually, though he laments the development.23 In the work of those he opposes, however—history-of-religions scholars and others—we find an additional model, one that sees emergent Christianity as the confluence of two streams, one flowing from the terrain of Judaism, the other from the Hellenistic world. In some history-of-religions approaches, most notably Bultmann’s synthesis of a number of earlier developments, a significant role is assigned to an already-existing hellenized form of Judaism, through which Hellenistic ideas flowed into early Christianity. Here we can see an interweaving of two models—that of a bifurcation within Judaism and that of a confluence of Jewish and Hellenistic streams. Purer forms of the confluence model exist, however. In Otto Pfleiderer’s reconstruction of Paul’s religion, for example, he identifies two distinct patterns of thought and influence—one drawn from his Pharisaic background; the other, emerging after his conversion and, more influential, drawn from the Hellenistic world.24 The model appears in a particularly striking form in an essay by W. R. Inge.25 Modifying Clement of Alexandria’s description of Christianity as “a river which receives tributaries from all sides,” he argues instead that there are only two, and these utterly dissimilar:
Catholic Christianity was the result of the confluence of two great streams, which differed in their origin and in the color of their water more widely than the Rhone and the Saône, or than the White and the Blue Niles. These two streams, the Semitic and the European, the Jewish and the Greek, still mingle their water in the turbid flood which constitutes the institutional religion of civilized humanity; but to this day the waters flow side by side in the same bed, perfectly recognizable—so alien are the two types to each other.26
Though he sees the Greek tributary as the larger (and clearly the more desirable) of the two, they have continued to coexist, primarily because Christ himself “was above the antithesis.”27
In contrast to the situation in more recent decades, Jewish scholarship in the period prior to Parkes played a much smaller part in any general scholarly discussion of Christian origins. Painting with a broad brush, however, one might say that Jewish scholars who were engaged in wider discussion (e.g., Claude Montefiore and Joseph Klausner) tended to see the emergence of Christianity as a small sideroad branching off from a main thoroughfare, which then became a separate thoroughfare of its own once it entered gentile territory. In other words, the tendency was to see a contrast between a dominant form of Judaism, which eventually became “normative” in the rabbinic period,28 and a marginal Jewish movement that became successful once it moved into the wider non-Jewish world. The primary early traveler on the sideroad, of course, was Paul, the apostle to the gentiles. While scholars such as Montefiore and Klausner may have been prepared to see Jesus more favorably—as one who never left the main thoroughfare at all—in their view of Paul, they differ very little from many of their predecessors.29 Because Paul grew up in the diaspora rather than in Judea, he was shaped by an inferior form of Judaism and thus failed in essential ways to understand Jewish life and religion in its purer and more vibrant form. For the same reason, however, he was culturally well positioned to transmute early beliefs about Jesus into a form that would appeal to gentiles.30
When seen against this background, then, the newness of Parkes’s more soberly historical and less patently self-serving parting of the ways can be clearly seen. To be sure, he was in a sense ahead of his time. His work was overshadowed by subsequent factors—the Second World War of course, the storm-clouds of which were already appearing on the horizon as his book was published; then after the war, the shattering impact of the Holocaust, as Christian scholars in particular came to recognize the anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism that characterized much Christian tradition and scholarship; and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which precipitated a reassessment of Judaism in the Second Temple period and beyond, with normative Judaism giving way to reconstructions that emphasized diversity and variegation. Such factors had the effect of spurring scholars to wrestle with a set of questions very similar to those that had driven Parkes’s earlier work, though in a significantly different context. While their own work produced results very similar to those of Parkes, these were determined more by the subsequent factors than by the direct influence of Parkes’s own work, even though his descriptive phrase has come into common use.31 Other phrases and images have been used with the same intent, especially those involving strained familial relationships.32
Speaking in broad terms, it is no exaggeration to say that the parting-of-the-ways model has in large measure provided the conceptual framework for the study of Christian origins since the middle of the last century (even if the framework has left considerable room for variation and for debate over specific points).33 In recent years, however, there has been increasing reexamination and questioning of the model itself.
For one thing, while the model is appealing for its apparent impartiality and historical evenhandedness, these appearances may well mask significant theological and ideological assumptions. The issue is not simply that none of the ancient participants would have understood themselves to be parting ways with former cotravelers on a single road. There is a place, after all, for etic analysis—scholarly constructions that are brought in from outside to help gain insight into a particular cultural situation but that do not correspond to the terms and categories of insiders (emic analysis).34 The issue, rather, is that, by assuming two more or less homogeneous entities—rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity—the model serves the interests of normative forms of two contemporary religions, especially those aspects of each that are interested in interreligious dialogue. In the words of Reed and Becker, the model functions as “a reassuringly ecumenical etiology of the religious differences between present-day Christians and Jews.”35 Not that historically informed interreligious dialogue is something to be resisted, of course. But the model almost necessarily downplays diversity, not only before the ways have parted (where the idea of diversity has a certain role to play) but especially after. The continuing existence of various forms of Jewish Christianity; the vitality of various heterodox Christian groups; the continuation of vigorous but nonrabbinic Jewish communities in the diaspora; the increasing evidence for ongoing interaction and overlap between members of churches and synagogues into the fourth century (at least), well after the parting had supposedly been complete—all such phenomena are necessarily marginalized in a two-ways construal of history. By the same token, taking such phenomena more fully into account serves to destabilize the structures of the model itself.36
Related to this are various questions that have been raised about the need to differentiate between reality and rhetoric in the interpretation of textual evidence. In appealing to second- or third-century texts that seem to suggest a definitive parting (e.g., Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus on the Christian side; the Mishnah on the Jewish), many interpreters (it has been argued) have failed to recognize the extent to which the proponents of what came to be the normative definitions were not simply reflecting social realities but instead were engaged in rhetorical attempts to define and impose them. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, for example, should not be seen as a straightforward interchange across a well-established boundary between Christianity and Judaism but as an attempt to impose clear boundaries on disputed territory where social definitions and distinctions were in reality much more fluid. The differentiation between rhetoric and reality has been part of the discussion of early Christian history from the time of Walter Bauer and his seminal work on orthodoxy and heresy,37 but more recently it has become an issue with respect to the parting of the ways. Boyarin, for example, has argued that instead of “a natural-sounding ‘parting of the ways,’ such as we usually hear about with respect to these two ‘religions,’” we should think instead of “an imposed partitioning of what was once a territory without border lines,” the partition being imposed by Christian and rabbinic “heresiologists” alike.38
Boyarin takes his critique one step further, however. He argues that the image of two diverging but analogous ways not only privileges the forms of Judaism and Christianity that ultimately became normative but also does so by forcing Judaism to conform to an inappropriate category—religion—which itself is a Christian construct: “[T]he difference between Christianity and Judaism is not so much a difference between two religions as a difference between a religion and an entity that refuses to be one.”39 For Boyarin, the idea of a religion—a group characterized not by traditional categories such as class or ethnicity but by structures of belief—was something that emerged in the second century in the context of a Christian struggle for identity and self-definition. By treating Christianity and Judaism as two forms of the same species, then, the parting-of-the-ways model both imposes a Christian category on Judaism and obscures the extent to which this category was an entirely “new thing, a community defined by adherence to a certain canon of doctrine and practice.”40 For Boyarin, this new identity was a distinctly gentile Christian construction. We will return to this aspect of his work in a few moments, but for the present it provides us with an opportunity to look more generally at the place of gentile Christianity in parting-of-the-ways discourse.
In some of the older essentialist models discussed above, in which Christianity was understood to be categorically distinct from Judaism in its very essence, its existence as a gentile phenomenon was almost a categorical necessity. If Christianity represented a replacement of Judaism, or its antipodal opposite, or a breaking through the boundaries of an ethnic religion, then it was non-Jewish in its essence and thus could continue only as a gentile phenomenon. A defining element of the parting-of-the-ways model, however, is that the ways diverge only over time and through a process of historical development. In this model, the emergence of gentile Christianity is to be seen as a contingent aspect of a process, not a necessary manifestation of a fundamental essence. Furthermore, even if some aspects of the model have been subjected to critique, the more fundamental assumption of a developing process has remained intact.
There is variation, however, concerning the significance of gentile Christianity in the process. To be sure, there is general agreement about the end result: once the ways had fully parted, the Christian way was almost entirely a gentile phenomenon. But differences are apparent with respect to the role played by gentile Christianity in the parting itself. One option has been to see the inclusion of gentiles as a categorical cause for the eventual separation. That is, the decision to admit gentiles as gentiles into membership in the community of Christ-believers constituted a decisive step across the boundary that defined the Jewish community, even if it would take a while for the implications of the step to become fully manifest. Bauckham, for example, argues that, since gentiles were categorically excluded from the full participation in temple worship, a group that included gentiles as gentiles in its membership could not remain indefinitely within the boundaries of Judaism. “The temple was the greatest, the most meaningful boundary marker between Jew and Gentile”; thus to grant full membership to gentiles without requiring them to become Jews was to take a step that would be “in the end decisive for the parting of the ways.”41
Another view, perhaps the dominant one, is to see gentile Christianity not as a categorical cause but rather as an effective cause for the eventual parting of the ways. That is, as long as Jewish Christ-believers themselves continued to observe the torah faithfully and as long as the population of gentile believers remained small, the inclusion of gentiles did not in itself effect any fundamental parting. Many synagogues, after all, had their own circle of gentile adherents and sympathizers. But the success of Paul’s mission among the gentiles, his reputation as one who encouraged Jewish believers to abandon torah observance (cf. Acts 21:20–21) and, more generally, the eventual demographic shift from Jewish to gentile membership had the combined effect of making the separation inevitable. As Himmelfarb puts it in her description of the parting of the ways:
Had Paul never appeared on the scene, the Jerusalem church, so Jewish in its piety, might have remained a variety of Judaism. But Paul’s mission to the Gentiles radically altered the demographic balance of early Christianity against the Jerusalem community…. What is more, Paul’s mission to the Gentiles involved a rejection of the Torah.42
A third assessment of the place of gentile Christianity is to see it not as a cause but as a result of the parting of the ways. In Segal’s view, for example, “[o]nce the communities of Judaism and Christianity had separated, … Christianity slowly became a church of Gentiles.”43 Although Segal sees Paul’s gentile mission as a factor in the separation, in his view the demographic shift from Jew to gentile was more a result than a cause.
My particular interest here, however, has to do with gentile identity and self-definition. Throughout this whole process (however it may be characterized), how did gentile believers come to conceive of their own identity, especially with respect to the identity imposed on them from the Jewish side—namely, that of ethnē (= non-Jews)? Given the historical context within which gentile Christianity emerged, any investigation of this question must necessarily be carried out in tandem with a consideration of the parting of the ways. On the one hand (we need to ask), what effect did the process of separation have on the developing sense of identity among gentile Christ-believers? On the other, what role was played in the process by their own developing sense of who they were? For the most part, these questions have not received sustained attention, either by those who work within the partings paradigm or by those who raise questions about its adequacy.
With respect to the former, the conception of a parting of the ways, by virtue of its choice of category, tends to downplay the importance of ethnicity and to conceive of the process in essentialist rather than ethnic terms. Because it operates on the basis of a differentiation between two ways—almost inevitably understood to be Christianity and Judaism—it tends to marginalize the more originary ethnic differentiation, the one between Jews and gentiles. Likewise, once the ways have parted, gentile Christianity inevitably appears as a redundancy, and little attention is paid to the ongoing role of ethnicity in Christian self-definition (a new ethnos or genos drawn from “all the nations”).
Among those who have questioned the parting-of-the-ways model, Boyarin can be singled out as one who has made significant use of gentile Christian identity in the construction of an alternative model:
In my historical reconstruction, a serious problem of identity arose for Christians who were not prepared (for whatever reason) to think of themselves as Jews, as early as the second century, if not the end of the first. These Christians, whom I will call by virtue of their own self-presentation, Gentile Christians (“The Church from the Gentiles,” ek tōn ethnōn), were confronted with a dilemma: Since we are no longer “Greeks” and not “Jews,” to what kind of group do we belong? … These Christians had to ask themselves: What is this Christianismos in which we find ourselves? Is it a new gens, a new ethnos, a third one, neither Jew nor Greek, or is it an entirely new something in the world, some new kind of identity completely? For one important strand of early Christianity, beginning with Justin Martyr, the option of seeing Christianismos as an entirely novel form of identity was chosen. Christianity was a new thing, a community defined by adherence to a certain canon of doctrine and practice.44
For Boyarin, identity formation among gentile Christians is to be seen as a fundamental factor in the partition, the second-century imposition (from both sides) of a boundary between Jews and Christians. But as has been observed already, he conceives of this “entirely novel form of identity” as something set over against ethnicity. What Justin was instrumental in inventing was a new entity called religion, something categorically distinct from the form of ethnic identity preserved among the Jews. While Boyarin recognizes the fact that Christians such as Justin saw themselves as gentile Christians (“‘The Church from the Gentiles,’ ek tōn ethnōn”), he seems to see this as a non-identity, a gap to be filled and a problem to be solved. Instead, I suggest, the evident interest on the part of gentile Christians to present themselves as a new ethnos drawn from all the ethnē suggests that Christians also, in their own way, refused to abandon an ethnos-based identity for a religious one.45
Further, the concern on the part of gentile Christians to identify themselves as a people drawn from all the nations directs attention to the fact that the process of parting involves not just two entities (Jews and Christians) but the wider world of the nations within which both exist. However we map the ways and their partings, we need to remember that the terrain they traverse is not empty countryside but the larger world of the nations. And terrain tends to have an important effect on the way paths and roads develop. As we have observed already, gentile Christian self-definition was carried out in dialogue with conceptions of the nations and of transethnic ideals in this wider world. Such conceptions were significant in their own ways for Jews as well; Jewish self-definition vis-à-vis the nations was an essential element of the Jewish world. The parting-of-the-ways model assumes just two elements (at least once the parting is complete): Jews and Christians. But all along the stages of the process, there was a third crucial entity—the wider world of the nations—that was an important additional factor in the process.
Thus, while our focus in this study will be gentile Christian identity rather than the parting of the ways per se, we will necessarily engage with this related discussion as we proceed. We will do so in the expectation that, by paying attention to the specific issue of gentile Christian self-definition, we may arrive at a better understanding of the process of Christian/Jewish differentiation itself.
Central to our investigation of gentile Christian identity construction is the term ethnē itself (together with related Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin terms). A number of aspects and uses of the term have already come into view, and others will emerge as we proceed. While we will leave any more detailed consideration for later, here a brief preliminary survey will be useful.
At the most basic level, we need to take account (1) of ethnos as a generic term used to denote identifiable nations or ethnic groups. The framework for much of the phenomena we will investigate, however, was set (2) by the specific Jewish use of the plural ethnē (and the Hebrew gôyîm before it) as a collective term for the other nations, all nations other than that of the Jews. Arising from this us-them binary is (3) the curious use of the term to refer not only to a collectivity of non-Jewish ethnic groups, but also to a plurality of non-Jewish individuals. Within the earliest stages of the Christian movement, Jewish Christ-believers used the term not only of non-Jewish outsiders (both ethnic groups and individuals), but also (4) of quasi-insiders—those non-Jews who had also become Christ-believers. With respect to the obverse of this terminological coin, we will want to ask (5) how the first non-Jewish Christ-believers themselves perceived and responded to this usage. What sense did they make of this ascribed identity? To the extent that they accepted it, how did they understand and define it? Although we have little direct evidence for this in the early stages—that is, when non-Jews were a minority in a still distinctively Jewish movement—there is considerable evidence (as we have begun to see) for (6) the use of ethnē as an identity term on the part of non-Jewish Christians when gentile Christianity existed as a distinct non-Jewish entity. In addition, as we have noted in passing with Eusebius and will see in more detail later, (7) some non-Jewish Christians reserved the term for non-Jewish unbelievers, so that ethnē came to designate an identity that they had left behind when they came to believe in Christ. Finally, we have also seen that gentile Christians such as Eusebius can not only describe themselves as ethnē, or as drawn from all the ethnē, but (8) can also consider themselves as constituting a new ethnos.
Thus in our considerations of ethnē as an identity term, we will need to reckon with various denotations and usages. Even though the idea of ethnicity is always present in some sense, the term was used to refer not only to ethnic groups per se but also to other types of groups or collectivities. Further, even though we are interested primarily in the appropriation of the term by non-Jews themselves, it emerged in the first instance as a term ascribed to them by others, as a Jewish way of identifying them as outsiders. Leading on from this, the term is used both to mark various types of us-them boundaries (between Jews and non-Jews, between Jewish and non-Jewish Christ-believers, between non-Jewish Christ-believers and polytheists) and to forge connections between Christian self-understanding and the transethnic aspirations of the wider world of the ethnē.
The issues we want to explore, then, lead us naturally into social-scientific studies of ethnicity and social identity, where analogous issues are explored in more general and theoretical terms. To be sure, this is not the place for anything like a full discussion of the field; nor is it my intention to carry out this investigation within any full-blown theoretical framework. Nevertheless, social identity theory offers a useful heuristic, helping us sharpen our questions and place our data into new interpretive light, and so some discussion is in order.
Because ethnic groups have often been perceived in the past as constituting a distinct social category, characterized by inherited traits in a way that sets them apart from other types of groups, it might be thought that we are dealing here with two separate domains of discourse. As we will see, however, in recent years theoretical considerations of ethnicity have led naturally into the study of social identity more generally.
Since the time of Herodotus, ethnic identity has been associated with a number of shared characteristics that persist over time—kinship and genealogical descent, a common language, a homeland or shared territory, common religious practices, a shared history and way of life, mutual interests, and the like.46 Because at least some of these characteristics seem to be immutable—simply a given aspect of a person’s existence—ethnic identity has often been seen in essentialist terms, that is, as an objective reality inherent in and determined by these shared characteristics. Since the seminal work of Fredrik Barth,47 however, a broad consensus has developed that ethnic identity needs to be seen more as the negotiated result of a process of social construction than as an objective reality produced naturally by a set of contributing factors such as those listed above. To be sure, group members often perceive or portray their ethnic identity as fixed and immutable, but studies of the ways in which these factors shift and undergo redefinition over time betray the extent to which such perceptions or portrayals themselves are part of the process by which such identity is constructed and maintained.
Barth’s work focused on the relationship between ethnic groups and the boundaries that differentiated them from others. From the perspective of the essentialist approach described above, such a boundary was simply an objective reality, the outer edge of an equally objective ethnic entity whose emergence and continued existence was a purely self-contained matter, even as it bumped into the hard outer edges of neighboring ethnic groups. Reacting against this “simplistic view that geographical and social isolation have been the critical factors in sustaining cultural diversity,”48 Barth in effect turned the relationship between boundary and ethnic identity on its head.
In his view, ethnic identity is something that is constructed at the boundary of a group, the result of a process of social interaction between members of the group and outsiders. In this process of identity negotiation, various cultural factors—including those usually categorized as ethnic—come into play as indicators of group identity. They play this role, however, not intrinsically and necessarily but because the members of the group come to see them as significant:
The features that are taken into account are not the sum of “objective” differences, but only those which the actors themselves regard as significant. Not only do ecologic variations mark and exaggerate differences; some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences, others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied.49
For Barth, then, the core of ethnic identity is the shared sense on the part of group members that they belong to an ethnic group. Cultural and ethnic characteristics are to be seen, in effect, as a stockpile of identity-related raw material from which members draw the necessary resources as they engage in the process of differentiating themselves from outsiders. The characteristics used in the process serve as functional indicators of ethnic identity rather than as essentialized producers of it.50 Since the process of differentiation is dynamic and ongoing, the selection and function of the indicators can change over time. As Barth sums it up: “The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”51
It is important to observe that, for Barth, the process of identity construction taking place at the boundary is an interactive one, with parts to be played by those on both sides. How a group comes to view itself is shaped in part by how it is viewed by those outside. Ethnic identity emerges from the interaction between a characterization ascribed by outsiders and a sense of group identity perceived by insiders—or, more simply, between “self-ascription and ascription by others.”52 As Jenkins has described it, “One of his [Barth’s] key propositions is that it isn’t enough to send a message about identity: that message must be accepted by significant others before an identity can be said to be ‘taken on.’”53
Before moving on, we might also observe two further aspects of Barth’s work that he touched on in passing but that have been picked up and amplified in subsequent scholarly discussion.54 The first is that ethnic identity can be seen as a special instance of social or group identity more generally. For Barth, a process of interaction between self-ascribed and externally ascribed identities is something that characterizes all groups; an ethnic group is a particular kind of group, one in which the ascription of ethnic categories is to the fore: “A categorical ascription is an ethnic prescription when it classifies a person in terms of his basic, most general identity, presumptively determined by his origin and background.”55
The idea of a person’s “basic, most general identity” leads to a second significant aspect, the relationship between social and individual identity. This statement might be taken to imply that for Barth some aspects of individual identity are foundational for social or ethnic identity. Elsewhere, by contrast, he talks about the permeability of ethnic boundaries and the changes of identity that individuals experience as they migrate across a border.56 Either way, however, his work opened up preliminary lines of connection between social and ethnic identity, on one side, and individual identity, on the other.57
Barth’s critique of a thoroughgoing essentialist (or primordial) approach has been widely accepted. There is a broad consensus that ethnic identity needs to be seen as a product of social construction, something that characterizes groups more generally. Nevertheless, there is also a range of opinion on how one is to view those aspects that tend to differentiate ethnic groups from other groups. At the other end of the spectrum are thoroughgoing constructivist (or instrumentalist) approaches, where ethnic identity is seen as an instrument used by interest groups to achieve more basic political or economic ends. In part, such approaches represent an extreme reaction against the way in which primordial views of ethnicity had been used to undergird unpalatable racial theories such as those adopted by the Nazis.58 Broadly speaking, however, most theorists tend to avoid the extremes and to accord some special significance to that set of identity-related raw materials that are used to differentiate ethnic groups from groups more generally. Ethnic identity may be socially constructed, but for the construction to be effective its members need to be able to perceive its foundation in essentialist terms.
A helpful suggestion for how one might mediate between the extremes has been made by Jenkins, whose concept of “primary identifications” might be seen as an elaboration of Barth’s idea of a person’s “basic, most general identity.” Primary identifications are those aspects of personal identity that are formed through the primary socialization that takes place in infancy and childhood, which, Jenkins suggests, “are experienced as more authoritative than those acquired subsequently” and thus “become part of the individual’s axiomatic cognitive furniture.”59 The most significant primary identifications have to do with gender, kinship, name, and sense of self. Although ethnic identification emerges somewhat later, Jenkins believes that in many cases it too has the character of a primary identification. Thus, while neither primordial nor immune to change, ethnic identification can nevertheless be seen as one aspect of a fundamental sense of identity, which, he suggests, means that “the notion of primary identification opens up some middle ground” between essentialist and constructivist views.60 While it remains the case that ethnic identity is a value-added product constructed out of raw materials, some of those materials are foundational for an individual’s primary identification and thus can be perceived by members of the group as primordial.
Increasingly, theoretical discourse about ethnicity and social identity is being drawn into the study of nations and groups in antiquity,61 including the study of Christian origins.62 For present purposes, it will be useful at this point to identify several aspects of the discourse that will help to guide the investigation that follows.
As is readily apparent, the role of boundaries in identity construction will be very important. The various uses of ethnē cataloged above are shaped by a number of identifiable group boundaries: between Jews and non-Jews generally; between Jewish and non-Jewish members of the early Christian movement; between later (non-Jewish) Christianity and the Jewish community; and between the Christian movement and the larger world of the nations. Some of these boundaries overlap; the whole set of boundaries shifts over time as the Christian movement emerges and develops, and as other changes take place in the wider context. One will necessarily expect, then, to find shifts and developments in the processes of identity construction that take place at these boundaries.
With respect to the nature of group boundaries, Jenkins has cautioned that, in seeking to avoid an essentializing view of “cultural stuff” (to use Barth’s phrase), we should not make the opposite mistake of reifying boundaries.63 Rather, both boundary and identity are caught up together in the same process of identity formation. This process is a dialectical one—an ongoing encounter between a group’s internal understanding of its own identity and the external perception of outsiders, the latter in the form both of external reactions to such internal self-definitions and of identities imposed from without.
This leads to a second important aspect, the relationship between external categorization and internal self-definition. Non-Jewish Christ-believers first encountered the category ethnē as an identity ascribed to them from without; eventually, at least for many of them, the category became an important part of their own identity.
The distinction between external categorization and internal self-definition arises out of a more general distinction, going back at least as far as Marx, between groups (“a collectivity which identifies itself”) and categories (“a collectivity which is identified and defined by others”),64 or, in Tajfel’s terms, between “membership groups” and “reference groups.”65 The distinction is not absolute, however, in that part of a group’s process of identifying itself has to do with its response to the categories imposed on its members by others. Social identity theory, then, is interested in the dialectical interaction between external categorization and internal group identification. The external and internal components of the interaction are not to be seen as fixed and static. Rather, they are subject to the process of negotiation across the border, the result of which can be described as an established social identity. Using a fictional example, Jenkins describes the process as
a cumulative social construction that occurs when people who are identified as, say, Laputans interact with others who are identified differently in any context or setting in which being Laputan matters. In the process the relevant criteria of membership of Laputa—Laputan identity—are rehearsed, presented and developed, as are the consequences of being Laputan.66
One factor affecting the outcome of this cross-border dialectic has to do with the level of correlation between the external category and the internal self-conception. Put differently, one needs to envisage different degrees to which a group might be prepared to internalize an externally ascribed category. Partly, this is conditioned by the desirability of the ascription. A group will naturally be prepared to accept a positive characterization and to resist a negative label or stereotype.67 However, it is not simply a matter of desirability; a more significant factor is that of relative power. The greater the external group’s ability to shape the experienced reality of the group in question, the less successful the group will be in resisting the ascribed identity. In this connection, Jenkins underscores “the centrality of power, and therefore of politics, in identity maintenance and change.” He continues: “Asserting, defending, imposing or resisting collective identification are all definitely political.”68
In our survey of the different occurrences of ethnē, we identified two situations in which it functions as an external categorization. One is its use by Jews as a term for outsiders—ethnē as the other. Here, except for very special circumstances, we would expect a very small degree of internalization; the term would have little appeal for non-Jews, and Jews generally would have little power to impose it. The situation might differ a little in Judea, however, where Jews were in the majority, or in other situations where non-Jews lived in close association with Jewish communities. This brings us to the second use—ethnē as an identity ascribed to non-Jewish Christ-believers by the Jewish Christian majority. Here we are dealing with a situation where those doing the ascribing had greater relative social power. In addition, given that the situation is one in which individuals had freely chosen to associate with the new group, we might expect that non-Jewish believers would be more prepared to assume the new identity—or, at least, not to resist it out of hand.
By the time of Justin Martyr, however, when gentile Christianity had separated itself from its Jewish matrix and was engaged in a concerted effort to find a place for itself within the larger ethnographical map of the Roman Empire, the boundary conditions had shifted considerably. In this context, gentile Christians would have had much more latitude to reject the ascribed identity. Any continued usage of ethnē needs to be accounted for on the basis of its internal desirability or usefulness, rather than external ascription. Here a third aspect of social identity theory will be helpful—what Tajfel calls “social comparison,” by which he means the various ways in which a group might attempt to change or alter its relative social location. He is interested in social identity not as a static entity in itself, but as a dynamic factor in processes of social change:
The concept of social identity … is not an attempt to describe it for “what it is” in a static sense—a daunting task which has baffled many social scientists of various persuasions and for which one needs a great deal of optimism and temerity. Social identity is understood here as an intervening causal mechanism in situations of “objective” social change—observed, anticipated, feared, desired, or prepared by the individuals involved.69
In the course of his analysis, he constructs a typology of various situations of relative power. For present purposes, what is most useful is the type having to do with groups that exist in a situation of relative social deprivation—“groups socially defined and consensually accepted as ‘inferior’ in some important respects”—but a situation in which group members are also able to envisage the possibility of altering or ameliorating their inferior status. With respect to such groups, he sets out three possible ways in which change might be sought:
The first, then, involves relative assimilation, a strategy followed both by numerous immigrant groups and, in a different way, by colonial subjects. Both the second and the third involve the construction of characteristics that can be perceived as positive, the distinction being that the second has to do with the redefinition and revaluation of already recognized characteristics, while the third involves the construction of new characteristics. To illustrate the former, he uses the example of the revaluation of various cultural indicators (e.g., the use of black as a positive identity term among African Americans in the 1960s and ’70s). With respect to the latter, he refers to ways in which emerging nation-states attempt to construct commonalities, hitherto latent at best, that might serve to bind different groups or areas into the new nation.71 These three strategies, as he notes, are not mutually exclusive but can be combined in various ways.
In all three cases, one needs to recognize the important distinction between internal and external perception. It is one thing for a subordinate group to reduce, redefine, or reconstruct the characteristics that differentiate them from the dominant group; it is quite another for these changes to be accepted by the dominant group and to result in real changes in social location. Further, with respect to the second and third strategies, one can imagine differences in intent. Redefining group identity in more positive terms might have the goal of changing the perception of outsiders in a more positive direction. It might, however, be directed instead at members of the group, providing them with a more positive valuation of group characteristics and thus increasing their ability to resist external categorization.
Gentile Christianity existed as a subordinate group attempting to compete with more dominant groups for social space within the larger Greco-Roman world. Tajfel’s analysis of identity construction as “an intervening causal mechanism in situations of ‘objective’ social change” will provide us with useful tools and insights as we explore the role of ethnē as an identity term in this ongoing competitive process.
This is perhaps the point to recall the fact that, as we have seen, gentile Christians were prepared to see themselves not only as a transethnic entity—drawn from all the ethnē—but also as collectively constituting a new ethnos. In the past, the tendency has been to downplay the element of ethnicity inherent in the term and to see it as metaphorical, a kind of rhetorical embroidery on a quite different concept of identity. Often this different concept was contrasted precisely with the ethnic particularity of the Jews. As we noted above in the discussion of the parting of the ways, the key to the success of the Christian movement has often been seen as its abandonment of Jewish particularism, with its basis in ethnic identity, in favor of an all-embracing, non-ethnic universalism.72
More recent constructivist approaches, however, have provided grounds for taking this language of ethnicity more seriously and thus for understanding Christian claims about being a new ethnos as part of an attempt to construct an identity for themselves that others would have recognized as ethnic.73 The world in which these claims were put forward was one in which religious practice was seen as one of the defining elements of an ethnos, and where even the notions of kinship and descent were subjects of negotiation. Social identity theory, then, within which ethnicity can be located as a special case, will provide us with a framework for investigating not only the place of “all the nations” in early Christian self-presentation, but also their claims to constitute a new nation or race.
Returning to Tajfel, another aspect of his typology leads us into a further usable aspect of social identity theory. In a situation of relative social deprivation, where a subordinate group is facing difficulties preserving a place for themselves in a social context dominated by others, one option, as we have seen, is social change. Another option, however, is social mobility—that is, where circumstances are conducive, the possibility that individuals simply abandon one group and become part of another. This is one aspect of an issue that is of more general interest to Tajfel—namely, the question of the factors that, in a given social situation, would lead a person to behave or interact with others as a member of a group, on the one hand, or as an individual, on the other. Not that it is a simple either-or, of course; Tajfel sees it rather as an “interpersonal-intergroup continuum,”74 with the relative importance of each element shifting along the line between the two poles. This raises again the issue of the relationship between individual and social identity, which will be pertinent in several respects.
First, let us return for a moment to the matter of social mobility. In one respect, this is only of peripheral interest; while instances of apostasy exist and are well worth studying,75 our interest is in group responses on the part of gentile Christians to their social location as a subordinate group within a dominant culture. From another angle, however, individual social mobility is very pertinent to our investigation. The earliest gentile Christ-believers were converts, as was a significant proportion of the gentile Christian community throughout our period of interest. With the concept of social mobility, social identity theory intersects with social-scientific study of conversion.
Seen from one perspective, conversion is a process by which a person is socialized into a new group. Or if this puts it too passively, a convert is one who has decided to take the necessary steps to become part of a new group and, in so doing, has internalized essential aspects of the group’s identity. Part of this internalization involves what Snow and Machalek call a “biographical reconstruction,” a retrospective version of the convert’s own life experience shaped by the “universe of discourse” that embodies the assumptions and values of the new group to which they now belong.76 Cross-cultural studies of conversion narratives have noted not only the considerable variation among them but also, and more importantly, the extent to which they conform to the respective narrative patterns that characterize the particular groups into which they have converted. In other words, the variations in such narratives are not idiosyncratic but group-specific. In Lewis Rambo’s words, “conversion is what a particular group says it is.”77 In turn, what the group “says it is” tends to shape a convert’s own account of the process and thus also the new reconstructed identity that has been assumed.78 Converts, by the very experience of conversion, become inclined and motivated to adopt the identity structures of the group into which they are being incorporated and to reconfigure their previous identity accordingly. This will become significant especially when we examine identity construction among the earliest non-Jewish converts to the movement and how they might have responded to ethnē as an ascribed identity.
Further, the question of when a person behaves as a member of a group and when as an individual leads to yet another line of investigation, that of multiple identities. Christian identity was neither monolithic nor totalizing; it was added to or coexisted with various already-existing identity constructs (ethnic, civic, familial, class, citizenship, etc.). This, of course, was not unique to the Christian movement; most inhabitants of the Roman Empire found themselves negotiating among multiple identities—whether hybrid, nested, overlapping, or operative in different spheres—some of them also transethnic or translocal (e.g., philosophical schools, voluntary associations, religious groups). Thus in investigating the place of ethnē in gentile Christian identity construction, we will need to pay attention to the factors that called for and reinforced this aspect of their identity, in contrast to other identity aspects. Here, in addition to Tajfel, John Turner’s work on self-categorization theory is helpful, especially the concept of salience, which has to do precisely with the question of which aspect of an individual’s constellation of identities comes into play in a given social situation.79
Finally, recognizing that the social situation in which early Christian identity construction took place was not simply the Greco-Roman world as a cultural amalgam but the Roman Empire as a political hegemony, we will find it beneficial to supplement the tools of social identity theory with others forged for use within imperial contexts more specifically. Some assistance will be provided by the work of James C. Scott, especially his concepts of public transcript—the pattern of interaction, with accompanying rationalization, imposed by the dominant on the subordinate—and hidden transcript—the various means by which subordinate groups construct and protect their own social breathing space within an imperial order.80 Scott’s analysis, however, tends to work with a simple binary model, where the line between the dominant and the subordinate is sharp and clear. The line has been blurred considerably—indeed, has given way to a broader, ambiguous, intervening space—by the complex and multifaceted discourse that has been gathered (sometimes reluctantly) under the banner postcolonialism.81 Here the seminal (albeit densely unsystematic) work of Homi Bhabha will be useful.82
Bhabha’s work overlaps with that of Scott in some respects, especially with the concept of mimicry, at least at one end of the spectrum. Mimicry has to do with attempts by the colonized to adopt and replicate the culture of the colonizers. To some extent, mimicry can be used as an instrument of resistance, as subalterns, in an exercise of what Bhabha calls “sly civility,”83 employ the culture of the colonizers to deflect, blunt, or even mock their colonial agenda. Such sly civility bears some resemblance to what Scott identifies as the most benign way in which the hidden transcript of the subordinated comes to expression.84
But in Bhabha’s analysis, the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized is characterized by much more ambiguity than Scott allows for. In part, the ambivalence emerges in the slippage between the colonizers’ ideal of a “reforming, civilizing mission,” which seems to have as its goal the effacing of difference and the creation of people who are “just like us,” and the colonizing imperative that causes them to shrink back from such equalization and the forces of liberation that it would unleash.85 This ambivalence has its counterpart among the subalterns, many of whom find aspects of colonial culture attractive, even as they continue to bump up against the limits of assimilation. From either side, colonizers and colonized alike experience the tensions inherent in a situation of “almost the same, but not quite,” in Bhabha’s repeated phrase. The result of this interplay of civilizing mission and colonial imperative, attraction and resistance, is a hybrid space—and an identity characterized by hybridity.
For groups subjugated to (or emerging within) an imperial power, then, identity construction is shaped by factors of a very specific sort, and Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity will provide a helpful supplement to social identity theory. But this leads to a third area of pertinent scholarly discourse.
The process of identity construction under investigation here is one in which ethnē, initially a Jewish term for the ethnically other, came to be adopted by non-Jewish Christians as a significant term of self-identification, one that they used to negotiate a space for themselves within the multiethnic context of the Roman Empire. Christians, of course, were not the only ones seeking to define themselves and competing for social space. The process of gentile Christian self-definition, then, needs to be located within the larger area of ethnicity and identity construction in the Roman Empire. Later we will look in more detail at the use of ethnē, genos, and related terms in this larger area. At this preliminary stage, we will take a more general overview. Again, our intent here is to sketch out an area of second-level scholarly discourse rather than to engage in primary-level constructive work.
Awareness of other peoples and groups, curiosity about differences in language and customs, and other manifestations of what might be called rudimentary ethnography seem to have been part of human experience for as long as there have been ethnē capable of producing graphai (written records). With the emergence of large-scale empires, however, especially those of the Persian, Greek, and Roman periods, contact with other peoples and cultures increased dramatically. Conquest, of course, represented contact of a very direct and particular kind, but conquest was followed by many other forms of interaction, not only with subjugated peoples but also with surrounding nations. Military encampments, colonization, the capture of slaves, strategic intermarriage, embassies, trade, migration, the emergence of diaspora communities, travel for study or other pursuits—the business and bustle of empire brought ethnic groups increasingly into mutual awareness of the other, which in turn generated an increasing desire to describe and understand the bewildering phenomena of human diversity.
The ethnographical tradition goes back at least as far as Herodotus, who, in order to answer the implied question with which he begins (“the reason why they [Greeks and barbarians] warred against each other”; Histories 1.1), finds it necessary to describe, in considerable detail, the distinguishing characteristics of barbarians (Persians, Babylonians, Indians, Egyptians, Scythians, and others) and Greeks alike. Ethnographical description continues to be a common feature of historical writing (e.g., Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Sallust, Livy, Josephus, Tacitus) but can be found as well in works dealing with geography and natural history (Posidonius, Strabo, Pliny), military campaigns (Julius Caesar), medicine (Hippocratic writings, Asclepiades, Galen), architecture (Vitruvius), and mythology (Apollonius Rhodius).
Ancient ethnographers, however, were not content simply to describe, catalog, and classify. They were also concerned to understand and explain. As Woolf notes: “Explanations are clearly important to much ethnographic writing, to judge from the space given to them.”86 The range of explanations stretches all the way from diet to the zodiac, but Woolf helpfully groups them into two broad categories.87 The first is genealogical—patterns of explanation in which distinctive features of a given group are understood as having been determined by kinship and common descent, often from founding ancestors or ancient heroes, sometimes with intervening stages of ancestral migrations. The other is geographical—explanatory schemes that account for ethnic distinctives on the basis of the land in which a group lives (or, in the case of autochthony, from which its ancestors sprang), its location within larger geographical regions, its climate, and so on. As is demonstrated by the elements of migration (a geographical element within a genealogical explanation) and of autochthonous ancestors (a genealogical within a geographical), the two patterns can readily intertwine and correlate.
In what follows, we will be interested particularly in two broad aspects of ancient ethnographical discourse. The first has to do with what might be described as comparative ethnic historiography—the range of ways in which ethnic groups constructed maps of the nations. Since the purpose of such mapmaking was usually to situate one’s own group advantageously, one might just as accurately describe this aspect as competitive ethnic historiography. These maps were historically oriented, in the sense that groups constructed pasts for themselves that could then be correlated in strategic ways with the pasts of other groups. Of course, as Hall reminds us, in these processes of identity construction, “there was no clear division between the historical past and the mythical past.”88 The other broad aspect involves the search for universals—ways of transcending ethnic particularities and arriving at some form of transethnic cosmopolitanism. These two aspects might be seen as moving in opposite directions, the first directed toward the construction of distinct group identities and the second aiming to transcend them. In reality, however, the two were often more dialectically intertwined. While these two aspects of ethnographical discourse took new and distinct forms with the emergence of the Roman Empire, they were well-established phenomena long before Rome arrived on the larger Mediterranean scene.
With respect to the first aspect, the most common device used in constructing maps of the nations consisted of ethnic family trees and lines of descent. This genealogical device, however, could function in different ways. Most commonly, ethnic histories functioned to demonstrate the antiquity of a group and thus both its distinct identity and its venerable status with respect to other groups. Josephus, who in his Antiquities set out to construct just such an archaiologia (Against Apion 1.1) on behalf of the Jews, recognized the competitive environment in which he did his work: “each nation endeavors to trace its own institutions back to the remotest date” (2.151). Since unadorned claims to antiquity were not always persuasive, supportive measures were often undertaken. In one such measure, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, Greeks and barbarians alike buttressed their claims to antiquity by claiming also to be autochthonous in origin, sprung from the earth itself.89 Alternatively, ethnic origins could be pressed back into the distant past by means of euhemeristic traditions that identified a nation’s gods with founder figures or ancient heroes and thus allowed for historicizing interpretations of national myths and sagas.90 Further, as Diodorus goes on to demonstrate, buttressing could also be sought in claims that one’s founding gods or noble ancestors were “the first of all men to discover the things which are of use in life” (Historical Library 1.9.3; the Erfinder argument), which is usually accompanied by claims that they had taught these elements of common culture (agriculture, crafts, metallurgy, and the like) to others (the Kulturbringer argument). Such traditions are well known in Greek mythology (Daedalus, Hephaestus, Hermes), and similar claims are made by Manetho in his history of Egypt, where he presents Egypt to the wider Greek-speaking world as the source of Greek culture and wisdom. With respect to Egypt, Diodorus later catalogs various innovations and inventions that were introduced by Isis and Osiris (1.14–15) and subsequently attributes additional innovations to the legendary Egyptian king Sesostris (1.53–57).
Such Erfinder and Kulturbringer arguments represent a particular aspect of a larger strategy employed by those engaged in competitive ethnic historiography. Once an ethnic group had established an account of its own origins, usually incorporating historicized interpretations of mythology and saga, the account could readily be used as a subordinating framework within which other groups could be located and their origins explained. While Greek influence and industry helped to ensure that a Homeric framework became dominant, it was just the most successful instance of a much broader phenomenon.91
But ethnic histories were used not only to establish difference and separation. As Dench observes, “In the ancient Mediterranean world, … it is extremely common to use notions of ancestral kin as a loop to draw peoples in, rather than a fence to keep peoples out.”92 With respect to Greek origins, for example, Hall observes that, at least in the period before the Persian wars, ethnic histories tended to be “aggregative” rather than “oppositional,” as various groups in the Greek peninsula used the idea of descent from a common ancestor (Hellen) as a means of banding together as a kin group.93
To be sure, the distinction between aggregative and oppositional self-definition was by no means absolute. One of the effects of the Persian wars, for example, was to spur on the “invention of the barbarian,”94 as the aggregative sense of Greekness that had been emerging in the earlier period was solidified by a new perceived contrast with the alien other. The other was in the first instance Persian (e.g., Aeschylus, Persians), but Persians came to be seen at the same time as a particular instantiation of a more categorical other—the barbarians.95 Of course, such us-them binaries represent an almost instinctive aspect of group identity and were common in the ancient world. At one level, such binaries can be seen as ethnic self-definition in its most basic and primitive form, a rudimentary ethnic map that allows for only two territories (ours and theirs), human diversity being flattened and homogenized accordingly. With the spread of Hellenism, however, both as an imperial force and as a cultural identity that could be acquired by non-Greeks, this binary came to operate at a much more sophisticated level, allowing for significant travel across the boundary. Various groups were able to use the Greek-barbarian distinction to their own advantage, either aligning themselves with the Greek side of the binary or presenting themselves as significant precursors of the Greeks.96 Nevertheless, while the binary of Greek and barbarian—and, to a lesser extent, that of Jew and ethnē—ended up playing a significant role in the shaping of the ancient world from Alexander to Constantine, they emerged as part of a more widespread part of what we have termed competitive ethnic historiography.
The other aspect of what will be of interest in the discussion of identity construction in the Roman Empire has to do with various ways in which cultural thinkers, imperial apologists, and others searched for ways of transcending ethnic boundaries and of creating more universal, cosmopolitan categories and identities. The primary context in which such transethnic conceptions and developments are to be found, of course, was the Hellenistic world that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of Alexander’s conquests and the consequent spread of Greek culture and influence.
To be sure, the idealized portrait of Alexander as the enlightened hero who set out to unify the oikoumenē by inviting conquered peoples to adopt and embrace Greek culture (paideia)—a portrait sketched out by Plutarch and championed in more modern times by writers such as Tarn—has to be set aside.97 Likewise, Isocrates’s definition of Greekness as based not on nature or descent (genos) but on education (paideusis) and a particular way of thinking cannot be taken as a straightforward throwing open of the doors of membership to all and sundry.98 In context, the definition was aimed more in direction of restriction than expansion—that is, to identify Athenian culture (rather than birth and genealogical descent) as the standard by which the emerging Greek nation should be defined.99
Nevertheless, it is clear that something like this was the result of Alexander’s conquests, even if not the intent. While the Greek-barbarian distinction remained intact, the boundary between the two became increasingly permeable. Greekness increasingly became defined in terms of paideia rather than genos—an identity, based on Greek culture rather than on kinship or descent, that could be acquired by anyone with the means, opportunity, and desire to pursue it. Even in the case of Isocrates, his distinction between paideusis and genos later provided him with a basis for extending the boundary of Greekness to include Philip of Macedon.100 Intentionally or not, Philip’s son Alexander created a world marked by a new transethnic identity, a world in which “one could ‘become Greek’ by acculturating oneself through rigorous education and the mimetic practice of Greekness via writing, declamation, and other performances.”101
At the same time, this new transethnic identity was also positioned as preserving the wisdom of the ancient past. Herodotus is the first of a long line of Greek writers who traveled to Egypt, engaged with their intellectual counterparts, and came away impressed with the wisdom and culture of the Egyptians. In an inverted version of the Erfinder motif, Greeks came to see Egypt, along with India, Persia, and other ancient cultures, as the originators of distinctive elements of Greek paideia, which were subsequently handed on to the Greeks themselves.102 Greek culture, then, became a form of uniting people across ethnic boundaries not only because others were invited to acquire it but also because Greek paideia itself was said to preserve the best of those venerable cultures generally recognized to be ancient. Of course, as Schott observes, the process of transmission and preservation was generally construed in distinctively Greek terms. “Egyptian, Persian, Jewish, or Indian wisdom is valuable only insofar as it can be given an interpretatio Graeca” and thus serve to underwrite Greek superiority and to reinscribe the Greek-barbarian distinction.103
At the same time, this interest in aligning the paideia of the present with the wisdom of the past could serve a competitive purpose within Greek culture itself. For the Stoics in particular, admiration for the wisdom of the past was linked with the belief that the ancients were more in tune with the rational principle (logos) that undergirded the natural order, so that the task of philosophy was to recover an original pattern of life that had been dulled and obscured by the trappings of later culture and technology. This leads to another form of transethnic conceptualization that emerged in the Hellenistic era and became a significant aspect of identity construction in the Roman Empire—the cosmic city of the early Stoics. To be sure, Vogt and others have rightly cautioned against an overly anachronistic approach to Stoic cosmopolitanism; for Zeno, Chrysippus, and others of the early Stoa, the cosmic city was not so much a project to be pursued as an already-existing reality to be perceived.104 Still, they provided conceptual resources for those in the imperial period who were engaged in more deliberate projects of transethnic social construction.105
Stoicism was marked by the conviction that the created order is an integrated whole, permeated and animated by a divine rationality (the logos). This rational principle serves to bind all human beings—at least to the extent that they are governed by reason—into a single community. More specifically, this community can be understood as a universal cosmic city, of which all rational beings are citizens and whose laws are a kind of natural law dictated by reason itself. To be sure, since citizenship for Zeno was limited to those who were wise, in the sense of being governed by reason, his cosmic city was characterized more by a concern to restrict its membership than to expand its boundaries. Early Stoicism displays little interest in a cosmopolis that might become coextensive with the oikoumenē. Nevertheless, the fact that citizenship was based not on ethnicity or descent but on rationality and wisdom served to make Stoic cosmopolitanism a useful resource for later projects of imperial (or, for that matter, ecclesial) expansion.
Of course, Stoicism was not the only philosophical movement engaged in the search for universals and commonalities. The widespread Greek interest both in the polis, its nature and constitution, and in virtue, seen as the necessary foundation of human life, led inevitably to questions about the relative value of descent and paideia in the formation of wise and virtuous citizens. The dialogue between Socrates and various interlocutors in Plato’s Meno, for example, produced answers to such questions that, at least in principle, transcended the boundaries marked out by lines of descent and solidified in ethnic identities.
In addition to the role of philosophy, Richter has drawn our attention to the way in which the pantheon of the gods came to provide a common sacred canopy (to borrow a term from Peter Berger) under which all the peoples of the Mediterranean basin lived their lives. As ethnic groups came into increased contact with each other, they engaged in a kind of syncretistic cross-referencing, by means of which the gods of one’s own group were correlated with the gods of other groups. What emerged was the sense that
all peoples experience the same numinous entities but describe them and act toward them in different ways. Both Greek and Egyptians, to borrow Plutarch’s image, sit on the shores of the same Mediterranean Sea; the fact that the Greeks have one name for it and the Egyptians another does not alter the fact that the sea is the same. Similarly, both Greeks and Egyptians “know” the same gods by different names, tell different stories about them, and have different cultic practices.106
Thus, just as lines of descent could function aggregatively (as well as oppositionally), so the pantheon could provide means of creating connections and commonalities across ethnic lines. The transethnic potential of comparative theogony and theology was amplified with the emergence of more unitary conceptions of the divine within the philosophical traditions (e.g., the pantheistic logos of Stoicism, the ultimate One of Neoplatonism).
Before moving to the Roman imperial period, we should note that resources and models for the transcending of ethnic boundaries existed not only in conceptual forms but in social formations as well. Philosophical schools themselves were translocal and transethnic communities, membership in which was open to all who were appropriately desirous of learning and wisdom. Many of the associations that began to flourish in the Hellenistic period drew members from across ethnic lines as well.107 Likewise, some of the initiatory (or mystery) religions that migrated through the Hellenistic world served to draw initiates from various ethnic groups and to offer shared relationships with deities who were not necessarily bound to specific cities or ethnic groups.
Long before Rome emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean world, then, discussions of ethnicity and cosmopolis, the processes of self-definition that fueled them, and the related negotiations for social advantage were well underway. Of course, Roman dominance did not happen overnight, and Rome itself developed within this Hellenistic context. With the accession of Augustus as a new kind of imperator, however, the new fact of the empire put these older discussions, processes, and negotiations into a new context and raised pressing questions, for both rulers and ruled alike, of how to conceive of the peoples bound together in this new imperium.108
The questions, of course, looked different to the ruled than they did to the rulers, which raises a different set of questions for the interpreter. Rome was by no means the last state to enlarge its sphere of geopolitical power and control to such an extent that it could be considered an empire,109 and imperial realities continue to shape both our contemporary world and the processes of identity construction within it.110 Investigation of Roman imperial realities has never been an innocent enterprise; any investigator needs both to take account of the ways in which this historical enterprise has been made to serve later agendas and to recognize the ways in which contemporary agendas, commitments, and social locations can exert their own control over the study of the past.
Through the modern period and up until the end of the Second World War, study of the Roman world tended to be shaped by its part in a smooth narrative of progress, one in which the Roman Empire was seen as the means by which classical civilization was transmitted to the West. In Hingley’s summary of the narrative, civilization
was successively displaced in time and space from the ancient Near East through “Western” (and democratic) classical Greece and then to Rome. Rome acted as the link to the Christian Middle Ages and then civilization passed through the western European Renaissance and to the modern European imperial powers, finally to form the inheritance of the countries of contemporary Europe and of the USA.111
Of course, the role in this narrative played by Christendom and the Christianized Roman Empire varies considerably. In more ecclesiastical versions of the narrative, Christianity is an essential element, classical civilization understood to have been purified and brought to completion through Christian faith.112 In more secularized versions, Christendom’s role is more contingent and temporary, serving as the convenient container within which classical civilization was preserved through the dark ages so that it might be rediscovered in the Renaissance. Once the precious classical cargo was safely delivered, the container could readily be set aside.
In whatever form, this narrative served to draw lines of connection between the modern Western world and two aspects of the Roman Empire. One had to do with Rome’s supposed sense of a civilizing mission—the empire as the means by which Greek paideia and Roman humanitas were transmitted to the barbarians in order that they might become full participants in the civilized world. The other had to do with the legitimization of political power—imperial rule as justified both by the nobility of its civilizing goals and its self-evident success in extending peace and security throughout the oikoumenē. Both aspects—the Roman Empire as civilizing pedagogue and as effectively ruling power—were often linked with the concept of Romanization—the spread of Roman culture through the empire and its adoption by the nations and groups within it.113 With the emergence of European nation-states and their extension through colonial conquest in other parts of the world, Romanization in its dual aspects served as a ready model both to justify and to inspire these later national, colonial, and imperial projects.114 In return, these projects and the environments in which they flourished served to shape the attitudes and interests of classical scholars. As Mattingly puts it: “Knowledge and admiration of the Roman Empire shaped British policy in its own colonies, while at the same time the modern British imperial experience reinforced a particular view of the Roman world.”115 Indeed, this positive dialectic between modern imperialism and classical studies probably helps account for the popularity of classical studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.116
Since the end of the Second World War, however, this smooth teleological narrative has lost its grip on classical scholarship. The dismemberment of colonial empires, the cultural and political turmoil of the 1960s, the postmodern suspicion of dominant narratives used to mask the realities of power—all have served to cast an unfavorable light on the more benign and optimistic portrayals of the past and to foster the emergence of analyses that are both more critical of the Roman Empire and more interested in the experiences and perceptions of the subject peoples.
The initial manifestations of this shift were shaped by a straightforward anti-imperialistic sensibility. Studies by scholars such as Dahlheim and Harris emphasized the harshness and brutality of Roman warfare, the greed for power and wealth that motivated it, the rapacious looting of cities and enslavement of populations that inevitably followed, and the importance of militaristic expansionism to Roman economy as a whole.117 In contrast to earlier approaches in which the emergence of the empire was seen as almost accidental—the unintended consequence of various defensive wars—here emphasis is placed on a deliberate and aggressive program of territorial conquest and self-interested rule. In keeping with the binary character of such analyses, most of the attention was given to the conquerors themselves, the conquered appearing primarily in the role of passive victims.
More recently, however, especially under the influence of postcolonial studies, attention has shifted to the experience of subject peoples and their own responses to the Roman reality in which they found themselves.118 To a certain degree, this question was also taken up within the older Romanization paradigm, where scholars debated the extent to which Romanization was a top-down or a bottom-up enterprise. As Hingley puts it: “Did the Roman administration have an active part in ‘Romanizing’ the empire” or “did the native elite effectively ‘Romanize’ themselves under the indirect influence of Rome?”119 Even so, the linearity of the older model remained intact, the primary category of interest being the degree of progress along a line from native barbarism to Roman humanitas. Within this newer approach, however, there is more interest in the variety of interaction and negotiation that took place between native and Roman cultures and thus in the variety of cultural amalgams and hybrid identities that resulted.
Adding to the variety is the fact that, in place of the homogenized figure of the barbarian, this approach gives greater recognition to the distinctive features of native cultures, which brings with it a greater recognition of regional variations. In place of the older linear model of Romanization, then, recent studies tend to operate within more multidimensional frameworks, with axes that include not only acculturation (the degree to which Roman culture is adopted) but also what might be called accommodation (an axis that stretches from “self-interested collaboration” to “resistance unto death,”120 as Mattingly puts it), together with local ethnic variation. The social phenomena mapped out within such frameworks—marked by ambivalent allegiances, hybrid identities, subversive mimicry, cultural bricolage, and the like—increasingly serve as the site at which questions about identity construction in the Roman world are being pursued.
One further aspect of this site needs to be noted before we move on. The shift of attention from imperial masters to imperial subjects (from the colonizers to the colonized) has highlighted the degree to which “the formation and contestation of identity are fundamentally about power.”121 Imperial ideology, whose purpose is inevitably to legitimate and reinforce the power structures of the empire, does so in part by constructing and imposing relative identities for the conquerors and the conquered. The extent to which a subordinate group is able to use such an imposed identity to its own advantage, or to reposition itself by establishing a modified or alternative identity, is a measure of its ability to increase its own degree of relative power. To pursue questions about identity construction in the Roman Empire is also to raise questions about how power was exercised, gained, and lost.
No investigation into the development of the Christian movement in the imperial period, then, can remain aloof from the ways in which study of the classical world has intertwined with later cultural, political, and religious agendas. Correspondingly, no investigator can pretend to occupy some neutral outside vantage point from which the classical world can be seen just as it was. While I see no need to engage here in any extended postmodern analysis of my own situatedness,122 I want to chart a course that avoids pro-Roman narratives of Western civilization and its development, on the one hand, and ideological anti-imperialism, on the other. With respect to the study of early Christianity in its Roman imperial context, I have little affinity either for triumphalistic accounts of Christian success in the Roman Empire or for attempts to portray early Christians as thoroughgoing anti-imperialist subversives. All of which is to say that, without wanting to align myself too closely with any specific method or school of interpretation, I find postcolonial approaches to identity construction to be particularly useful and congenial.
To return to the main thread of our discussion, we are interested here in issues of identity construction in the early imperial period, from Augustus through to the end of the Severan dynasty in the early third century CE. Although Augustus made efforts to present himself as a defender of Roman tradition (the mos maiorum) and to put a republican patina on his rule, the Roman world was a strikingly different place at the end of its life than it had been when, as Octavian Caesar, he defeated Mark Antony in 31 BCE. Of course, the difference should not be exaggerated: as Cicero and Polybius demonstrate, the belief that Rome had conquered “the whole earth” (orbis terrarum) and now ruled “the inhabited world” (oikoumenē) was already widespread among Romans and Greeks alike.123 Nevertheless, his achievements—political, administrative, ideological—consolidated this rule and embedded it in structures that shaped the Mediterranean world through our period of interest. The result was the emergence of not so much a shared sense of identity as the sense of a common territorial and social reality within which identity was to be constructed and negotiated.
This perception of a common imperial reality was shaped by, and came to expression in, a variety of forms. We shall look briefly at several markers—terminological, representational, literary, social—of the changes that were effected in the Augustan period and that continued to shape the Roman world in our period of interest.
We begin with the language of empire, and in particular with the terms imperium and provincia. In the early republican period, these terms did not have the territorial sense that empire, province, and related political terms have in modern usage. Instead, imperium had to do with the authorized power or the right to rule that was granted to an official of the state; provincia referred to the responsibilities that were entrusted to one who held imperium. Of course, as the Roman rule expanded, these terms came to be associated as well with the territory within which such rule was exercised or such responsibilities carried out. But as Richardson has demonstrated in his thorough study of these terms,124 it was with the accession of Augustus, who assumed the supreme imperium over Roman affairs and who carried out a full reorganization of the provinciae, that the territorial sense came more clearly to the fore: “Whatever may have been the case before Augustus, there was now something which could be described as a Roman Empire in a concrete sense, which was more than the power of the Roman people exercised over a large part of the globe.”125 This new “something” was the awareness of a geographical empire—a territorial domain rather than simply the effective rule of a dominus.
Another marker of the new imperial reality was found in visual representations of the empire.126 The map of the known world initiated by Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s loyal second-in-command, and eventually displayed in the Porticus Vipsania depicted in strikingly visual terms the extent of Roman rule.127 A similar effect was achieved by means of statues or busts personifying defeated nations or Roman provinces. Pompey erected fourteen of these similacra gentium in his theater, the first permanent theater in Rome,128 and Augustus displayed his own conquests in a similar way in his forum.129 Although none of these have survived, the portico of the nations in the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias provides an indication of what they might have looked like,130 doubly interesting in that the Sebasteion was erected by provincial subjects, not by Romans themselves.131 The theme of victory over the nations was expressed in imperial sculpture as well, notably in the Prima Porta sculpture of Augustus. In this statue, the emperor is depicted as wearing a cuirass ornamented with a set of reliefs in which his victory over the Parthians is placed in a dual context—Roman rule over subjugated provinces and client states on the earthly plane, and a new harmonious order uniting earth and heaven on the cosmic level.132
Similar personifications frequently appear on Roman coinage. In some instances the provinces or nations are depicted in poses of subjection, such as the well-known Judaea capta coins issued by the Flavians after the defeat of Judea; in others, the portrayals convey instead the sense of the provinces as “equal and free members of the Roman commonwealth.”133 Another image that appears in both sculpture and coinage is that of the whole world as a globe, again varying between images of conquest and subjection (the globe under the foot of the emperor) and images of benefaction and protection (the globe nestled in his arm).134 Such images eventually could be found throughout the empire.
Visual representations of empire were also conveyed through spectacle and ceremony. In Rome, the triumphs celebrated by Augustus and his successors functioned not only as expressions of Roman power but also as ethnological displays, providing vivid depictions of the geography, topography, dress, and customs of newly subjugated nations.135 In the eastern provinces, the emerging emperor cult smoothly adopted the ritual and rhetoric of the long-established Hellenistic ruler cults and used it to reinforce the perception of Rome as a unifying center, binding the diverse areas of the orbis terrarum into a single cosmopolis.136
Straddling the boundary between material representation and literary depiction are imperial inscriptions of various kinds: treaties, inscribed in stone or bronze and erected both in Rome and in the subject area, such as the one with Judea reproduced in 1 Macc 8:22–32 or another with the people of Callatis (on the Black Sea);137 edicts, such as the one by Claudius concerning the status of Jews in Alexandria, which, according to Josephus, was to be posted (temporarily) in “the cities and colonies and municipia” throughout the empire (Jewish Antiquities 19.290–91); inscriptions on triumphal arches, such as the one concerning the Alpine peoples, reproduced by Pliny (Natural History 3.20.136–37); inscriptions in imperial temples, such as the one in Lugdunum (Lyon), recounted by Strabo (Geography 4.3.2); or honorary inscriptions dedicated to the people of Rome and set up (in Rome) by provinces or client kings.138
Of the inscriptions, the most elaborate is Augustus’s Acts of Augustus (Res Gestae), the lengthy account of his achievements that he left as part of his will, with instructions that it be made public after his death. The fact that the surviving copies were found as far away as Pisidia suggests that it was widely distributed.139 In Rome it was displayed, in accordance with his wishes, as an inscription attached to his Mausoleum, the family tomb that he had completed in 28 BCE. In the preface, Augustus speaks of his achievements as those “by which he brought the world [orbem terrarum] under the empire [imperio] of the Roman people.”140 We will have occasion to look again at this remarkable text, but for present purposes two sections are of particular interest, especially in view of its physical location. The first of these, found close to the beginning of the text, describes the erection of Augustus’s Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis) (12), a monument commemorating the fact that he had “secured peace by land and sea throughout the whole empire [imperium] of the Roman people” (13). Given that the Altar of Peace stood nearby,141 anyone reading the Acts of Augustus could readily supply a mental image of this symbol of Roman imperium to supplement the verbal description. In the second section, the lengthier of the two (25–33), Augustus surveys the territorial extent and demographic areas of the known world in systematic precision, including not only Roman provinces from Spain to Syria,142 but also peoples as far away as India, who, although “not subject to our government [imperio],” nevertheless had sent ambassadors to seek Roman friendship.143 One can well imagine that, as an observer read this section of the inscription affixed to the Mausoleum, the mental image of Agrippa’s map came readily into view.144 The Porticus Vipsania was also located nearby in the Campus Martius, which means that our observer could well have visited all three material visualizations of the Roman imperium in the course of an afternoon’s walk.
Moving just across the boundary between the material and the literary, we encounter Virgil’s famous description of the shield that Vulcan forges for Aeneas (Aeneid 8.626–728), which in symbolic form tells the story of Rome from its founding to the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony at Actium. At the center of the shield is a depiction of the triumphal procession in Rome, celebrating Caesar’s victory. In keeping with the theme of the whole work—that Rome was destined “to hold the sea and all lands beneath their sway” and to possess “imperium without end” (1.235–36, 278)—the central scene takes the form not simply of the defeat of a rival but of “a world conquest over rivers and peoples of the corners of the earth, with all their variegated costumes and tongues.”145
The Aeneid is no doubt the most significant literary marker of the new imperial reality emerging in the Augustan era, and we will return to it shortly in connection with Roman identity construction.146 But there were other writers in the period who also lauded Augustus’s accomplishments and thus helped to establish the Roman imperium in public consciousness. Horace’s Hymn for a New Age was written for the festival celebrating Augustus’s declaration of the dawning of a new golden age, and many of his other Odes strike similar notes.147 Vitruvius prefaces his work On Architecture by praising the emperor for giving expression to “the majesty of the empire … through the eminent dignity of its public buildings” (1.preface.2) and, in keeping with his concern for physical setting, links Rome’s moderate climate and central location with its ability “to rule the world” (6.1.10–12). Strabo’s Geography begins by declaring that geographical knowledge provides essential support for “the needs of states [politikas]” and their leaders, especially those “who are able to hold sway over land and sea, and to unite nations and cities under one government” (1.1.16); it ends with a summary of Augustus’s division of the empire into provinces (17.3.25). Strabo’s geopolitical goals are thus clearly to be seen; his Geography accomplishes in literary description what Agrippa’s map does in cartographic depiction.148 Geographers, architects, poets—writers in the Augustan era both reflect the growing awareness of the Roman imperium over the orbis terrarum and help to reinforce it, at least among the literary elite.
Something similar was accomplished—and in a more generally accessible way—at the social level as well. The pax Romana made possible a degree of human mobility that had never before been seen (and would not be seen again until the nineteenth century).149 In Rome, this resulted in an environment in which the extent of the empire was readily reflected in the faces seen in the forum. Visitors of low rank and high, merchants, philosophers, foreign delegations, hostages, peregrini, slaves, members of diaspora communities in the city, travelers passing through—“these people embodied the vastness and diversity of Roman territory, their presence in the heart of the city underlining Rome’s power to draw people to itself over distances almost unimaginable, from cultures thrillingly alien.”150 In the provinces, the Roman reality was experienced directly through the presence of governors, soldiers, colonists, and other members of the Roman diaspora, and indirectly through the presence of those from other parts of the empire, visitors and residents alike.
To be sure, the role of direct Roman presence should not be exaggerated. In the early imperial period at least, and unlike some more recent empires, Rome did not depend on extensive bureaucracy or military occupation to carry out its rule. Instead, the empire operated on the basis of an extensive network of local elites, bound together by “a shared sense of aristocratic culture.”151 In our engagement with Aelius Aristides in the previous chapter, we have already seen a certain example of the type. Rome’s embrace of Greek culture—together with the willingness of local elites to acquiesce in Roman rule and to do their part in carrying it out (not to mention enjoying the benefits that came with it)—worked to create something that served both as a structural endoskeleton for the imperial body and as its neural network.152 For present purposes, the point is that, in city after city, the existence of a Romanized aristocracy served as a visual social indicator and reminder of the larger imperial reality.
Linked with this, of course, was Rome’s willingness to grant citizenship not only to local elites but also to allies, freed slaves, retired soldiers, and many others who had rendered service to the empire or who were in a position to further Roman interests.153 This practice owed something to the spread of Hellenistic identity in the Greek period, the result of Greek willingness to recognize as Greek those who had adopted the language and other characteristic aspects of Greek culture. But by couching such acculturation in the terms of citizenship, which heretofore had been normally associated with the small and local community of a city, Rome was doing something new and distinctive.154 In the case of Hellenism and the spread of Greek paideia, the Greekness that resulted had been kept quite distinct from Athenian citizenship. In this new case, however, the spread of the Roman Empire was accompanied by the spread not only of Romanness but also of citizenship—or at least the realistic expectation of citizenship for those in a position to have realistic expectations. The city of Rome was now, in a sense, becoming coextensive with the empire, its boundaries expanding to incorporate the orbis terrarum. The presence of Roman citizens throughout the cities and provinces of the empire, then, served as additional social markers and reminders of the imperial reality.
To a significant extent, the various markers that we have been discussing here (terminological, representational, literary, and social) constitute what Zanker calls “visual language” or “visual imagery,” which he defines as
the totality of images that a contemporary would have experienced. This includes not only “works of art,” buildings, and poetic imagery, but also religious ritual, clothing, state ceremony, the emperor’s conduct and forms of social intercourse, insofar as these created a visual impression.155
As components of such a visual language, these markers represent more than simply pieces of evidence for a widespread awareness of the imperial reality that reached a new stage with Augustus. Far from being simply inert markers of a reality, most of these elements functioned at the same time as part of an imperial ideology—a deliberate, powerful, self-legitimating discourse by which the empire sought to establish its right to rule and to persuade its subjects to accept it as a foreordained and beneficent reality.156 We have already caught a glimpse of this in the discussion of Aelius Aristides in chapter 1, where we noted the way in which his Regarding Rome served to reflect back to his Roman audience the flattering self-image that Rome presented to its subjects.157 In a subsequent chapter we will look in more detail at Roman imperial ideology by tracing the place of the nations within it. Here a brief summarizing sketch will suffice.
The bedrock foundation of this imperial ideology was the message of Rome’s invincibility. Triumphal processions, coinage, statuary, imperial arches, and columns all proclaimed the irresistible power of Rome’s military machine.158 To be sure, this message was often subordinated to imperial themes that displayed a softer edge. Yet even if it was often muted, it was everywhere implied.
Such an implication was certainly clear in the emphasis on the universality of Roman rule, something proclaimed in the first line of the Acts of Augustus.159 To be sure, even Augustus readily acknowledged that there were lands “not subject to our government [imperio]” (26). But as Aristides himself demonstrates, this detail could be dismissed as inconsequential—such lands were not worth the bother—and, in any case, did not diminish the universal character of Rome’s rule over the oikoumenē in any significant way (Regarding Rome 29, 34).160
But the case for Roman rule was not made on the basis of brute force alone; imperial ideology presented a number of softer edges. Some of these had to do with the beneficial effects of Roman rule. The most loudly trumpeted benefit of Roman rule was the establishment of peace throughout the empire, together with the political stability and economic well-being that came in its wake. Augustus took pride in having secured “peace by land and sea throughout the whole empire of the Roman people” (Acts of Augustus 13), a benefit proclaimed both in the text of the Acts of Augustus and the fabric of the Altar of Peace, and the refrain was taken up by Romans and provincials alike.161
Another, more direct, benefit of Roman rule was imperial benefaction itself. Although much of what Augustus has to say about benefaction in the Acts of Augustus pertains primarily to Rome and the cities of Italy (15–23), he does refer to his gifts to temples in the province of Asia (24), and the appendix added to the copy of the Acts of Augustus in Ancyra speaks of expenditures “beyond counting” given (inter alia) to towns and cities in the provinces (appendix 4).162 The erection of the Sebasteion in Aphrodisias, with its veneration of Augustus (Greek: Sebastos) and the praise of the empire implicit in its gallery of the nations, was no coincidence; Aphrodisias had been amply rewarded for its support of Julius Caesar and his successors, in benefactions and special privileges. And as we have seen, by the second century, Aristides can say of Rome that “you have filled your whole empire with cities and adornments” (Regarding Rome 92).
Further, the tangible benefits of Roman rule, it was claimed, served as a clear demonstration of Rome’s ability to govern. As Ando says, “the Romans came to regard the arts of government as their special skill and boasted of this both at home and abroad,” adding that many in the provinces readily “took up this refrain.”163 We have already heard this refrain from Aristides, who credited Rome with the very discovery of how to rule effectively.164
Roman rule, of course, was closely connected to Roman law, and some Roman thinkers sought to justify their rule by linking their law with a kind of universal law, recognized (at least ideally) by all civilized people and coming to expression in the laws of civilized states. This was not to say that nations should not have their own distinctive customs and traditions that would come to expression in their own distinctive laws. Cicero, followed by others (e.g., the second-century jurist Gaius), made a distinction between the local law of a specific people (ius civile) and a universal natural law (ius gentium)—a law “which natural reason establishes among mankind [omnes homines] generally” (Gaius, Institutes 1.1). While distinct, the two are to be closely connected. Among civilized nations, it should be readily apparent that the local national law, despite its ethnic particularities, contains and is based on the universal international law.165 The idea of a universal natural law (ius gentium), then, enabled Rome to place its own customs and laws within a universal, transethnic frame and thus to provide further legitimization for its imperial rule.
In addition, however, beginning in the late republican period and continuing into the empire, Roman aristocracy increasingly convinced themselves, and proclaimed to others, that their right to rule was grounded in virtue—specifically in their ancestral mores and the humanitas it engendered.166 “These concepts were used,” says Hingley, “to define the elite as cultivated, enlightened and humane, entirely fitted to rule a wide empire and to lead others by example.”167 Humanitas was often aligned with Greek paideia, with the result that Rome could present itself as the legitimate heir and defender of classical civilization. At the same time, however, the one did not fully subsume the other. Roman humanitas retained its own distinctive character, not least in its tight connection with the ability—and thus the right—to rule.168
Humanitas, however, was not restricted to the ruling Roman elite. Another significant element of imperial ideology was Rome’s presentation of itself as a civilizing agent and the empire as a means of spreading humanitas throughout the orbis terrarum. While there is room for debate about the extent to which imperial conquest was motivated by a deliberate “civilizing mission,”169 there can be little doubt about either the reality of Romanization or the part it played in the self-legitimating ideology of the empire. To cite Hingley again:
At the same time that humanitas defined an ideal state of being, it also allowed for the idea that others who had not achieved its goals might succeed, given the correct circumstances. Humanitas served as an effective element in Roman imperial discourse, since it enabled the empire to absorb into its structure a variety of other peoples from the societies it encountered. It did this by defining its own cultural rules in such a way that they could be adopted by others.170
The message was not lost on Aristides: unlike previous conquerors, he says, who had the policy “that no one share in their fortune, but that all be kept apart as far as possible,” the Romans, “alone of all people have set out their advantages to be shared like prizes by the best people,” and he adds that it does not matter “whether one lives in Europe, Asia, or Africa … or whatever place one would mention.”171
Finally, the capstone of Roman ideology was the claim that the empire was foreordained by the gods, who continued to support it by their favor. Given the geopolitical theology of the day, divine favor could readily be inferred as a straightforward corollary of Roman success and the geographical extent of their rule.172 In Virgil’s Aeneid, however, de facto divine approval was transformed into an imperial narrative of divine foreordination, as “not only the future rule of the Julian house, but the whole history of Rome was portrayed as one of predestined triumph and salvation.”173
This was the context, then—constituted by the social realities of the Roman Empire and the rhetorical realities of the discourse that sustained it—within which all inhabitants of the empire found it necessary to negotiate an identity for themselves. In what follows, we will look first at the views of the rulers—both Roman conceptions of their own identity and the identities they ascribed to their subjects—and then at the views of the ruled.
As we have seen, identity construction takes place at the boundaries, and the most significant boundary that the Romans needed to take into account was the one imposed by their imperial predecessors—namely, that which divided the world into Greeks and barbarians. Horace’s well-known dictum—“Captive Greece took her rough conqueror captive and introduced the arts to rustic Latium” (Epistles 2.1.156–57)—captures some of the ambivalence felt by elite Romans as they considered themselves in relation to this Greek map of humanity. On the one hand, they were well aware, as Balsdon has observed, that the Greeks considered their rough and rustic Roman conquerors to be ineradicably “on the wrong side of [the Greek-barbarian] divide.”174 On the other, they generally admired Greek culture, recognized its superiority, and did their best to master it. Without trying simply to do away with the Greek-barbarian map, then (something that would have been difficult in any case), the challenge for Rome was to redraw it so as to locate themselves advantageously within it.
The barbarian side of the problem was the simpler one. A stark contrast between Roman humanitas and everything that characterized the barbarian nations was fundamental to Roman self-understanding. “If a Roman looked round the world, he saw humanitas in Greece … and he found it elsewhere in those who had been properly romanized…. These were the children of light; everywhere else was shrouded in the darkness of barbarism.”175 Barbarism and civilization were at opposite poles and, while barbarians might occasionally be admired for their closeness to nature, for the most part this was seen rather as a measure of their distance from civilization (i.e., humanitas).176
The Greek side of the map was more complex. In their self-presentation, Romans were concerned to combine a close identification with classical Greek culture, on the one hand, and with a claim to represent a distinct and superior identity, on the other. The two existed in tension, of course, and in the ongoing negotiations of identity, emphasis came to be placed now on this side and now on that. Still, both need to be kept in view.
On the first side of it, we have already observed how Roman humanitas and Greek paideia could be closely aligned in Roman discourse—closely aligned, but in a way that was to Rome’s advantage. In a letter to Maximus, who was about to take up an official appointment in Achaia, Pliny the Younger urges him to remember, as he carries out his duties, that he is doing so in “that real, genuine Greece where humanitas, learning, and even agriculture itself, are supposed to have first arisen.” At the same time, however, he makes it clear that what once flourished in Greece has now passed to the Romans; what remains to the Greeks is but a “shadow” of its former glory.177 This idea that Rome stands in continuity with Greece, inheriting and preserving the glories of Greek paideia while at the same time succeeding Greece as the beacon of a civilized culture, was a common theme in Roman self-definition.178 Sometimes, however, the contrast between past and present was drawn more sharply. Rather than simply being a shadow of its former glorious self, contemporary Greece was often sharply criticized for its softness, vice, decadence, luxurious excess, and debauchery—all of which (it was implied) stood over against both the (Greek) paideia of the past and the (Roman) humanitas of the present.179
But Rome was not content simply to claim the mantle of Greek culture. Although this move was important, there were limits to its usefulness. So we also encounter Roman voices laying claim to a separate identity, one that was both distinct and more ancient. Stories of Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Latium enabled subsequent Latins to trace their descent from Trojan heroes and thus to claim an identity that predated the Greeks.180 While this story was firmly established as a national epic by Virgil in his Aeneid, the fact that tales of Aeneas’s wanderings had been circulating among the Greeks for centuries provided the claim with independent credibility.181 An even stronger genealogical trump card was provided by the various claims, made by the Julians and other aristocratic Roman families, to have descended from the gods themselves.182
In using mythological lines of descent to position themselves advantageously with respect to other groups, the Romans were employing a tactic that was widely used in ancient identity politics. Unlike most other groups, however, Rome placed much less emphasis on genealogical descent in its construction of group identity. For Virgil, Livy, and others, there was no place in Rome’s identity mythology for the kind of autochthony found in Greek tales or for an insistence on genealogical purity. What we find instead is the idea that, from the times of Romulus on down, the story of Rome was one of the systematic incorporation of heterogenous peoples into its body politic.183 In one episode of the story, Romulus, in order to populate the city he had just founded, offered asylum to various disenfranchised groups—“political refugees from oppressive regimes, slaves, an immigrant assortment of Latins, Etruscans, Phrygians, and Arcadians.”184 In another, the famous rape of the Sabine women, Roman men sought to populate the city by abducting wives from the nearby Sabine people, resulting eventually in the incorporation of the Sabines into the developing Roman state.
The identity embedded in these episodes comes to expression in a different form in a speech that Tacitus attributes to Claudius. After referring to his own Sabine ancestry, the emperor goes on to say that he employs an incorporative principle in his own administration: “by transferring hither all true excellence, let it be found where it will.” He continues:
For I am not unaware that the Julii came to us from Alba, the Coruncanii from Camerium, the Porcii from Tusculum; that—not to scrutinize antiquity—members were drafted into the senate from Etruria, from Lucania, from the whole of Italy; and that finally Italy itself was extended to the Alps, in order that not individuals merely but countries [terrae] and nationalities [gentes] should form one body under the name of Romans. (Annals 11.24)
To be sure, he makes the speech to counter arguments made by some senators who were opposing a proposal to fill gaps in senate membership by appointing some new members from Gallia Comata. In other words, there were limits to the incorporative character of the empire, an opinion found also in Juvenal’s xenophobic grousing about the “Syrian Orontes” pouring “into the Tiber” (Satires 3.62)—that is, about eastern foreigners streaming into Rome. Nevertheless, even where there was opposition, it was based not on blood and descent but on laws and traditions.185 Mores and leges undergirded the incorporative character of Roman identity, which in turn came to define the character of the empire itself. It is probably futile to ask which came first—the transnational empire or the incorporative identity. Clearly they both developed in tandem, part of the dialectical process of empire building and identity construction.
Thus by means of both a strategic alignment with Greek culture, on the one hand, and the construction of a distinct identity, on the other, Rome redrew the ethnic map of the world (in the case of Marcus Agrippa, literally as well as figuratively) in order to position itself at the center.
We are interested here not only in Rome’s own image of itself as imperial ruler but also in the identities that they ascribed to the nations and peoples subject to their imperial rule. Since the one is largely implicit in the other, all that is needed here are some brief comments to draw a few threads together.
As we have seen, Roman imperial ideology conveyed a dual message: the invincibility of its military might, on the one hand; the benefits bestowed and made available through imperial rule, on the other. Seen from another angle, Rome projected an image of itself both as victor over wild barbarian nations and as civilizing agent within the orbis terrarum as a whole. Implicit in this message, then, were two ascribed identities—or better, a single identity with two variable components. Nations within the empire (and, to a certain extent, outside the empire as well) were presented with an image of themselves in which they appeared both as subjugated peoples (or as potentially so) and as (potential) beneficiaries of Rome’s civilizing project.
But the proportions of the two components varied from case to case. One end can be seen in the image conveyed by the ongoing series of triumphal processions. Here the slow parade of victory—triumphant general, defeated kings, bound captives, conquering troops, wagons laden with the spoils of war, all processing into Rome through the triumphal gate—imposed on the defeated nation an indelible sense of its total subjugation and (usually) its barbarian otherness. Although the triumphal procession provided some scope for expressions of clemency,186 the idea that the newly conquered nation might someday become a civilized beneficiary of Roman rule was largely occluded.
At the other end was the image conveyed, for example, by Claudius’s speech to the senate, referred to above. For Claudius, the Gauls were part of a whole company of “lands and nations” that had become “blended” with the Romans through “customs, culture, and the ties of marriage” and thus had been incorporated into “one body under the name of Romans.”187 While those taking the opposing position brought up the fact that Gaul had also been conquered by Rome, Claudius appealed to the example of Romulus to present an image in which subjection had been occluded by incorporation: “But the sagacity of our own founder Romulus was such that several times he fought and naturalized [hostis, dein civis] a people in the course of the same day.” To be sure, despite Claudius’s language (“blending”), incorporation was more a constitutional matter than one of full cultural assimilation. People and nations could be Romanized while still retaining aspects of their distinct ethnic identity.188
Subjugated enemy (hostis) and incorporated citizen (civis)—barbaria and humanitas—were the two poles of the identity that Rome ascribed to the people and nations within the empire. In between, while the proportion of the two components varied along the spectrum, the area in the middle—the dominant identity that people and nations within the empire were encouraged to embrace—had to do with grateful acceptance of the benefits of Roman rule. The resultant identity becomes visible in images constructed by Aristides of the whole inhabited world as a single Roman city with the nations as its citizens, or of the empire as a household, with the emperor as its benevolent paterfamilias.189
The Greeks, of course, represented a special case. With respect to Greece, the negative pole of the identity ascribed by Rome could not (as it did in other cases) represent subjugated barbarism (though it could include the idea that many Greeks had fallen away from the glories of the classical age into soft self-indulgence). Rather, Roman victory and Greek subjection was to be seen as an indication that Rome had supplanted Greece not only as the ruler of the world but also as the torchbearer and defender of humanitas. At the other pole, since Roman ideology linked humanitas with the glories of the classical age, Greeks were thereby invited to see themselves as honored predecessors of their rulers and to shape their identities accordingly.
But what of the ruled themselves? What can be said about the ways in which imperial subjects responded to the identities ascribed to them by the rulers? The question, though crucial for our investigation, is a large one, and here we will have to be content with a sketch, with emphasis on those features that will be particularly important for our investigation of gentile Christian identity construction. As Huskinson has observed, it is only in the case of the Greeks and the Jews that we have substantial evidence of how conquered peoples reformulated their identities in negotiation with the identities ascribed to them in imperial ideology.190 Fortunately, these two cases are also the most pertinent for our investigation.191 Even so, there are differences. Most of the Greek material stems from the cultured elite. It is only in the Jewish case that we hear as well from voices from farther down the social scale (the humiliores rather than the honestiores), reactions that are much less sanguine about Roman rule than those of a Dionysius of Halicarnassus or an Aristides.192
We begin with the Greeks.193 Rome’s willingness to align humanitas and paideia, and to see itself as the successor of the Greeks in a common cosmopolitan project, offered the Greeks a ready-made, advantageous position in the Roman map of the world. Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Aelius Aristides, and the Second Sophistic more generally—a succession of Greek authors from the late republican period through to the second century—demonstrated a ready willingness to take up the offer.194 Of course, even if one sets aside for the moment the fact that this was only one side of Rome’s self-presentation, the offer came at a price—namely, the willingness also to acknowledge Rome’s superior place in the succession of empires. Although such willingness has often been interpreted as unqualified pro-Roman enthusiasm, more recently there has been increasing recognition of the ways in which authors such as these were able to preserve a distinctive Greek identity even as they wrote in praise of Rome.
Polybius, who was particularly liberal in his praise, also provides a ready illustration of how Greek writers negotiated the politics of identity in the imperial context. As with Aristides in a later period, Rome’s unprecedented success in bringing “nearly the whole inhabited world” under the rule of a single people (Histories 1.1.5) was understood by Polybius as an indication not simply of Roman might but of divine sanction; Rome’s success was, almost self-evidently, a state of affairs willed by the gods.195 Further, by casting his initial question in terms of politeia (“by what means and by what system of polity [politeias]” did the Romans succeed in “subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world [oikoumenēn] under one rule [archēn]”), Polybius sets himself up for a very Greek answer: Rome’s success resulted from its discovery of how to strike a successful balance among the three types of government that Greeks had been thinking about since the time of Aristotle (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy).196 As Ando has observed, such an answer also carried with it an independent (and decidedly Greek!) standard by which Roman performance could be measured.197
As we have seen, however, there was another side to the coin of Rome’s self-presentation. In addition to an alignment with the Greeks, Rome also laid claim to a distinct identity, and this presented Greeks with a different challenge. For his part, Polybius was not prepared either to position Rome fully within the positive side of the Greek-barbarian binary or to subordinate the binary to a Roman map. Rome’s distinctive identity, for Polybius, was one that was to be located somewhere in between Greeks and barbarians.198 While they may have succeeded the Greeks in global influence, they had not thereby supplanted them as the defining exemplars of (nonbarbarian) civilization.
Another strategy, utilized by Dionysius and Plutarch, albeit in different ways, was to turn Romans fully into Greeks. As we have seen, part of Rome’s case for a distinctive identity had to do with its stories of origin, not only the peregrinations of Aeneas and his Trojan companions but also the earlier tales of Romulus’s asylum, the capture of the Sabine women, and so on. Against those who might scoff at these claims to antiquity, Dionysius defended them as fully reliable. As he does so, however, he reads them as a Greek story from beginning to end. Not only are Aeneas and his companions seen as essentially Greek, but even before their arrival, Rome had already been settled by various emigrants from Greece (Arcadia, the Argives, Sparta). His conclusion: “from now on let the reader forever renounce the views of those who make Rome a retreat of barbarians, fugitives and vagabonds, and let him confidently affirm it to be a Greek city” (Roman Antiquities 1.89.1). “For Dionysius,” Richter observes, “archaic Rome was a panhellenic oasis in a sea of barbarism that over the centuries managed to maintain, for the most part, its Hellenic integrity.”199 Although Dionysius, unlike Polybius, places the Romans fully on the positive side of the Greek-barbarian binary, he does so by subverting Rome’s claim to a distinct identity entirely: “one will find no nation that is more ancient or more Greek” (1.89.1).200
Like Dionysius, Plutarch also qualifies Rome’s claim by Hellenizing essential aspects of Roman identity. But whereas Dionysius’s concept of Greekness is based to a considerable extent on descent, in Plutarch’s case it is based on culture. Rome can be described as Greek not because it is ancient but only because the Romans have been schooled in Greek paideia, divesting themselves of their prior barbarian character in the process.201 In addition, as Dench observes, there is a retrospective aspect to Plutarch’s assimilation of Roman humanitas to Greek paideia. His presentation of Alexander the Great is such as to suggest that he imposes “onto the figure of Alexander the civilizing ‘mission’ that became associated with Rome in the imperial period.”202 Where Dionysius rewrites Roman history so as to turn Romans into Greeks, Plutarch reworks Greek history so as to turn a key element of Roman self-presentation (the spread of humanitas) into a Greek invention.
While this is admittedly just a brief sketch, these authors provide us with a representative and reliable picture of the strategies for identity negotiation that were utilized by Greek writers in the early imperial period. To be sure, the sketch could be filled in considerably. Richter, for example, has demonstrated how Plutarch, Aristides, and other writers of the Second Sophistic arrived at their distinctive panhellenic conceptions by transposing classical formulations of Greek identity into a more cosmopolitan key. In particular, whereas Isocrates’s definition of Greekness (as based not on descent [genos] but on paideia) functioned restrictively rather than inclusively—that is, for Isocrates true Greekness was to be found within a properly educated subset of the Greek descent group—Aristides and others used Isocrates’s formulation to argue “that the possession of Hellenic culture could make a Hellene even out of a barbarian.”203
With respect to a different area of the sketch, Mattingly and Balsdon have indicated how one might tease out from the evidence how non-elite Greeks responded to Roman ideological claims.204 For present purposes, however, the sketch will suffice.
But what of Roman subjects who were not Greek? Here the situation is more complicated, in that non-Greeks found it necessary to negotiate among three different identities—Roman, Greek, and their own native culture. True, the situation in the eastern part of the empire, where Hellenization had been widespread long before Rome appeared on the scene, was different from that in the western and northern provinces.205 Even so, the Roman conquest of Gaul, Spain, and regions beyond inevitably brought Greek realities with it as well. Thus throughout the empire, non-Greeks needed to engage in what Wallace-Hadrill calls “cultural triangulation.”206 As an example of the phenomenon, he cites Favorinus, a second-century-CE native of Gaul, whose level of acculturation enabled him to claim that his life and experience demonstrated to the Greeks “that there is no difference between education and birth,” to the Romans that education can result in “high social standing,” and to the Celts “that none of the barbarians” need feel that Hellenic culture is out of reach.207 One might say similar things of Lucian of Samosata (eastern Syria) or Apion (Egypt).208 Wallace-Hadrill suggests that the concept of hybridity, while not without its usefulness, is perhaps too binary in nature to serve as an adequate model for this more complex phenomenon.
As has been mentioned, the non-Greek group for which we have the most information is that of the Jews. We will pick this up in the next chapter, where a discussion of Jewish identity negotiation in the competitive context of the Greco-Roman world will provide the groundwork for an analysis of the identity that they in turn ascribed to non-Jewish nations and individuals.
1. James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (London: Soncino, 1934). A related term was used earlier as the title of a collected volume of essays, written by scholars associated with Jesus College (Cambridge) and edited by F. J. Foakes-Jackson, The Parting of the Roads: Studies in the Development of Judaism and Early Christianity (London: Edward Arnold, 1912). Except for one chapter by a Jewish scholar (Ephraim Levine, “The Breach between Judaism and Christianity”), however, the work displays few of the concerns or characteristics of the later phenomenon.
2. Part of the subtitle of an earlier book: The Jew and His Neighbour: A Study of the Causes of Anti-Semitism (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930).
3. Ch. 3 (pp. 71–120); the quoted material appears on p. 77.
4. See his defense of torah religion against Christian caricature (pp. 35–37) and his criticism of those whose portrait of Judaism is drawn from Christian sources (“it is no juster to go to Christian sources to understand Judaism than to go to the Jews to understand Christianity” [p. 37]). Against the tendency to see Christianity and Judaism as representing “two fundamentally different conceptions of religion”—an approach found even among Christian interpreters sympathetic to Judaism (such as Travers Herford, to whom this characterization is attributed)—Parkes argues: “But this opposition is only true upon the assumption of certain Protestant interpretations of Christianity. It would be truer to say that the Christian through Jesus, the Jew through Torah, sought the same thing—‘the immediate intuition of God in the individual soul and conscience’—and that to preserve for succeeding generations the possibilities of that intuition each religion has ‘hedged it round’ with the discipline of a system and the humility of an authority” (p. 37).
5. Jesus “wished to change things in current teaching, but not to abandon Judaism itself” (p. 34). As for the Jewish believers, even with the first admission of gentiles there was “as yet no question of the Law not being valid for Jewish Christians” (p. 49) and the creation of the Birkat Haminim demonstrates that “the Judeo-Christians still frequented the synagogue” until late in the first century (p. 78).
6. In the early decades of the Christian movement, they were seen by the rest of the Jewish world as “a ‘party’, not a separate religion” (p. 49). “At the death of Paul, Christianity was still a Jewish sect” (p. 77).
7. The revolt during Trajan’s rule (115–17 CE), for which detailed evidence is scarce and incomplete, features much less prominently in the discussion.
8. On the previous three points: “The loss of the Temple meant that Judaism had now only the Law as a basis for its continued independence. Had the Judeo-Christians been the only members of the new faith, the breach between them and the Jews might have been healed, for they also desired to observe the Law. But the rabbis at Jabne were not unaware of their contact with Gentile Christians who did not observe the Law at all. They knew the teaching of Paul, and condemned it utterly. It was only a step from this condemnation to the refusal to accept as orthodox the conformity of the Judeo-Christians. This step was taken by the insertion into the daily Blessings recited in the synagogue of a declaration about heretics so worded that the Judeo-Christians could not pronounce it” (p. 77).
9. While the separation was complete from the Jewish side by the end of the first century (see the previous note), many Jewish Christians still desired to remain within the world of the synagogue: “The fact that the test [i.e., the Birkat Haminim] was a statement made in the synagogue service shows that at the time of making it the Judeo-Christians still frequented the synagogue. There would be no point otherwise in trying to prevent them from leading the prayers. In other words, at the time when official Judaism, represented by the rabbis at Jabne, had decided that the presence of these people could not be tolerated, the Judeo-Christians, however much they disagreed from other Jews on the question as to whether the Messiah had or had not come, still considered themselves to be Jews; and it is not too much to suppose from this that there were also Jews who considered that a disagreement on this point did not make fellowship with them impossible. They must have been generally accepted, or it is incredible that they should have continued to frequent the synagogue. They were evidently there as ordinary members, since it needed the introduction of this formula to detect them” (p. 78). It was the Second Jewish Revolt, and especially the acclamation of Bar Kokhba as messiah, that led to the recognition of a definitive separation on the part of the Jewish Christians: “A breach would, however, from their point of view, occur if the rest of the Jews decided definitely on another Messiah, and this is what happened in the time of Barcochba” (p. 78).
10. See his description of “the creation of an official attitude to Judaism” (pp. 95–106).
11. In his concluding chapter, “The Foundations of Antisemitism,” after examining various putative explanations for the phenomenon, he concludes: “There is no other adequate foundation than the theological conceptions built up in the first three centuries. But upon these foundations an awful superstructure has been reared, and the first stones of that superstructure were laid, the very moment the Church had power to do so, in the legislation of Constantine and his successors…. And the old falsification of Jewish history … has persisted up to the present time in popular teaching. Scholars may know to-day of the beauty and profundity of the Jewish conception of life. They may know that ‘some Jews’ were responsible for the death of Jesus. But the Christian public as a whole, the great and overwhelming majority of the hundreds of millions of nominal Christians in the world, still believe that ‘the Jews’ killed Jesus, that they are a people rejected by their God, that all the beauty of their Bible belongs to the Christian Church and not to those by whom it was written; and if on this ground, so carefully prepared, modern antisemites have reared a structure of racial and economic propaganda, the final responsibility still rests with those who prepared the soil, created the deformation of the people, and so made these ineptitudes credible” (pp. 375–76).
12. See the section “From Supersessionism to Common Origins and ‘Parted Ways,’” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 4–16.
13. For an attempt to set these two approaches within a more thoroughgoing characterization of the various ways in which early Christian groups conceived of their relationship with Israel (including scriptural Israel, contemporary Judaism, Jewish Christ-believers), see my “Supersessionism and Early Christian Self-Definition,” JJMJS 3 (2016): 1–32.
14. On the term itself, see my “Supersessionism and Early Christian Self-Definition,” 2–8.
15. In his very helpful discussion of supersessionism, Soulen designates these as “economic” and “punitive” forms of supersessionism respectively; to these he adds a third category—“structural” supersessionism—a form of Christian theology that moves structurally from the fall to the redemption in Christ, without finding any meaningful place for Israel at all. See R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
16. Later we will have occasion to look at Marcion’s more extreme antipodal construction, in which the distinction between the Jews and his own group of Christ-believers was grounded in a duality of Gods—the Father God of Christ, who came for the sake of the gentiles, and the subordinate creator God of the Jews.
17. F. C. Baur, Paul: The Apostle of Jesus Christ (London: Williams & Norgate, 1876), 2:125.
18. Baur, Paul, 1:3.
19. Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 276. To be sure, both classical liberalism and German Idealism were characterized by a sharp thesis of decline, the emergence of catholic orthodoxy seen as representing a kind of reassertion of priestly and particularistic forms of religion within the Christian movement.
20. In Harnack’s view, first-century Judaism was influenced by two tendencies, one “progressive,” the other “nationalist.” The progressive strand, the older of the two, which goes back as far as second Isaiah, “gave vivid expression, even within Palestine itself, to the universalism of the Jewish religion as well as to a religious ethic which rose almost to the pitch of humanitarianism.” Under the influence of this tendency, Judaism “was already blossoming out by some inward transformation and becoming a cross between a national religion and a world-religion (confession of faith and a church).” With the Maccabees and their reaction to the policies of Antiochus IV, however, “an opposite tendency set in. Apocalyptic was keener upon the downfall of the heathen than upon their conversion, and the exclusive tendencies of Judaism again assert themselves, in the struggle to preserve the distinctive characteristics of the nation.” Adolf von Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt (London: Williams & Norgate, 1908), 9–16; cited material from pp. 16, 9, 17.
21. Albert Schweitzer, Paul and His Interpreters (London: A. & C. Black, 1950), 49.
22. Similar models of bifurcation can be found in others who worked with apocalyptic literature in this period—for example, Johannes Weiss in Germany and R. H. Charles in Britain.
23. While “Paul did not Hellenize Christianity,” he put it into “a form in which it was capable of being Hellenized” and indeed was (beginning with John’s Gospel and Ignatius). Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (London: A. & C. Black, 1931), 334.
24. Otto Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity (London: Williams & Norgate, 1906), 1:87–91.
25. Actually, the introductory essay (pp. 1–14) in the collection The Parting of the Roads, cited above.
26. William Ralph Inge, “Essay I: Introductory,” in The Parting of the Roads: Studies in the Development of Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. F. J. Foakes-Jackson (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 4.
27. He continues: “His character and view of life were unlike those of the typical Jew; but we can hardly call them Hellenic”; Inge, “Essay I: Introductory,” 10.
28. The term has become common through its use by George Foot Moore, whose three-volume work Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–30) represents a classic and still-useful treatment by a sympathetic Christian scholar.
29. Claude G. Montefiore, The Synoptic Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1927); Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teaching (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929). See also Donald A. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus: An Analysis and Critique of Modern Jewish Study of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Academie, 1984); Zev Garber, ed., The Jewish Jesus: Revelation, Reflection, Reclamation (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011).
30. Claude G. Montefiore, Judaism and St. Paul: Two Essays (London: Max Goschen, 1914); Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (New York: Macmillan, 1943). See also the thorough survey of Jewish scholarship on Paul by Stefan Meissner, Die Heimholung des Ketzers: Studien zur jüdischen Auseinandersetzung mit Paulus, WUNT 2.87 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996).
31. E.g., Morton Scott Enslin, “Parting of the Ways,” JQR 51 (1961): 177–97; James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991); Richard Bauckham, “The Parting of the Ways: What Happened and Why,” Studia Theologica 47 (1993): 135–51; Martha Himmelfarb, “The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman Empire; A Jewish Perspective,” in Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians through the Ages, ed. Eugene J. Fisher (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1993), 47–61; Judith M. Lieu, “‘The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?” JSNT 56 (1994): 101–19; James D. G. Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992); Becker and Reed, Ways That Never Parted; Thomas A. Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish-Christian Relations (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009). While Becker and Reed give due credit to Parkes for his work (see Ways That Never Parted, 8–12), Parkes’s pioneering role with respect to the term itself is often overlooked. In her 1994 article, for example, Lieu says that the origin of the term is “unclear” (though she does refer to Foakes-Jackson’s The Parting of the Roads); see “Parting of the Ways,” 101.
32. Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians, 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). Cf. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
33. The essays in Dunn, Jews and Christians, for example, may be taken as representative. They reflect debates on a variety of issues: whether one can identify a date by which parting was (more or less) complete; Yavneh and the degree of rabbinic dominance; the Birkat Haminim; reactions to the destruction of the temple; Greek translations of Scripture; the significance of Christology; the role of Paul; geographical variation; ongoing forms of Jewish Christianity; etc. For an earlier discussion of various issues (official letters, a ban on Christians, the prohibition of heretical books, the Birkat Haminim), see Steven T. Katz, “Issues in the Separation of Judaism and Christianity after 70 CE: A Reconsideration,” JBL 103 (1984): 43–76.
34. See Lieu, “‘Parting of the Ways,’” 101–5.
35. Becker and Reed, Ways That Never Parted, 1. Lieu goes further in arguing that, with its interest in establishing continuity, the model serves Christian interests more substantively than it does Jewish: “the ‘parting of the ways’ is essentially a Christian model. Its concern is to maintain the Christian apologetic of continuity in the face of questions about that continuity from a historical or theological angle”; “‘Parting of the Ways,’” 108.
36. As is done in the various essays in Becker and Reed, Ways That Never Parted.
37. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); German original 1934.
38. Boyarin, Border Lines, 1–2. Boyarin refers explicitly to Bauer. See also Andrew S. Jacobs, “The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering Jewish-Christian Relations in Antiquity,” in Becker and Reed, Ways That Never Parted, 95–118. The issue of rhetoric versus reality has also emerged more generally with respect to the depiction of Judaism in the adversus Judaeos tradition: Does this tradition reflect a real situation where Christians were engaged in active debate with Jews and Judaism represented a significant competitor to Christianity for approval from the wider Greco-Roman world (so Marcel Simon)? Or is it an artificial construct designed primarily for rhetorical purposes of self-definition (so Adolf von Harnack, Miriam Taylor)? For discussion, see, e.g., Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996); Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian’s Aduersus Iudaeos: A Rhetorical Analysis, Patristic Monograph Series 19 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 16–36.
39. Boyarin, Border Lines, 8.
40. Boyarin, Border Lines, 16.
41. Bauckham, “Parting of the Ways,” here 143, 148. Jossa also tends to move in this direction; see Giorgio Jossa, Jews or Christians? The Followers of Jesus in Search of Their Own Identity, WUNT 1.202 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006).
42. Himmelfarb, “Parting of the Ways Reconsidered,” 48. Parkes takes a similar view of the significance of Paul; Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, 77 (pertinent material quoted in n. 8 above). See also Philip S. Alexander, “‘The Parting of the Ways’ from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism,” in Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians, 23–24; and Lawrence H. Schiffman, Who Was a Jew? (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1985).
43. Segal, Rebecca’s Children, 161–62.
44. Boyarin, Border Lines, 16–17.
45. To allude to this statement of Boyarin, cited in part above: “While Christianity finally configures Judaism as a different religion, Judaism itself, I suggest, at the end of the day refuses that call, so that seen from that perspective the difference between Christianity and Judaism is not so much a difference between two religions as a difference between a religion and an entity that refuses to be one”; Border Lines, 7–8.
46. See, e.g., Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45; Irad Malkin, ed., Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquia 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6; Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 37. Herodotus’s statement is more made in passing than as an attempt at definition: “For there are many great reasons why we [the Athenians] should not do this [consider an accommodation with the Persians], even if we so desired; first and chiefest, the burning and destruction of the adornments and temples of our gods, whom we are constrained to avenge to the uttermost rather than make covenants with the doer of these things, and next the kinship of all Greeks [to Hellēnikon] in blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life” (Histories 8.144).
47. The key conceptions were set out in the introductory chapter of Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), and developed in subsequent work. Jenkins has pointed out, however, that there were important precursors; see Richard Jenkins, Social Identity, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 46.
48. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 9.
49. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 14.
50. Jonathan Hall describes this as a distinction between criteria—“the definitional set of attributes by which membership in an ethnic group is ultimately determined”—and indicia—“the operational set of distinguishing attributes which people tend to associate with particular ethnic groups once the criteria have been established”; Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 20–21.
51. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 15.
52. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 13.
53. Jenkins, Social Identity, 46.
54. On these aspects, see especially the work of Tajfel and Jenkins: Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Henri Tajfel, ed., Social Identity and Intergroup Relations, European Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 1982); Jenkins, Social Identity.
55. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 13.
56. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 21.
57. At this point, social identity theory overlaps considerably with Berger and Luckmann’s analysis of the “social construction of reality” (Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966]), a point observed by Tajfel (Human Groups and Social Categories, 255).
58. See the discussions in J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 1–13; Werner Sollors, “Foreword: Theories of American Ethnicity,” in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (London: Macmillan, 1996), x–xliv. Sollors’s foreword also includes a survey of responses to Barth.
59. Jenkins, Social Identity, 87. Jenkins prefers “identification” to “identity,” since it better captures the idea that identity construction is a dynamic process rather than a static entity.
60. Jenkins, Social Identity, 89.
61. For the classical world generally, see, e.g., Greg Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Erich S. Gruen, Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean (Issues & Debates) (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011); Daniel S. Richter, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ton Derks and Nico Roymans, eds., Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition, Amsterdam Archaeological Studies (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Richard Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire (London: Routledge, 2005); Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Malkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity; Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity; Emma Dench, From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines, Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994): 116–43; Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (London: Duckworth, 1993); Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
62. See, e.g., Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, eds., Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009); Love L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (London: T&T Clark, 2009); Philip A. Harland, Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians: Associations, Judeans, and Cultural Minorities (New York: T&T Clark, 2009); Bengt Holmberg and Mikael Winninge, eds., Identity Formation in the New Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Joseph H. Hellerman, Jesus and the People of God: Reconfiguring Ethnic Identity (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2007); Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Buell, Why This New Race?; Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Philip F. Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (London: Routledge, 2002); Mark G. Brett, Ethnicity and the Bible, Biblical Interpretation Series (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
63. A danger to which, in his view, Barth’s approach is susceptible; Jenkins, Social Identity, 128.
64. Jenkins, Social Identity, 45.
65. Tafjel, Human Groups and Social Categories, 229.
66. Jenkins, Social Identity, 160.
67. On labeling and stereotyping, see Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories, ch. 7, and Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
68. Jenkins, Social Identity, 45.
69. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories, 276–77.
70. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories, 283–84.
71. For other seminal studies of identity formation in modern nation-states, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006); Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and, from a quite different perspective, Halvor Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-Century Historical Jesus (London: I. B. Taurus, 2012).
72. “Most people—Christian or not—do not think of Christianity as necessarily linked with race or ethnicity. Indeed, most historical reconstructions published in the last twenty years depict earliest Christianity as an inclusive movement that rejected ethnic or racial specificity as a condition of religious identity”; Buell, Why This New Race?, 1.
73. Cf. Buell, Why This New Race?, 2: “Christians also referred to themselves using other language that their contemporaries would have understood as positioning Christians as comparable to groups such as Jews, Greeks, and Romans: the terms ethnos, laos, politeia (Greek), and genus and natio (Latin) pepper early Christian texts.”
74. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories, 238; see the whole section “When does inter-individual behaviour become inter-group behaviour?,” 228–43.
75. See Stephen G. Wilson, Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).
76. David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, “The Convert as a Social Type,” in Sociological Theory, ed. Randall Collins (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983), 266–69.
77. Lewis R. Rambo, “The Psychology of Conversion,” in Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. H. Newton Malony and Samuel Southard (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1992), 160.
78. Brian Taylor, “Recollection and Membership: Converts’ Talk and the Ratiocination of Commonality,” Sociology 12 (1978): 316–24; see also Brian Taylor, “Conversion and Cognition: An Area for Empirical Study in the Micro-Sociology of Religious Knowledge,” Social Compass 23 (1976): 5–22; Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions and the Retrospective Self,” JTS 37 (1986): 3–34; Beverly Roberts Gaventa, From Darkness to Light: Aspects of Conversion in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 5–7; Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 27–30.
79. John C. Turner and Michael A. Hogg, Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). For application of Turner’s work to the study of Paul, see Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans; J. Brian Tucker, You Belong to Christ: Paul and the Formation of Social Identity in 1 Corinthians 1–4 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010).
80. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
81. For a brief account, with some attention to the reluctance, see Susan B. Abraham, “Critical Perspectives on Postcolonial Theory,” in The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes, ed. Christopher Stanley (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 24–33.
82. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).
83. “[A] subversive strategy of subaltern agency that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and incommensurable, insurgent relinking”; Bhabha, Location of Culture, 184.
84. “The safest and most public form of political discourse is that which takes as its basis the flattering self-image of elites. Owing to the rhetorical concessions that this self-image contains, it offers a surprisingly large arena for political conflict that appeals to these concessions and makes use of the room for interpretation within any ideology. For example, even the ideology of white slave owners in the antebellum U. S. South incorporated certain paternalist flourishes about the care, feeding, housing, and clothing of slaves and their religious instruction. Practices, of course, were something else. Slaves were, however, able to make political use of this small rhetorical space to appeal for garden plots, better food, humane treatment, freedom to travel to religious services, and so forth. Thus, some slave interests could find representation in the prevailing ideology without appearing in the least seditious”; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 18.
85. See Bhabha, Location of Culture, 86. Many of Bhabha’s examples and case studies stem from British rule in India.
86. Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians, 33.
87. See ch. 2 in Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians.
88. J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 182.
89. Library of History 1.9.3. See Elias Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” CP 47 (1952): 76; Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 17. On the Greek claim, see Isocrates, Panegyric 24–25.
90. See Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 17.
91. See Bickerman, “Origines Gentium.”
92. Emma Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138. See also Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), especially part 2, “Connections with the ‘Other.’”
93. J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, 47. See also Richter, Cosmopolis, 118.
94. E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian.
95. Richter draws attention to the fact that Socrates simply assumed a fundamental distinction, rooted in nature itself, between Greek and barbarian: “Socrates maintained that there exists in nature a fundamental rift between Greek and barbarian. What is more, he describes this rift in the same language of kinship he had adopted to describe the homogeneity of Kallipolis. Just as the polis ought to act and react like a single family, Hellas ought to recognize its own shared kinship as well as the foreignness of the barbarian…. Socrates does not attempt to explain why barbarians are the natural enemies of the Greeks. As opposed to almost every other facet of life in the city, we find here the simple assertion of commonplaces rather than systematic argumentation”; Cosmopolis, 39.
96. For the former, see, e.g., Anthony Spawforth’s study of Lydia: “Shades of Greekness: A Lydian Case Study,” in Malkin, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, 375–400. And for the latter, see, e.g., Richter’s discussion of how Egyptians and Jews, taking advantage of Herodotus’s readiness to see Egypt as the source of some aspects of Greek thought and culture, used this to position themselves advantageously with respect to the Greek-barbarian divide; Cosmopolis, 178–84.
97. See, e.g., William W. Tarn, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Proceedings of the British Academy 19 (1933): 123–66. The decisive refutation of Tarn was made by Ernst Badian, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte 7 (1958): 425–44. For discussion, see further Richter, Cosmopolis, 13–16.
98. “And so far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and in speech that her pupils have become the teachers of the rest of the world; and she has brought it about that the name ‘Hellenes’ suggests no longer a race [genous] but an intelligence [dianoias], and that the title ‘Hellenes’ is applied rather to those who share our culture [paideuseōs] than to those who share a common blood [physeōs]” (Panegyric 50).
99. See Richter, Cosmopolis, 106–7; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 238–39. A similar definition of Greekness, used for somewhat similar ends, can be found several centuries later in a letter attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, in which he reproaches the Ionians for basing their claim to be Greek on kinship and descent (genē), when Greek identity is based on “customs, laws, language, and way of life” (Letters 71).
100. See Richter, Cosmopolis, 107–8.
101. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 5. See also J. M. Hall, Hellenicity, esp. 172–228; Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 67–70.
102. “[F]or centuries, Greeks had located the origins of almost every aspect of civilization in Egypt. Greek intellectuals, from Pythagoras to Cleombrotus, either had actually visited or were reputed to have visited Egypt, talked with the priests of the shrines, and brought the incomparable wisdom of the Nile back to Greece”; Richter, Cosmopolis, 194.
103. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 27.
104. Katja Maria Vogt, Law, Reason and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), e.g., 4–6. Richter organizes his study (Cosmopolis) around two temporal poles—late-classical Athens and the early Roman Empire—in order to argue that “it was the Roman Stoics … who fully developed the sort of cosmopolitanism that both ancients and moderns often associate with Zeno” (p. 63).
105. Richter’s goal is to demonstrate “how early imperial intellectuals … made use of a late-classical Athenian political-conceptual vocabulary” in “an effort to imagine the unity of the Roman empire” (Cosmopolis, 5, 245).
106. Richter, Cosmopolis, 209.
107. See now the splendid collection of source material in Richard S. Ascough, Philip A. Harland, and John S. Kloppenborg, eds., Associations in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012).
108. On this term, and its shift in usage from “ruling power” to “territory ruled,” see John Richardson, The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and further below.
109. For considerations of how to define and identify an empire, see David J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 6–7; Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19–27.
110. See, e.g., Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic, 2003).
111. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 21.
112. See, e.g., the “confluence model” of the parting of the ways as discussed earlier in the chapter, especially the essay by Inge (“Essay I: Introductory).
113. On the concept of Romanization and recent debates about the term, see Janet Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire, ed. Janet Huskinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 20–22, together with other essays in the volume; see also Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 38; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9–14; Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 15–18.
114. E.g., see Hingley’s description of how Theodor Mommsen made strategic alignments between the movement toward German unity in his own day and the Roman unification of Italy as recounted by Appian; Globalizing Roman Culture, 32. Dench makes an analogous observation about the mixed ethnic roots of Britain: “according to one strand within the somewhat tortured history of the identification of the British with the Roman empire (within which the undeniable episode of the Roman occupation of ancient Britain threw up particular problems), the greatness of Britain resided in her ‘mixed’ roots, Romano-British and/or Anglo-Saxon ‘just like’ the ‘mixed’ roots of the Roman empire”; Romulus’ Asylum, 229.
115. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 10.
116. “Classics, as a discipline grew, in particular, out of the Grand Tour of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it performed a specific role in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to educate future colonial administrators”; Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 18.
117. William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B. C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); Werner Dahlheim, Gewalt und Herrschaft: Das provinziale Herrschaftssystem der römischen Republik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977).
118. See especially Jane Webster and Nicholas J. Cooper, Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives (Leicester: University of Leicester, 1996); Richard Miles, ed., Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999); Janet Huskinson, ed., Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 2000); Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture; Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution; Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity; Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 9; and Woolf, Rome, 277. A somewhat dissenting perspective is offered by Ando, who is critical of attempts to view the Roman Empire through the lenses of modern anti-imperialism or postcolonialism, not in the interest of defending an older, more pro-Roman approach, but because he believes that such attempts tend to disregard the differences between modern empires and ancient ones, thus imposing modern agendas and categories on quite different ancient realities; see Clifford Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. 66–67. For a somewhat similar discussion of the differences between ancient and modern empires, yet combined with a more positive assessment of the potential of postcolonial approaches, see Woolf, Rome, 227–29.
119. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 45.
120. Wallace-Hadrill, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 29. For the concepts of “acculturation” and “accommodation,” see John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 88–98.
121. As Miles puts it in his introduction to Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, 5. For Schott, postcolonialism “insists that identities are produced and deployed in the context of imperial systems of power and control”; Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 9. See also Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, xv, 206–7.
122. Pertinent biographical information is readily available: male; white; Canadian, of British and Icelandic stock; Christian, of a more or less conventional sort; coming of age in the 1960s; moderately left-of-center—all of which has rendered me grateful for the benefits of civilization but wary of power and the structures through which it is wielded.
123. Cicero, On Behalf of King Deiotarus 15; Polybius, Histories 1.1.5.
124. Richardson, Language of Empire.
125. Richardson, Language of Empire, 144. For a related study of the developing notions of space and geography in the Roman world, see Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).
126. See especially Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
127. See, e.g., Richardson, Language of Empire, 144; Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, 7; and, more generally, O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
128. See, e.g., Woolf, Rome, 147; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 79.
129. Catharine Edwards, “Incorporating the Alien: The Art of Conquest,” in Rome the Cosmopolis, ed. Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65–66; Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty, 277–79. Later, in a different way, Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli functioned as a visual display of both the breadth and unity of the empire (Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh, “The Significance of Antiquity in Antiquity: An Introduction,” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh, TSAJ 123 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008], 14).
130. The portico, created before the middle of the first century CE, contained sculpted female figures each personifying a different nation. The surviving remains represent somewhere between nineteen and twenty-four different figures. See R. R. R. Smith, “Simulacra Gentium: The Ethnē from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias,” JRS 78 (1988): 50–77; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 79–80; Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, 84.
131. See Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty, 304–13. Huskinson describes an analogous depiction, this one a mosaic in an upper-class Tunisian house, in which portraits of six female figures (clearly identified with specific provinces) surround a male figure (Rome); Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” 3–6.
132. The statue was found in the villa of Livia in Prima Porta and is now in the Braccio Nuovo museum in the Vatican. See the discussion in Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 188–92. See also the two-level depiction of imperial order in the Gemma Augustea, discussed in Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 128–29, 144.
133. Niels Hannestad, Roman Art and Imperial Policy (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1986), 97. See also Edwards, “Incorporating the Alien,” 66–67.
134. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 1; Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” 8; P. A. Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 438.
135. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 79.
136. Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 297.
137. E. H. Warmington, Archaic Inscriptions, vol. 4 of Remains of Old Latin, LCL 359 (London: W. Heinemann, 1940), 292–95 (“Laws and Other Documents,” no. 55).
138. Lycia (CIL 1.2.725); Ephesus (CIL 1.2.727); Laodicea (CIL 1.2.728); Mithridates (CIL 1.2.730). Also found in Warmington, Archaic Inscriptions, 141–43 (nos. 21, 25, 23, 20 respectively).
139. Nevertheless, it is curious that all three surviving portions were found in Galatia.
140. The translation is that of P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore, eds. and trans., Res Gestae Divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
141. While not as close as its current reconstruction (adjacent to the Mausoleum), the Altar of Peace originally stood only 450 meters away.
142. “I extended the territory of all those provinces of the Roman people on whose borders lay peoples [gentes] not subject to our government [imperio]” (26).
143. Acts of Augustus 26, 31. “The Res Gestae [Acts of Augustus] asserts from the very first line that there was Roman control of the inhabited world (orbis terrarum). And it proves this methodically, without symbolism, by using a series of topographic lists that correspond to precise geographical knowledge—knowledge that reflects the science of the times, but that also surpassed the vague beliefs of the common man”; Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, 23.
144. Agrippa himself is mentioned in 8.2.
145. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 79.
146. Of course, Virgil’s significance in this connection is not restricted to the Aeneid.
147. See Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 167.
148. See Richardson, Language of Empire, 137–38; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 262; Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, 47.
149. Woolf, Rome, 226–27; Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 6.
150. Edwards and Woolf, Rome the Cosmopolis, 1.
151. Woolf, Rome, 249. See also (and especially) Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty.
152. On the role of the client-patron system in this integrative network, see Avi Avidov, Not Reckoned among Nations: The Origins of the So-Called “Jewish Question” in Roman Antiquity, TSAJ 128 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 69–93.
153. See Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 93–151; Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 56–57; J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens (London: Duckworth, 1979), 82–96. Eventually, under Caracalla (in 212 CE), citizenship was extended to almost everyone in the empire.
154. See Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 7.
155. Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 3.
156. Zanker continues: “Most importantly, through visual imagery a new mythology of Rome and, for the emperor, a new ritual of power were created. Built on relatively simple foundations, the myth perpetuated itself and transcended the realities of everyday life to project onto future generations the impression that they lived in the best of all possible worlds in the best of all times”; Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 4.
157. To borrow Scott’s useful phrase; Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 18.
158. A message not lost on Josephus, as can be seen from the speech he puts into the mouth of Agrippa II, the point of which is the absolute futility of any attempt to rebel against Roman might (Jewish War 2.342–407).
159. “The res gestae of the Divine Augustus, by which he brought the world [orbem terrarum] under the empire [imperio] of the Roman people.” It had already been proclaimed in the first line of Vitruvius’s On Architecture: “When your Highness’s divine mind and power, Caesar, gained the empire of the world [orbis terrarum], Rome gloried in your triumph and victory. For all her enemies were crushed by your invincible courage and all mankind [omnes gentes] obeyed your bidding.” See also Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, 23.
160. “Nothing escapes [your rule] … unless you have condemned it as useless” (Regarding Rome 28). Dionysius of Halicarnassus strikes a similar note: “Rome rules every country that is not inaccessible or uninhabited” (Roman Antiquities 1.3.3). See Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes, 433–38.
161. E.g., “You, Roman, be sure to rule the peoples [regere imperio populos]—be these your arts—to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and to crush the proud” (Virgil, Aeneid 6.851–53). See Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes, 440; Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 167. On Plutarch, see Lorna Hardwick, “Concepts of Peace,” in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire, ed. Janet Huskinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 349.
162. On the appendix, see Brunt and Moore, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, 1–2, 80–81.
163. Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty, 6.
164. “Before you the knowledge of how to govern did not yet exist” (Regarding Rome 51).
165. “All nations [omnes populi] who are governed by laws and customs observe partly their own particular law and partly the law common to all mankind [omnium hominum]” (Gaius, Institutes 1.1). “The civil law is not necessarily also the universal law; but the universal law ought to be also the civil law” (Cicero, On Duties 3.69).
166. On Cicero’s thinking in this regard, see Woolf, Rome, 148–52.
167. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 62.
168. On the relationship between humanitas and paideia, see Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 65–66; Woolf, Rome, 169.
169. On this debate, see Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 64–67.
170. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 63. See also Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 336.
171. Panegyric in Cyzicus, 32.
172. This certainly was the inference drawn by Aristides (Regarding Rome 104) and, in his own way, by Josephus (Jewish War 2.390; 4.323) as well. See also Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty, 6.
173. Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 193.
174. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, 30.
175. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, 63–64.
176. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 61.
177. To Maximus (Letters 8.24.1).
178. Richter, Cosmopolis, 177–78; Janet Huskinson, “Élite Culture and the Identity of Empire,” in Huskinson, Experiencing Rome, 98–99; Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 336.
179. Huskinson, “Élite Culture and the Identity of Empire,” 99; Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 239; Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, 30–31.
180. Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” 11–12; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 69–70; Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 193; Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, 30; Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” 81.
181. Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” 66.
182. Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” 11–12.
183. See especially Dench, Romulus’ Asylum. Also: Woolf, Rome, 152; Richter, Cosmopolis, 113, 132; Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion, 7; Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf, “Cosmopolis: Rome as World City,” in Edwards and Woolf, Rome the Cosmopolis, 9–10.
184. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 2.
185. See especially Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” 12–14.
186. “As victor I spared the lives of all citizens who asked for mercy” (Acts of Augustus 3.1). Some of those spared became the victor’s freedmen.
187. Tacitus, Annals 11.24.
188. Roman ideology invited “all inhabitants of the Imperium Romanum to participate in the Revival of Classical culture and its ethical values while still preserving their national identity”; Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, 336. See also Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 3–7.
189. Regarding Rome 34, 61–65, 102; see also the discussion of Aristides in ch. 1.
190. Huskinson, “Looking for Culture, Identity and Power,” 20. See also Woolf, Rome, 228–29; Hardwick, “Concepts of Peace,” 350–51.
191. At least at the level of the empire as a whole. In addition, one could also inquire into the ways in which the identity held in common among gentile Christians more generally was adapted or refined within specific ethnic areas or Christian subgroups.
192. See Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 26.
193. On the topic generally, see Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity; Richter, Cosmopolis; Goldhill, Being Greek under Rome; Huskinson, Experiencing Rome; Swain, Hellenism and Empire; Balsdon, Romans and Aliens.
194. “One approach to the ‘Second Sophistic’ is to see it as an attempt by Greek intellectuals in the Roman world to deal with their present subordination to Rome by seeking to revive a glorious Greek tradition from the past”; Richter, Cosmopolis, 7. On the significance of the Second Sophistic (Greek writers of the first and second centuries CE) for the issue of identity construction, Richter’s work is especially significant.
195. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 107; Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty, 337.
196. See, e.g., Histories 6.2.5 and the discussion that follows. Again, Polybius is followed here by Aristides; see above, ch. 1, n. 11.
197. Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty, 337; see also Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 107.
198. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 249.
199. Richter, Cosmopolis, 114.
200. On this aspect of Dionysius, see Richter, Cosmopolis, 113–15; Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 234; Rebecca Preston, “Roman Questions, Greek Answers: Plutarch and the Construction of Identity,” in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100.
201. See especially Preston, “Roman Questions, Greek Answers,” 100–101.
202. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum, 263.
203. Richter, Cosmopolis, 125. Further: “It is the flexibility of Isocrates’ cultural and ethnic logic that informs and indeed makes possible the ways in which intellectuals such as Aelius Aristides speak of the Roman empire as the typological fulfillment of the Panhellenic ideal” (p. 111).
204. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 26; Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, 161–92. See also Hardwick, “Concepts of Peace,” 350–56.
205. On these differences, see especially Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians; also James Rives, “Religion in the Roman Empire,” in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire, ed. Janet Huskinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 269–71.
206. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 3–7; the phrase is introduced on p. 5.
207. In a speech recorded by his teacher, Dio of Prusa (Corinthian Discourse [Or. 37] 26–27).
208. See Richter, Cosmopolis, 138–60; and Joseph Geiger, “The Jew and the Other: Doubtful and Multiple Identities in the Roman Empire,” in Jewish Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern, ed. Lee I. Levine and Daniel R. Schwartz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 136–46.