Non-Jews who became Christ-believers in the formative period of the movement found themselves in a social world in which the binary distinction between Jews and non-Jews (ethnē: “gentiles”) functioned as a foundational element in the discourses of identity. More to the point, they found themselves in a situation where they were identified as belonging to the non-Jewish half of this binary. Jewish believers, those who represented the continuing core of the movement, considered them as ethnē and assumed that they would accept this designation (a form of benevolent othering) as part of their basic identity as Christ-believers. To be sure, there were variations (as we have seen) in the way in which this ascribed identity was understood. In situations where it was important to emphasize the difference between gentile Christ-believers and the larger gentile world, ethnē could denote an identity that was left behind with their new allegiance to Christ (e.g., “when you were ethnē”; 1 Cor 12:2). But this did not erase their basic identity as ethnē; while they no longer were part of “the ethnē who do not know God” (1 Thess 4:5), from the perspective of Jewish Christ-believers, they were “the ethnē who were turning to God” (Acts 15:19). In either case, ethnē was an essential element of the new identity ascribed to them.
A lot of scholarly time and energy has been spent on questions having to do with the origins and development of the movement and the place of the gentiles within it. But very little attention has been given to the perceptions of non-Jews themselves.1 What did non-Jewish Christ-believers think of the identity term? What did it mean for them? To what extent did they resist the designation? Alternatively, were they prepared to assume it as part of their new identity? If so, how and on what terms? Such questions have undergirded our discussion to this point, and we are now in a position to address them directly.
At this point, it will be useful to recall briefly some of the discussion carried out in chapter 4; we will look first at the emergence and development of Christ-belief among non-Jews and then at the place of ethnē in the identity ascribed to such believers by their Jewish fellow believers.
As we observed in chapter 4, the movement first took shape in the form of a messianic advance party or renewal movement, self-consciously locating itself within the Jewish people as a whole, centered in Jerusalem but appearing as well in other Jewish cities and centers in Judea and environs.2 While non-Jews soon began to show an interest in the movement and its message, this did not in itself represent any significant departure from patterns found in other Jewish groups and communities. The phenomenon of gentile attraction to Judaism—with resultant groups of sympathizers and, in some cases, proselytes—was apparently a typical feature of Jewish life, and one should not be surprised if Josephus’s description of the Jewish community in Antioch—“they were constantly attracting to their religious ceremonies multitudes of Greeks, and these they had in some measure incorporated with themselves” (Jewish War 7.45)—was also applicable to Jewish Christ-groups in Antioch and elsewhere. With the emergence of a deliberate and energetic appeal to gentiles more directly, however, and the eventual conception of a universal mission to all the ethnē, the Christ-movement began to display a distinctive profile that set it apart from other Jewish groups.
After an initial stage, then, when the movement consisted exclusively of Jewish Christ-groups (especially in Jerusalem),3 the phenomenon of gentile Christ-belief developed in several forms and configurations: the inclusion of some gentiles within largely Jewish Christ-communities (e.g., Antioch); a more substantial proportion of gentiles within mixed-ethnic communities (e.g., probably Rome, the Matthean church); predominantly gentile communities, but still within a Jerusalem-centered movement (many of Paul’s communities). Not discussed directly in chapter 4, but certainly within the scope of our study, are the various forms of distinctively gentile groups that come into view in the second century—proto-orthodox gentile Christianity, the network of Marcionite communities, the various groups traditionally lumped together as Gnosticism, and other variations and subgroups. While there is a certain temporal progression to these developments, one is not to imagine a smooth linear chronological process, especially one in which each stage fades away with the emergence of the next. The point, rather, is that what has traditionally been called “gentile Christianity” existed in several distinct and temporally overlapping forms.
Nevertheless, this reference to temporal progression raises the issue of the parting of the ways, discussed in general terms in chapter 2. While I do not want to constrain this investigation of identity construction among gentile Christ-believers by pressing it into any particular position on the issue, it is nevertheless the case that the two issues are related and thus that any discussion of gentile Christian identity needs to be carried out in conversation with the parting-of-the-ways discussion. For one thing, the eventual emergence of proto-orthodox gentile Christianity as the dominant form of the movement represents one of the two endpoints of the process that parting-of-the-ways theories seek to explain. Even if this two-ways bifurcation is a misleading oversimplification of a much more complex and multistrand process, the emergence of gentile forms of Christ-belief remains a significant aspect and outcome of the process. In addition, however one weighs the various factors that might have contributed to the process (the effect of the Jewish revolts, the theological ideology of the Christ-groups and the exegetical arguments that supported it, and so on), the dramatic geographical spread of gentile forms of the movement and the demographic shift that this represents have to be seen not simply as an aspect and outcome of the process but as significant factors as well.4
Without wanting to overestimate the significance of the Jewish revolts,5 for purposes of convenience, I will proceed with the discussion of gentile identity construction in three chronological periods.6 We will deal with the first two in this chapter, leaving the third for chapter 7. (1) Up to the end of the first Jewish revolt (i.e., 70 CE). In this period, the Christ-movement was marked by a clear Jewish center of gravity, both in the role of the Jerusalem church and in the Jewish identity of the leaders. While there is no clearly identifiable gentile literature from this period, the Jewish material (primarily the undisputed letters of Paul and the traditions underlying Acts) provide invaluable, albeit partial, information concerning the origins of the movement, including the inclusion of non-Jews and the use of ethnē as an ascribed identity, together with some muffled echoes of what the non-Jews might have thought of the term.7 (2) Between the destruction of Jerusalem and the Bar Kokhba revolt (i.e., 70–135 CE). This period witnesses the continuation of Jewish and mixed-ethnic forms of the movement, an apparent increase in the number of gentile believers and groups, and the emergence of gentile leaders and literature. Although the sources do not provide much by way of historical information, literature of Jewish provenance provides further evidence for the ways in which gentile inclusion is understood and the use of ethnē as an identity term, while gentile literature provides us with glimpses into various gentile Christ-groups and some indication of gentile responses to the use of ethnē as an ascribed identity.8 To a certain extent, the choice of the revolt as a terminus ad quem is a matter of convenience. For our purposes, the significant difference has to do with ethnē as an identity term: in contrast to the gentile Christian literature that begins to appear toward the middle of the second century, material from the earlier period (roughly the latter third of the first century and the first third of the second) displays much less interest in the term.9 While the Bar Kokhba revolt may have been one of the factors contributing to the shift, nothing in the following analysis of the material depends on any assumptions about a causal connection. (3) From Justin to the early third century. This period is marked by the emergence or increasing dominance of several competing forms of distinctly gentile Christ-belief—the followers of Marcion; those groups commonly labeled as Gnostic, associated with teachers such as Basilides, Valentinus, and others; and the proto-orthodox Christians, precursors of the orthodox form of Christianity that later became normative.10 Marcion shows some interest in the binary distinction between the Jews and the other nations, though discerning his attitude toward the term ethnē itself is problematic, given the indirect nature of our evidence. Most of our attention in this period will be given to proto-orthodox literature, which is marked by its more more deliberate engagement with the Greco-Roman world and its thought forms, and to the use of ethnē (along with gentes and nationes) in the context of this engagement.
In chapter 4 we also looked at the term ethnē in extant literature produced by Jewish Christ-believers through our periods of interest, with particular attention to its use as an ascribed identity. As we observed, some of the pertinent material simply corresponds to existing Jewish conceptions and attitudes, especially those texts that present the ethnē as non-Jewish outsiders, whose practices are sinful and whose way of life is to be avoided.11 In other material, the ethnē appear as objects of mission—disciples in the making (Matt 28:19) and potential Christ-believers to whom the gospel is to be proclaimed.12 In the case of those non-Jews who respond positively to the mission, we noted two different ways in which ethnē functioned as an identity term. On the one hand, it was a continuing aspect of their identity as Christ-believers—“you ethnē,” as Paul says to the non-Jewish Christ-believers in Rome (Rom 11:13); “to the believers of the ethnē,” as the Jerusalem apostles wrote in the apostolic decree (Acts 15:23).13 On the other, it was an identity that was left behind when they became Christ-believers—“when you were ethnē,” as Paul can also say to his readers in Corinth (1 Cor 12:2).14 The fact that Paul can use both identity designations with respect to his converts (albeit in different letters) suggests that we need to expect a certain fluidity in the use of ethnē as an identity term.
Further, we attempted to set this material within some larger patterns of identity construction, by proposing a typology of ways in which Jewish Christ-believers construed their place with respect to Israel as a whole and the terms on which non-Jews were to be included. In constructing this typology, we interpreted the pertinent textual evidence on the basis of the ways in which it might have been read and understood by gentile Christ-believers. That is, we were not concerned to arrive at a single, most probable, originally intended meaning. The resultant typology consisted of three primary types, with several subtypes:
1. Christ as the Messiah appointed for Israel; believing gentiles brought into relationship with Israel as a whole in accordance with already-existing patterns
1.1 Gentiles as incorporated into Israel as proselytes
1.2 Gentiles as associated with Israel by adhering to patterns of righteousness appropriate for gentiles
2. Christ as inaugurating a new era of fulfillment for (a remnant within) Israel, which gentiles are invited to share
2.1 Gentile believers as having been drawn in to share with Israel—or, at least, with the Christ-believing remnant of Israel—in the promised blessings now being accomplished for Israel by its Messiah
2.2 Gentile believers as having come in to replace that portion of Israel that had failed to respond, or, more generally, as having an opportunity for salvation that has somehow been made possible by that failure
3. Christ as inaugurating a new era and a new Jewish-centered people, in which the traditional distinction between Jews and gentiles has been transcended or overshadowed (though not eliminated)
3.1 The Mosaic covenant as having had a legitimate preparatory purpose as it was traditionally understood and practiced, though this purpose has now been brought to completion in Christ
3.2 The nature and purpose of the Mosaic covenant itself as reworked and reinterpreted on the basis of the new belief in Christ
Without repeating the full analysis and descriptions presented in chapter 4, we can provide a brief summary of the distinguishing features of each main type by looking at their different approaches to a number of key elements. In type 1, Christ’s role as Messiah is seen primarily as having to do with the future; Jesus is the “messiah appointed for [Israel]” (cf. Acts 3:20), who will carry out his messianic activity at the parousia. The other two types place more emphasis on the present—on the exalted status that Christ is already occupying and the saving role that he is already carrying out.
Related to this are different approaches to the fulfillment of Jewish eschatological expectation. Type 1 is of a piece with other Jewish expectations about “the time of universal restoration that God announced beforehand through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21), the primary difference being the belief that God has disclosed the identity of the Messiah ahead of time by raising Jesus from the dead.15 Types 2 and 3 place more emphasis on the present experience of eschatological realities, though type 2 remains closer to traditional expectations of what those realities look like.
With respect to the relationship between Jewish Christ-believers and Israel, in type 1 they function as heralds of the coming Messiah, and thus as a Jewish renewal group standing in full solidarity with Israel as God’s covenant people. While type 2 is characterized by more of a remnant stance with respect to Israel as a whole, it is nevertheless marked by a continuing commitment on the part of Jewish Christ-believers to the traditional, covenant-centered identity markers and practice and thus to a continuing distinction from gentile Christ-believers. In type 3, the emphasis falls more on the existence of a new people, consisting of Jewish and gentile believers alike, marked by a new common identity. While this new people is understood to stand in some form of essential continuity with Israel, the emphasis on newness effects and reflects a greater distance from the continuing Jewish people.
Picking up on one aspect of the preceding point, types 1 and 2 both attach ongoing significance to the traditional identity markers and practice of the Mosaic covenant, whereas in type 3, these have been superseded in one way or another by the new realities brought into being through Christ.16
Types 2 and 3 are characterized by a commitment to an active mission to non-Jews as an element of the present age of fulfillment, and a willingness to accept them as fellow Christ-believers without requiring them to become full torah-observers. In type 1, there was probably the expectation of a significant influx of non-Jews at the time of eschatological fulfillment at the parousia, but this was accompanied by a willingness to accept gentile Christ-believers in the present on the basis of terms and patterns already established within the Jewish community.
Finally, types 1 and 2 maintain a distinction between Jewish and gentile Christ-believers, seeing the community of Jewish believers as standing in an essential relationship with larger Israel and (with the exception of full proselytes) viewing gentile Christ-believers as having come to share in blessings that belonged properly and first of all to Israel. In type 3, the distinctions between Jews and gentiles have been transcended by the new state of affairs brought into being by Christ, which results in a new people consisting of Jews and gentiles on an equal basis. Nevertheless, this new people sees itself as standing in some form of continuity with scriptural Israel and as bearing an identity that is grounded in that of Israel.
In each of these types and subtypes, ethnē appears as an aspect of the identities ascribed to non-Jews who come to believe in Christ. In our investigation of how they responded to ethnē as an identity term, we need to pay attention not only to the use of the term narrowly considered—in particular, whether it denoted an ongoing identity or an identity left behind—but also to these larger identity structures within which the term was used.
Before turning to the textual evidence directly, however, it will be useful to engage in some preliminary considerations about gentile responses to ethnē as an identity term. Here it would be helpful to know something about how non-Jews more generally perceived this ascribed identity. Unfortunately, explicit evidence is lacking. Of course, there is a considerable body of material dealing with Greek and Roman perceptions of Jews and Judaism, most of it made readily accessible by Menahem Stern in his indispensable collection.17 But while this material touches on many aspects of Jewish life and practice, with a mixture of scorn and admiration,18 no notice is taken of the distinctively Jewish use of ethnē as a term for non-Jewish nations and individuals.19 To be sure, evidence for proselytes and sympathizers indicates that a considerable number of non-Jews not only became aware of the usage but also were able to come to some sort of terms with it. To go further, however, and to ask about how they did this or what awareness of the term there might have been among non-Jews more generally would take us beyond the available evidence.
Despite the lack of evidence, however, it will be useful to engage in some a priori considerations about gentile responses to ethnē as an identity term. On the one hand, we can take it as probable that non-Jews would have found the term off-putting and would have been reluctant to accept it as an ascribed identity. Being identified as some different group’s other is not something that is readily embraced. As a Jewish designation for outsiders, the descriptor ethnē would have had little more natural appeal for non-Jews than barbarian would have had for non-Greeks.
In addition, in contrast to barbaros, this use of ethnē would have struck non-Jews as quite odd. Unlike barbaros, a univocal term originally coined for the purpose of denoting non-Greeks, ethnē and its singular ethnos were common everyday terms, used to denote ethnic people groups. The use of ethnē to denote every ethnic people group but one would have gone against the linguistic grain.20
Further, as we have already observed, by the first century CE, the usage had undergone a further stage of development in that it came to denote not only non-Jewish people groups (nations) but also multiplicities of non-Jewish individuals. This development produced an odd disjunction between the singular ethnos and the plural ethnē. Since ethnos in its basic sense referred to an ethnic people group, this in-group use of the plural to denote individuals would have struck outsiders as curious at best. If Peter was customarily eating with ethnē in Antioch (Gal 2:12), how would one describe a situation where he was eating with one of them? While ethnē functioned as the plural of ethnos when ethnic people groups were in view, ethnos could hardly serve as the singular of ethnē when it denoted a group of non-Jewish individuals.21 The oddness of the term would no doubt have been off-putting for many non-Jews.
On the other hand, however, and thinking more directly of potential converts, these considerations would not necessarily have been determinative. Any non-Jews who had become proselytes to Judaism or members of Christ-groups had, in so doing, already demonstrated a willingness to undertake a significant reconfiguration of their identities. Despite the oddness of the term ethnē, and even if it might have had an initially alienating effect, it is not unreasonable to expect that they would have been predisposed to accept this new identity as something that came with the territory.
We can find some additional support for this reasonable expectation from contemporary social-scientific studies of conversion.22 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.23 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 narrative patterns characteristic of 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.”24 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.25 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.
With respect to non-Jewish converts in the early stages of the movement, then, we can reasonably expect that they would have been prepared to accept the characterization of them as ethnē and to incorporate this ascribed identity, in some manner, into the new version of themselves that they had come to accept. To be sure, there was an element of fluidity in the manner in which the ascribed identity was formulated: an identity that had been left behind in the turn to Christ, in one formulation, and an identity that continued to define them as (a distinct group of) Christ-believers, in another. However, even in the first case, ethnē constitutes an enduring aspect—albeit in a negative form—of the new identity taken on in the turn to Christ. It is also worth noting in passing that this new identity did not displace anyone’s primary ethnic identity; non-Jewish believers continued to be identified as Cyreneans, Galatians, Macedonians, Bithynians, and so on. As with barbaros, ethnē functioned as a kind of transethnic or hyperethnic category.
We can buttress and amplify this insight from the study of conversion by placing it within the larger discussion of social identity that was summarized in chapter 2. There we began with the seminal work of Fredrik Barth on ethnicity and his argument—now widely accepted—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 (genealogical descent, language, land, way of life, religious practice, political organization, shared history).26 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.
Then we noted how this understanding of ethnicity connected with the study of social identity more generally, looking in particular at the work of Richard Jenkins.27 One useful aspect of his work has to do with externally imposed identities. Drawing on Marx’s distinction between “groups” and “categories,” Jenkins makes a distinction between “categorization,” identities ascribed from without, and “group identification,” internally constructed self-definitions.28 Part of the process of self-definition involves the extent to which group members are willing to internalize the externally ascribed categories. If the categories are negative, the effectiveness of the ascription depends on the power of those doing the ascribing and the extent to which the category corresponds to the social realities of the recipients.29 But Jenkins observes that the theory can be applied to positive instances as well. In such cases—which would include the ascription of the category ethnē to non-Jewish Christ-believers—the willingness of recipients to internalize such categories would depend on the degree of authority they were prepared to grant to those doing the ascribing and on the degree to which the category corresponded with aspects of their own social realities. In the early stages of the movement, both factors were such as to foster a willingness on the part of non-Jewish converts to accept and internalize the ascribed identity.
However, while this might have been the case in the early stages of the movement, when Jewish Christ-believers constituted the great majority and were thus in a position to shape the new identities being assumed by (the relatively few) non-Jewish Christ-believers, this was not the only demographic configuration during our period of interest. In the early stages, ethnē as an ascribed identity could simply be taken for granted; it was simply a given part of the identity transformation that a non-Jew underwent in becoming part of a Christ-group. But what about situations where gentiles constituted a significant proportion of a group or where a group was predominantly or completely gentile? To draw in another aspect of social identity theory, what about situations where the primary boundary experienced by gentile Christ-believers was not the one differentiating themselves from Jews and Jewish Christ-believers but the one between them and the wider Greco-Roman world?30
In such situations, ethnē in its distinctively Jewish sense could well lose much of its taken-for-granted force. More in control of their own identity negotiation, gentile Christians might be prepared to let it fall into disuse or, at least, to prefer other more salient terms, unless there were specific reasons to retain it. Usefulness, rather than givenness, might become the determining factor. Here is where the use of the term in the wider Greco-Roman world, especially in Roman imperial discourse, will become important. As we have already seen in our preliminary foray into the work of Eusebius (ch. 1), ethnē became very useful as an identity term as gentile Christianity negotiated social space for itself in the Greco-Roman world. We will explore this in more detail as we proceed (especially in ch. 7).
At this point, we turn from a priori and theoretical considerations to the textual evidence itself. What we might expect to have been the case is one thing, evidence is quite another. Still, social-scientific models can help us look at the evidence we do have in new ways and, perhaps, wring new information from it.
In the first stage of our investigation, from the beginnings of the movement up to the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, what evidence we have that pertains to non-Jewish Christ-believers is indirect, stemming from Jewish sources. Of the Jewish material identified in chapter 4, we can have a good measure of confidence in assigning the following to this period: the undisputed letters of Paul; the document Q; other pre-Gospels traditions; the Gospel of Mark (in approximate terms); and the traditions utilized in Acts.31 Of this list, while the material pertaining to the Gospels indicates that ethnē was used by Jewish Christ-believers with reference to non-Jews, it contains nothing that might reflect gentile attitudes toward ethnē as an ascribed identity and thus is of little help. Gentile Christ-believers and groups do come into view, however, in the Pauline epistles and the traditional material in Acts, which thus provide us with some material to go on. Even so, they do not offer any direct access to the perceptions of the gentile believers themselves. The best we can do is to listen in on the conversations reflected in the letters and in the narrative material, with one ear attuned to the muffled sounds that might be audible from the other end, and with the other to the range of ways in which Jewish Christ-believers conceived of the terms on which non-Jews were to be included.
This exercise can draw some inspiration from a number of other investigations that have attempted, through creative listening, to discern and recover what Concannon calls the “spectral voices” that speak only faintly from the margins of our texts.32 Such investigations usually draw on available literary, inscriptional, and archaeological material to reconstruct the social environments assumed and addressed by the texts, and then use these reconstructions as a means of amplifying these faintly heard voices.33 While such approaches have been pioneered by feminist scholars,34 several more recent studies have focused on issues of ethnicity and identity.35 Some of this work, however, is deliberately speculative—using imaginative reconstructions of possible alternative voices to produce thicker and more layered understandings of a particular text or to decenter the normative voice of the text.36 While such reconstructions can have a certain heuristic value, our specific focus here—on what the texts can reveal about the identity perceptions of non-Jewish Christ-believers—requires us rather to look for the probable than to imagine the possible. We will concentrate, then, on material that provides us with more probable indications of how gentile Christ-believers responded to ethnē as an identity term.
As we proceed, two clusters of material will be of particular interest. One of these is focused on Paul’s rebuke of apparently protosupersessionistic attitudes among those whom he addresses as “you ethnē” (Rom 11:13–32). The other has to do with indications (from Galatians especially) that some gentile believers were attracted by the invitation to undergo circumcision and thus to cross over the line dividing the ethnē from the Jews. Between them, they provide evidence for two quite different responses to the ascribed identity. By so doing, they also alert us to the possibility of other responses lying in between the two.
Before looking at these two cases directly, however, we can begin with some more general observations. First, Paul clearly assumes that his gentile readers are familiar with the term ethnē in its distinctively Jewish sense and are prepared to accept it as part of their new identity. This plural form appears some forty-one times in the seven undisputed letters: Romans (twenty-five times);37 1 Corinthians (three); 2 Corinthians (one); Galatians (ten); 1 Thessalonians (two). The matter-of-fact way in which he uses it suggests strongly that it was a familiar element of their new vocabulary as Christ-believers. In the autobiographical section of his epistle to the Galatians, for example, Paul not only uses ethnē with respect to his apostolic call (“God … called me … so that I might proclaim [his Son] among the ethnē”; 1:15–16) and preaching (“the gospel that I proclaim among the ethnē”; 2:2), with the evident assumption that the term was familiar, but he also assumes that his readers would understand themselves to be the recipients of this proclamation (“so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you”; 2:5). His usage here and elsewhere implies that he had used the term freely in his initial preaching and his ongoing face-to-face encounters with the new believers.
In addition, Paul’s letters indicate that ethnē was common currency in ekklēsiai founded by others. In Galatians, the account of his interactions with James, John, and Peter in Jerusalem (2:1–10), and with Peter and Barnabas in Antioch (2:11–14), suggests strongly that the term was already used among the communities in Jerusalem and Antioch. Further, his letter to the Romans, which contains more occurrences of ethnē than any of the other letters that bear his name, was addressed to a group that was not founded by him and that he had not yet visited. Not only does ethnē feature prominently in the argument of the letter, but he also addresses his readers directly as “you ethnē” in 11:13 and, by implication, in 1:5–6 and 1:13 as well. Clearly, he assumes that the believers in Rome are also familiar with the term. Further, eight of the occurrences of ethnē are in scriptural quotations, which indicates that he assumes an awareness of Israel’s Scriptures as well. While he has not had direct experience of the community, he apparently knows enough about it (as suggested by his list of greetings in ch. 16) that we can take his assumptions as well founded. In other words, the epistle to the Romans adds to the evidence suggesting that the term was known and used more widely among non-Jewish Christ-groups.
Further, there is no hint in any of Paul’s letters that the term was controversial or that the ascribed identity was resisted. Nowhere does Paul give any indication that he needs to explain the term or defend its use. Not only was the term familiar among gentile Christ-believers, but it seems to have been acceptable as an identity term as well.
Turning to the Acts of the Apostles, here the evidence is less compelling, partly because we cannot be certain of the nature and extent of its pre–70 CE sources;38 for the most part, Acts will come into our discussion as a piece of post-70 gentile literature. Still, there are two narrative passages to be considered, each of which portrays Jewish Christ-believers as using ethnē in the context of an address to non-Jews, with some indication of a positive gentile response.39
One of these has to do with the visit of Paul and Barnabas to Pisidian Antioch, a visit that involved an initial sermon to a mixed synagogue audience (“Israelites and those who fear God”; 13:16) and a subsequent encounter the following Sabbath. In this second incident (13:44–52), after experiencing opposition from Jewish members of the synagogue, Paul declares that since they had rejected “the word of God,” “we are now turning to the ethnē,” punctuating the declaration with a quotation of Isa 49:6 (“I have set you to be a light for the ethnē”). The narrative continues: “When the ethnē heard this, they were glad and praised the word of the Lord” (13:48).40 It would be rash, however, to build anything on this narrative detail. For one thing, the enthusiastic response of the non-Jewish hearers would tell us little about their attitude toward the term itself. But more importantly, the sequence that plays out in the narrative—preaching to Jews, opposition, turning to the ethnē—is a characteristic Lukan pattern (cf. 18:5–6; 28:17–28) and thus cannot be attributed to traditional material with any confidence.
We might be on more solid ground, however, with the account of the apostolic decree—the letter written by the Jerusalem apostles and elders to the “brothers from the ethnē in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia” (Acts 15:23), conveying the decision that was made concerning gentile believers, circumcision, and the law of Moses. Aspects of the letter as it is found here (15:23–29) suggest that it was drawn, in whole or in part, from traditional material.41 Again, we probably cannot build anything on Luke’s description of the reception of the letter by the Antioch believers (“they rejoiced at the exhortation”; 15:31). However, if Luke’s account draws on traditional material, this might suggest that an original letter was preserved by the congregations addressed, which could imply a general acceptance of ethnē as an identity term.
At a general level, then, we are justified in expecting a broad, low-level acceptance of the term by non-Jewish believers as an aspect of their identity. This is suggested by studies of the phenomenon of conversion itself and is probably confirmed by the material we have examined from Paul’s letters and Acts.
In addition to this basic, low-level acceptance of the term, Paul’s letters contain material that enables us to hear, in a muffled sort of way, the voices of some gentile believers themselves, as they speak about their own identity with respect to Jewish Christ-believers. What emerges is evidence for two more specific—and quite different—responses to ethnē as an identity term.
The first set of voices belongs to those in Galatia who were being encouraged by rival teachers to allow themselves to be circumcised and thus to become full members of Abraham’s family of descendants. In other words, they were being encouraged to become proselytes. While the related account in Acts 15 helps put the Galatian situation into the context of a larger enterprise and debate, what sets Galatians apart is the indication that some were finding the arguments persuasive. In Acts, the “teaching” that was brought by “certain individuals from Judea” (15:1) is presented simply as a burdensome imposition.42 That the gentile believers in Antioch did not respond positively to this teaching (at least in the view of the author) can be inferred from the statement that they “rejoiced” at the (less burdensome) news contained in the letter from the Jerusalem apostles and elders (15:31).43 In Galatians, by contrast, although the gentile believers have not yet fully succumbed to the arguments of the rival teachers—they have not yet “let [themselves] be circumcised” (5:2)—it is clear that the prospect is appealing,44 that they desire to take this step,45 and that they are already turning in that direction.46
As he attempts to dissuade them from taking this decisive step, Paul frames his argument in terms of the sharp binary between Jews and gentiles. The term ethnē appears ten times in the first three chapters, half of the time in explicit contrast with one Jewish identity term or another.47 In other words, Paul frames their contemplated action as a desire to abandon one identity (as ethnē) for another (as Ioudaioi). Since it is almost certain that the Galatian Christ-believers had become familiar with the binary from the outset of their relationship with Paul, there is every reason to expect that they would have already understood their situation in these terms. That is, even in their desire to Judaize and thus to abandon their identity as ethnē, they had accepted and internalized the ascribed identity.
The other case to be considered here comes into view in Rom 11, where Paul, addressing himself to “you ethnē (11:13),” rebukes some of them for what could be described as protosupersessionistic attitudes. After he has introduced the image of Israel as an olive tree, with some natural (Jewish) branches broken off and a wild (gentile) olive shoot having been grafted in, he gives voice to a gentile interlocutor: “You will say, ‘Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in’” (11:13).48 We have already had occasion to look at this passage, in our attempt to construct a typology of the different ways in which Jewish Christ-believers conceived of the inclusion of non-Jews within the new movement.49 There is no need to repeat what was said there about Paul’s rebuke of the position or of his own understanding concerning the connection between the breaking off of some branches and the ingrafting of another. What is important here is that he can conceive of someone, speaking on behalf of gentile believers as a whole, as adopting an attitude of superiority toward Jewish outsiders and as holding to a rejection-replacement understanding of their own position as gentile Christ-believers.
It is not necessary to see this position as something developed in toto in a non-Jewish context. As we observed as part of the typology developed in chapter 4, it is probable that some Jewish Christ-believers, seeing themselves as constituting a remnant within Israel (in distinction from other Jews who had refused to listen to the promised prophet like Moses [cf. Acts 3:22–24]), also saw gentile Christ-believers as constituting a replacement for those within Israel who had failed to believe. An important element of this type, however, was the essential role assigned to Jewish Christ-believers as the remnant of Israel for whom the messianic promises were being fulfilled. What is new in Rom 11 is the evidence that this model was being adopted enthusiastically by non-Jews who were also giving it an arrogant, anti-Jewish spin, a harbinger of the exclusively gentile Christian form of supersessionism that developed later.
To be sure, it is Paul himself who identifies those who hold this position as ethnē; the passage does not provide us with explicit evidence that they would have formulated the position in these terms. Further, we cannot be certain that this position was actually held by a group of non-Jewish Christ-believers in Rome. Nevertheless, for his argument to be effective, the profile of the non-Jewish interlocutor must at least have been recognizable to his intended readers. What the passage does suggest, then, is that his readers were aware of non-Jewish Christ-believers who perceived themselves as constituting a distinct group in contrast to the Jews. The most readily available term for such a self-perception was ethnē.
Paul’s letters, then, provide us with evidence for two quite contrasting responses on the part of gentile Christ-believers to ethnē as an ascribed identity—one in which the term was enthusiastically adopted, together with a degree of arrogant superiority toward (unbelieving) Jews, and another in which the identity category was accepted, but with a desire to leave it behind in favor of a fully Jewish identity. While we may well wish that more gentile voices had been preserved from this early period, the fact that those to which we do have access represent such contrasting positions is valuable in itself. If the extremes were present, we can be fairly confident that intervening positions were represented as well.
This period witnesses the continuation of Jewish and mixed-ethnic forms of the movement, an apparent increase in the number of gentile believers and groups, and the emergence of gentile leaders and literature. In examining the literature that can be dated to this period (with varying levels of confidence), it is not always an easy task to identify the ethnicity of the authors—that is, whether authors are Jewish or non-Jewish. Indeed, in some cases (especially the Pastoral Epistles), it is striking to note how often standard reference works contain lengthy discussions of authorship that decide in favor of pseudonymity, but that then have nothing to say about the ethnic identity of the actual author. In any case, literature that, in my opinion, probably emanated from gentile circles during this period and that uses the term ethnē in pertinent ways is represented primarily by the following: Luke-Acts, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, 1 Clement, 2 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, the letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apology of Aristides.
Here we are interested in the use of ethnē—especially in its particular sense as a denotation for non-Jewish nations—in connection with questions of gentile Christian self-definition. How did gentile Christ-believers understand their emergence as a distinct entity, in relation to scriptural Israel, on the one hand, and present-day Jews (including Jewish Christ-believers), on the other, and what use did they make of the identifier ethnē?50 Speaking in broad and general terms, with the exception of Luke-Acts, this literature for the most part does not display very much in the way of sustained, thematic interest in ethnē as an identity term, especially as an aspect of Christian identity. Still, in none of the occurrences is ethnē used in simply trivial or inconsequential ways. In each case, we can discern some connection to the themes and identity concerns of the texts and, in varying degrees, to questions concerning gentile Christian identity.
The details will emerge as we look at the pieces of literature one by one. While the writings do not fall into any readily apparent sequence, the usage that appears in the greatest number of texts (six) is that of an identity term for outsiders.51 We will begin here, dealing with the writings in a rough order of increasing interest in the identity questions that concern us.52 Then we will go on to the remaining writings, in the same order.53
We begin with Polycarp and his letter To the Philippians. Unlike some of the other authors whose work we will examine here, we have a considerable body of information about Polycarp, including his letter to the church in Philippi, a letter to him by Ignatius, an account of his martyrdom written under the aegis of his own church in Smyrna, and various comments by other early writers (Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius).54 While this material contains no explicit indication of his ethnic origins, there is nothing at all to suggest that he might have been a Jewish Christ-believer. The picture that emerges in the Martyrdom of Polycarp—where Polycarp and his followers are identified as “Christians,” in sharp contradistinction both to “the Jews” and to the polytheistic ethnē—no doubt provides us with an accurate picture of his social location and sense of identity.55 As bishop of Smyrna, with a much wider sphere of influence, Polycarp was firmly embedded in the emerging proto-orthodox form of gentile Christianity.
Polycarp’s letter to the Philippian church falls into two parts, in two different ways. Linguistically, all of the extant Greek manuscripts end abruptly at the end of chapter 9.56 The remainder of the letter is available in a Latin version, itself a translation of the Greek. With respect to content, the letter as it has survived seems to represent the conflation of two separate letters to the Philippian church, written by Polycarp at different times. In chapter 9, Polycarp includes Ignatius in a list of those (including “Paul himself and the other apostles”) who have suffered and died and who are now “in the place they deserved, with the Lord, with whom they also suffered” (9.2). In chapter 13, however, Ignatius is apparently still alive. Polycarp has received a letter from him, in which he requests that Polycarp take charge of sending on to Syria what he (Ignatius) had written to the Philippians (13.1). After discussing this request, Polycarp goes on to ask whether they can provide him with any news “about Ignatius and those who are with him” (13.2), which implies that Ignatius was still alive or, at least, that Polycarp assumed this to be the case.
Since the pioneering work of Harrison in 1936, the dominant scholarly opinion has been that the extant form of the text contains two epistles—one (chs. 13–14) written while Ignatius was still on his way to Rome (ca. 110 CE), the other (chs. 1–12) written after his death, some time later (130–140?)—though other positions continue to find supporters.57 The letter contains two passages of interest (10.2; 11.2)—both in the Latin section and, if the theory of two letters holds, both in the (chronologically) later letter. In both, gentes appears as a term denoting outsiders.
Near the beginning of his epistle, Polycarp says that he is “writing these things about righteousness” (To the Philippians 3.1), and this is as good a characterization as any of the epistle in its overall thrust. Most of the first six chapters consists of exhortations addressed to various segments of the community (wives, widows, deacons, young men, virgins, presbyters), in which he encourages them to “walk in the commandment of the Lord” (4.1), a blanket term for standard Christian ethical teaching. In chapter 7, he turns briefly to theology, warning his readers against false teaching, especially the denial “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (7.1). But this quickly moves into an exhortation to imitate Christ in his suffering (ch. 8), with Ignatius, Paul, and others being held up as models (ch. 9).
As Polycarp sums up his exhortations in chapter 10, he introduces the idea of maintaining a good reputation among outsiders, urging his readers to keep “your interactions with the outsiders [in gentibus] above reproach, that by your good works you may receive praise and the Lord not be blasphemed because of you” (To the Philippians 10.2). The theme appears elsewhere (e.g., 2 Clement 13.1–3; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 17.2; cf. Rom 2:24), in each case with a citation of LXX Isa 52:5. Although there is no explicit citation of Scripture here, the influence of Isa 52:5 is readily apparent in the reference to blasphemy.
In chapter 11, he turns from general exhortation to discussion of a particular case of misbehavior. The case concerned a certain Valens, formerly a presbyter in the Philippian church, who had abused his office through some form of financial impropriety (“the love of money”) and was thus deposed. In discussing the case, he makes a general statement about such persons: “Anyone who cannot avoid the love of money … will be judged as if among the outsiders [inter gentes] who know nothing about the judgment of the Lord” (11.2).
In both cases, then, gentes functions as a term for outsiders, one side of an identity binary, with members of Polycarp’s group—variously designated as “the church of God,” “the saints,” “the brotherhood,” and so on—on the other side. In both cases, individuals rather than national people groups are clearly in view. While the Greek has not survived, there can be little doubt that gentes renders an original ethnē in each case. Given the profile of this usage (i.e., outsiders, individuals), it must have developed in some way under the influence of the range of identities ascribed by Jewish Christ-believers that we examined in chapter 4. Unlike some other literature to be studied here, however, Polycarp’s letter provides us with virtually no information on how he might understand the identity of “the church of God” in relationship with scriptural Israel, the earliest Jewish Christ-believers, or local Jewish communities in his own day. While his letter is peppered with quotations from and allusions to apostolic writings, the echo of Isa 52:5 that was noted above is the closest we get to any use of Israel’s Scriptures.58 In one other passage, he does make mention of “the prophets” but in a thoroughly Christianized way: “the apostles who proclaimed the gospel to us and the prophets who preached, in advance, the coming of our Lord” (6.3). In view of this lack of apparent interest in the Jewish origins of “the gospel” and its “Lord,” we probably should view the use of gentes (= ethnē) with reference to outsiders simply as a residue of an identity discourse that has ceased to be relevant or useful.
Despite the title under which it has been preserved—the Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians—2 Clement is not a letter, nor was it written by the author of 1 Clement.59 Epistolary features are absent, and the general consensus is that it should be seen as a homily or sermon.60 To be sure, the reference in 19.1 to a “reader” who is “reading you a request to pay attention to what has been written” sits awkwardly with the homiletical material that precedes and raises the possibility that chapters 19–20 stem from a different author.61 Since the two instances of ethnē appear earlier, however, we can safely leave this question to one side and examine the use of the term within the framework of chapters 1–18. There is general agreement that the document was written sometime in the second quarter of the second century.62 While Rome, Corinth, Syria, and Egypt have each been suggested as the place of origin, what is more important for our purposes is that it clearly stems from a gentile Christian environment.63 Near the beginning of the homily, in a section where he is extolling the magnitude of God’s gift of salvation, the author describes their former state in these terms: “We were maimed in our understanding, worshiping stones and pieces of wood and gold and silver and copper—all of them made by humans” (1.6). A similar depiction of typical polytheistic identity appears in 3.1.
The themes of the sermon are simple and straightforward—an appeal for righteous living, steadfast obedience to God’s commands and resistance to the attractions of this age, with the promise that those who heed the appeal would thereby attain the blessings of the age to come. This statement in chapter 5 provides a convenient summary:
You should realize, brothers, that our visit in this realm of the flesh is brief and short-lived, but the promise of Christ is great and astounding—namely, a rest in the coming kingdom and eternal life. What then must we do to obtain these things, except conduct ourselves in a holy and upright way and consider these worldly affairs foreign to us, and not yearn after them?” (2 Clement 5.5–6)
For 2 Clement, the foreignness (allotria) of “these worldly affairs [kosmika tauta]” is rooted in a sharply drawn eschatological duality: “this age and the age to come are two enemies” (6.3).64 This characterization of the present age as foreign provides a connection with the first occurrence of ethnē.
In chapter 13, the author shifts his appeal for righteous living onto new ground—the opinion of outsiders: “We should not be crowd-pleasers nor wish to please only ourselves, but through our righteous activity we should be pleasing as well to those outside the fold”—literally, “the persons outside [tois exō anthrōpois]” (2 Clement 13.1). He is primarily concerned, however, not with positive effects but with the other side of the coin, the effect on outsiders of unrighteous behavior. He continues: “so that the name not be blasphemed because of us,” underlining this with a citation of LXX Isa 52:5:65 “For the Lord says, ‘My name is constantly blasphemed among all the ethnē’” (13.2).66 As he continues with the theme, he does so in the language of the citation: “For when the ethnē hear the sayings of God from our mouths, they are astonished at their beauty and greatness. Then when they discover that our actions do not match our words, they turn from astonishment to blasphemy, saying that our faith is some kind of myth and error” (13.3).
This use of ethnē is similar to the passage in Polycarp’s letter discussed above (To the Philippians 10.2–3). The first thing to note here is that, as with Polycarp, a gentile Christ-believer writing to other gentile believers is using ethnē as a term for outsiders, those not belonging to the group. The parallel with “the persons outside [tois exō anthrōpois]” makes it clear that individuals are in view. Since the author presents both himself and his readers as former polytheists (2 Clement 1.6; 3.1), ethnē could also function as an identity left behind when they came to “know the Father of truth” (3.2), though this remains implicit at best. As with Polycarp, To the Philippians 10.1–3, the usage stands in some line of development that goes back to the use of ethnē in the identity discourse among early Jewish Christ-believers. But 2 Clement provides us with a little more information on how this ascribed identity was being understood and interpreted.
The next thing to note is that LXX Isa 52:5, which in its original context was addressed to Israel, is read here in a simple and straightforward way as an address to the author’s community of gentile Christ-believers. This is not an isolated occurrence, as similar appropriations of passages from Israel’s Scripture are found elsewhere in the work.67 What are we to make of this? Is the author aware of their Jewish origins, so that his reading of these texts is undergirded by some considered reflection on the relationship between the gentile church and the Israel of Scripture (or the Jews of his own day)? Or does he simply assume without further ado that these texts are Christian Scripture and, as such, that they can be applied to his readers in a straightforward and simpleminded way?
While 2 Clement does not provide us with a great deal to go on, one passage early in the work deserves some comment. We have already noted how the homily begins with a description of their former plight (“our entire life was nothing other than death”; 1.6) and subsequent salvation (“he graciously bestowed light upon us; … while we were perishing, he saved us”; 1.4), a passage in which the author characterizes himself and his readers as former polytheists and thus as gentiles. As he continues, he expatiates on this creation of life out of death by citing a passage from Isaiah: “Be jubilant, you who are infertile and who do not bear children! Let your voice burst forth and cry out, you who experience no pains of labor! For the one who has been deserted has more children than the one who has a husband” (Isa 54:1).68 As we might expect, he understands this passage as referring to the church: “Now when it says, ‘Be jubilant, you who are infertile and who do not bear children,’ it is referring to us. For our church [ekklēsia] was infertile before children were given to it.” Further: “And when it says, ‘For the one who has been deserted has more children than the one who has a husband,’ it is because our people [ho laos hēmōn] appeared to be deserted by God, but now that we believe we have become more numerous than those who appear to have God” (2.3). The contrast between “our people,” identified a few verses earlier as former polytheists, and “those who appear to have God” is striking. The simplest and most probable interpretation is that the contrast is between the gentile church and the Jewish people.69
If this is so, then the combination of (1) the assumption that Israel’s Scriptures speak directly to the church and (2) the assertion that the gentile church is greater than the Jewish people, a people who moreover only “appear to have God,” suggests a thinned-out form of supersessionism or replacement theology. To be sure, the statement that “our church was infertile before children were given to it” strikes the reader as odd: How could the church have existed (even in a barren state) before there were any believers? One might be tempted to see the statement simply as driven by the language of Isa 54:1—especially in view of the contrasting statement that appears just prior to the citation: God “called us while we did not exist, and he wished us to come into being from nonbeing” (2 Clement 1.8). However, later in the homily, we encounter the idea of a preexistent spiritual church—“the first church, the spiritual church, the church that was created before the sun and moon” (14.1)—a church created at the outset both as the “body of Christ” and as the female counterpart to the male Christ.70 So the statement in 2.1 can be read in these terms (i.e., a primordial spiritual church that later becomes physically manifest on earth).
All of this is complex and rather muddled, and we need not explore it any further. The main thing to observe is that, while the author seems to acknowledge the existence of Israel—the children of “the one who has a husband”—he shows little interest in them or their possible significance. While they occupy a position in between the primordial creation of the spiritual ekklēsia and the latter appearance of the earthly body of Christ, they remain overshadowed by both and of little apparent interest. At most, we can detect some evidence of a replacement theology—that the earthly ekklēsia has displaced the previous “children” and now possesses their Scriptures.
The apparent implication that the members of the ekklēsia used to be part of the polytheistic ethnē gives this replacement theology an ethnic character: Jewish “children” displaced by a greater group of “children” drawn from the non-Jewish ethnē. But the theme remains thin and undeveloped; perhaps we are to see this as the attenuated remnants of previous identity struggles that have ceased to be pressing and are now no longer relevant.
The other occurrence of ethnē can be treated more briefly. In chapter 17 we encounter once again a call to repentance and perseverance (especially vv. 1–3), undergirded by a reminder of eschatological judgment:
For the Lord said, “I am coming to gather all the nations [panta ta ethnē], tribes and tongues.” And this is what he calls the “day of his appearance,” when he comes to redeem each of us, according to our deeds. And the unbelievers [hoi apistoi] will see his glory and power and be shocked when they see that the rulership of this world has been given to Jesus. (2 Clement 17.4–5)
The citation, including the phrase panta ta ethnē, is drawn primarily from Isa 66:18, though incorporating some language found in Dan 3:2, 7. The author does not pick up the term, and so we can only speculate on how he would have understood it. But since, in what follows, the end-time gathering includes both members of the church (“each of us”; also v. 7) and “the unbelievers” (also vv. 5–6), it is probable that panta ta ethnē is understood here as a reference to humankind in its totality. In other words, with the addition of panta, the special sense of ta ethnē that appeared in 13.1–3—that is, as a reference to (polytheistic) outsiders—has fallen away.
The Shepherd of Hermas is a lengthy, rambling first-person account of a series of visions and revelations experienced by Hermas, who introduces himself at the outset as the former slave of a certain woman of Rome named Rhoda.71 As the story begins, Hermas has become reacquainted with her and, as he puts it, “began to love her as a sister.” Somehow he had an opportunity to see “her bathing in the Tiber river” and thus to “observe her beauty” as he helped her out of the water. She, apparently, did not interpret the event in a sisterly way at all, as she subsequently accused him “before the Lord” of allowing “the desire for evil [to] rise up in your heart.”72
This interaction leads quickly into the first of the five visions with which the book begins. Shaken by the accusation, Hermas has a vision of “an elderly woman, … dressed in radiant clothes and holding a book in her hands” (Visions 1.2.2). Although she is thoroughly familiar with Hermas and has a message for him from God, she does not show much concern about the accusation of sexual impropriety. Instead, she informs Hermas that he has displeased God by the problems that he has tolerated in his own family. He has been lax with his children; their resultant “sins and lawless acts,” together with his own lack of attention, has brought him “to ruin,” which, as we learn later, involved financial loss;73 and his wife has compounded the problem by her inability to “restrain her tongue.”74 In the second vision, the woman is identified as a personification of the church in its heavenly ideal form (2.4.1), and the problems in Hermas’s family begin to merge with problems that he is also warned about in the earthly church of his own experience.75
Hermas then encounters the heavenly woman in two further visions.76 The third has to do with the construction of a great stone tower, which the heavenly woman identifies as an image of the (earthly) church (Visions 3.3.3). In the fourth vision, Hermas sees “an enormous wild beast,” which he learns is “a foreshadowing of the great affliction that is coming” (4.2.4–5).
After Hermas has encountered the heavenly woman in these four visions, he has a fifth vision in which a different heavenly figure appears—“an eminent looking man … dressed in shepherd’s clothing” (Visions 5.1), who introduces himself as “the shepherd to whom you have been entrusted” (5.3) and who subsequently is identified as the “angel of repentance.”77 The remainder of the work consists of the shepherd’s message to Hermas, which the shepherd describes as “the commandments and parables” (5.6).
The work as a whole, then, consists of three interconnected sections: five Visions, twelve commandments (or Mandates), and ten parables (or Similitudes). The Mandates contain ethical instructions of various kinds, some of which relate to issues that have already surfaced in the Visions (family relations, sexual propriety, the dangers of wealth, the need for repentance) and others that reflect early Christian moral teaching more generally (including material that echoes the kind of two-ways teaching found in the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas).78 The Similitudes continue to deal with the central themes of the work in the form of allegorical discourses on a series of parabolic images. The longest and most significant of these are the eighth and the ninth, each of which returns to the image of the tower (first seen in the third Vision) and the construction of the repentant and purified church.
In older discussions of the Shepherd of Hermas, attention tended to be focused on its distinctive approach to postbaptismal sin and repentance. Unlike some of the more rigorist strands in the early Christian movement that denied any possibility for repentance in the case of a believer who willfully sinned and fell away (e.g., Heb 6:4–6; 10:26–29), the position taken in the Shepherd of Hermas is that such repentance is possible—but only once: “the one who sins and repents must be accepted back. But not many times. For there is but one repentance given to the slaves of God” (Mandates 4.1.8). Indeed, it seems that the revelation to Hermas is to play a dual role in this regard—both making known the possibility of repentance and establishing “the day” beyond which no further sin will be forgiven (Visions 2.2.4–6). This aspect of the Shepherd of Hermas has led interpreters of a previous era to read the work primarily as part of a developing discourse within the early church on penitential theology.79
Such a reading, however, slides over another obvious and significant theme, that of “rich and poor in the Shepherd of Hermas.”80 The dangers that accompany the search for wealth and the resultant entanglement in business affairs; the problems experienced by those whose allegiance is split between the world and the church; the enervating effect on the church of such dual allegiance or “double-mindedness” (dipsychia);81 the obligations of the rich believers toward those who are poor—it is increasingly being recognized that such social and economic factors represent an important part of the context within which the Shepherd of Hermas’s concern for repentance and ecclesiastical purity is to be located and understood.82 We will return to this theme presently when we look at the place of ethnē in the work.
For present purposes, we do not need to spend much time on the usual questions of critical introduction. Formally, given its narrative shape—a first-person narrative account of revelatory experiences in which divine knowledge is communicated to Hermas through visions and their interpretations by heavenly intermediaries—the Shepherd of Hermas can be classified as an apocalypse,83 even though a number of elements that often are associated with the genre are absent.84 With respect to provenance, while we should not assume that the biographical details associated with Hermas can be taken as transparent historical information about the actual author and his circumstances,85 they probably do provide a general reflection of the social situation surrounding the work: a socially stratified Christian community in an urban setting, probably Rome, whose wealthy members were probably upwardly mobile members of the lower classes (freedmen, artisans, and the like) rather than part of the social elite.86 The question of date has been complicated, perhaps unnecessarily, by suggestions, on the one hand, that the work in its final form incorporates discrete writings by different authors and,87 on the other, by attempts to build too much on incidental personal references.88 While, in view of its length, it is probable that it was written over a period of time, the fact that it was so widely known by the end of the second century suggests that it appeared in its final form sometime well before the middle of the century.89
Ethnē appears in the Shepherd of Hermas a total of sixteen times, functioning in two distinct ways: as a designation for outsiders or unbelievers (twelve times, plus one occurrence of ethnikos) and, in one extended passage, in a construction referring to humankind as a whole (four occurrences). We will deal with each in turn.
The first appearance of ethnē occurs early in the work, in the context of the first vision. The elderly woman has just read two portions of a book (presumably “the books of the living”; Visions 1.3.2), the first of which Hermas experienced as “terrifying,” while the second was “beneficial … and gentle” (1.3.3). In response, the woman explains the difference between the two: “These last words are for those who are upright [tois dikaiois], but the former are for the outsiders [tois ethnesin] and apostates [tois apostatais]” (1.4.2). The parallel between ethnē and “apostates” indicates that individuals are in view. In the woman’s explanation, ethnē appears without introduction or explanation; the author simply takes it for granted that his readers will recognize it as a designation for those who are outside the community of the righteous (or “the elect” [1.3.4]).
As the narrative progresses, ethnē continues to function as the primary term for outsiders (sinners, unbelievers).90 Used in this way, it appears in connection with the central themes of the work. Despite the fact that ethnē face the prospect of final judgment and destruction,91 repentance remains a possibility; indeed, in contrast to the situation of sinful believers, the possibility of repentance remains open for the ethnē until the end:
For the Master swore by his own glory to his chosen ones: “If there is any more sinning once this day has been appointed, they will not find salvation. For there is a limit to repentance for those who are upright [tois dikaiois], and the days of repentance for all the saints are complete. But the ethnē will be able to repent until the final day.” (Visions 2.2.5)
In the meantime, however, unrepentant ethnē continue to represent a danger for the believers. The first similitude contains the warning that believers are not to “participate in the extravagance sought by the ethnē; for it is of no profit for you who are slaves of God” (Similitudes 1.10). This warning comes at the end of a discourse in which the shepherd describes believers as living in a foreign city that is a long way from their own. They cannot have it both ways, he warns. They cannot continue to set down economic roots in this city and at the same time expect to be able to live according to the laws of their own city. Eventually “the ruler [ho kyrios] of the country” will say: “Either live by my laws or leave my country” (1.1.4). Clearly the similitude is only partly metaphorical; the readers after all are living in the city of Rome. The contrast between the ethnē, who are at home in the city of this lord (kyrios), and the “slaves of God,” who are citizens of God’s city, begins to hint at a counterimperial construction of identity, even if it remains undeveloped.92
A similar warning appears in the eighth similitude, which uses the image of a willow tree to categorize the various types of believers according to their degree of adherence to “the law of God that has been given to the whole world” (Similitudes 8.3.2),93 the likelihood of their repentance (where necessary) and whether they will ultimately be allowed to enter the tower:
Those who handed over sticks that were two parts withered and the third part green are those who have been faithful, but who also have grown wealthy and maintained a high standing among the ethnē. These have clothed themselves with great arrogance and become conceited; they have abandoned the truth and do not cling to those who are upright, but live with the ethnē. And this path has become very sweet to them. (8.9.1)
While these have not yet fallen away completely (“they have not fallen away from God, but have remained in the faith, even though they do not do the works of faith”), there are others who have crossed the line into apostasy: “But others have taken up residence, once and for all, with the ethnē. These have fallen away from God by being borne along by the vanities of the outsiders and acting like them. And so these are counted among the ethnē” (8.9.3).94
There is a considerable element of fluidity, then, in the spiritual demography of the Shepherd of Hermas. Some among “those who have been called by the name of the Lord” will fall away and be “counted among the ethnē”; some among the ethnē will take advantage of the opportunity for repentance and thus be admitted eventually into the tower. Nevertheless, the category is clear; those who are found outside, either now or in the “final day,” constitute the ethnē. While the use of the term has elicited little comment from interpreters, it is clear that it is Jewish in origin.95
In addition to this use as a designation for outsiders, ethnē appears in the ninth similitude with reference to humankind as a whole. By far the longest single section of the work, the ninth similitude represents a much more elaborate version of the account in the third vision, in which the development of the church is portrayed through the image of the construction of a tower. As with the eighth similitude, the author is especially concerned to categorize the various types of believers—in this case represented by different types of stones—and their ultimate destinies as the church undergoes a process of purification.
In this version, the construction of the tower takes place on a “great plain, with twelve mountains surrounding the plain, each having its own appearance” (Similitudes 9.1.4). Here we are particularly interested in the stones that are used to construct the tower. One set of stones came up “out of a great depth” and was used to build a foundation in four layers—ten, twenty-five, thirty-five, and forty stones, respectively (9.3.3; 9.4.2–3). We will return to these a little later. The other stones were drawn from the twelve mountains. Though they were originally of various colors, when they “were placed in the building, they changed their former colors and all alike became white” (9.4.5). When the tower was close to completion, the Lord of the tower came to examine it and found that a number of the stones had become discolored or faulty and needed to be replaced. Even so, the faulty stones were stored nearby in case they could yet be salvaged for use in the tower.
As the shepherd explains the vision to Hermas, we learn (as we may well have suspected) that it has to do with postbaptismal sin, the possibility and necessity of repentance, and the ultimate purity of the church. More importantly, we also learn that the twelve mountains from which the building blocks were hewn are “twelve tribes [phylai] that inhabit the entire earth” or “twelve ethnē” or “all the ethnē that dwell under the sky.” When, through the preaching of the “apostles,”96 they first “believed in the name of the Son of God,” they were transformed into white stones, but later “some of them defiled themselves and were cast out from the race of the upright [ek tou genous tōn dikaiōn], and they again became as they were formerly, only somewhat worse.”97 Presumably those who believed and thus became part of the “race” (genos) of the righteous thereby ceased to belong to the ethnē.
This use of ethnē presents us with a puzzle that is also characteristic of the Shepherd of Hermas as a whole. On the surface of it, the phrase “twelve tribes” seems to represent a clear echo of biblical language concerning Israel. But these twelve tribes are also described as “twelve ethnē”—decidedly unbiblical language for Israel—and they are equated with humankind as a whole: they “inhabit the entire earth”; they are “all the ethnē that dwell under the sky.” While there has been some attempt to see this language as governed by an Israel ecclesiology—the church drawn from all the ethnē as the new or true Israel—there is virtually nothing in the ninth similitude to suggest any interest at all in the people or history of Israel, or the Jewish roots of the church.98 The closest one gets is the account of the other set of stones—those emerging from the depths rather than drawn from the mountains. In response to Hermas’s question, the shepherd identifies them as “the first generation” (the first ten stones), “the second generation of upright men” (the twenty-five), “the prophets and ministers of God” (the thirty-five), and “the apostles and teachers who proclaim the Son of God” (the forty) (Similitudes 9.15.4). While the first three groups could have been identified with the patriarchs and prophets of Israel, the author shows no inclination to do so.99 As the passage continues, it is clear that his primary concern instead is to provide a way for righteous individuals, from the time prior to the proclamation of the Son of God, to be included in the church.100
As with the ninth similitude, so with the Shepherd of Hermas as a whole. Some of its themes and elements seem to reflect origins within Jewish forms of Christ-belief: the apocalyptic character of the work; the concern with the law and commandments of God; the echoes of two-ways material; the reference to the Book of Eldad and Modat (Visions 2.3.4);101 angels (symbolized by men and shepherds); and so on.102 To this list we can add ethnē as a designation for outsiders and panta ta ethnē as the sphere of apostolic proclamation. But these seem to be little more than residue from the past; as Hvalvik has observed: “a most conspicuous feature in the Shepherd is total silence about Jews and Judaism.”103 Nowhere in the Shepherd of Hermas do we find a living concern with the people or Scriptures of Israel, or the Jewish origins of the church. There is no mention of Jewish rites or institutions, no interest in the Son of God as Messiah (or as the earthly Jesus of Nazareth, for that matter), and no indication that keeping the law and commandments was ever a source of controversy in the church. While the twofold use of ethnē in the work clearly has roots in the ascription of ethnē as an identity term in the first generation of the movement, the Shepherd of Hermas displays little interest in (or even awareness of) the Jewish origins of the term.
The letters of Ignatius were written while Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, was being transported to Rome, where he would be executed. He was well aware of his impending martyrdom; indeed, one of the purposes of his letters was to forestall any attempts on the part of other Christians (especially those in Rome) to prevent it. Four of the letters were written from Smyrna, where he had the opportunity to meet not only with members of the church there, including its bishop Polycarp, but also with members of several nearby churches. He sent letters to three of these (Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles); the fourth went to Rome. A little later he had an opportunity for further communication during a stop in Troas, where he wrote letters to the church in Smyrna, to Polycarp, and also to the church in Philadelphia.
This, at least, is the most widely accepted interpretation of the Ignatian material, which in the manuscript tradition has come down to us in three discernible recensions: a longer recension, containing these seven letters in a longer form, together with a number of additional letters; a shorter recension, preserved in a Syriac manuscript, containing only three letters (to Polycarp, Ephesus, and Rome) in a much shorter form; and, in between, a middle recension of the seven letters as described above.104 The work of Zahn and Lightfoot in the latter part of the nineteenth century served to create a broad consensus concerning both the originality and the authenticity of the middle recension—that is, that the middle recension represents the earliest form of the letters and that the letters were written by Ignatius.105 While dissenting voices continue to be heard, they remain minority opinions.106 There is also a general consensus that the letters were written during the time of Trajan or Hadrian; while the former is perhaps more probable, it is not necessary for our purposes to be more precise.
Although the letters are distinct, a number of shared themes reappear.107 We have already noted Ignatius’s desire for martyrdom; as he says to the Ephesians, it is only by fighting the beasts in Rome that he will “be able to be a disciple”; until he has been “perfected” in this way, he has “merely begun to be a disciple” (To the Ephesians 1.2; 3.1). Another well-known theme is his vigorous and uncompromising assertion of the essential role of the bishop for the existence and unity of the church, and of the bishop’s overriding local authority. A third theme has to do with the situation of the church he has left behind in Antioch. The repeated requests for prayer on behalf of the Syrian church in the earlier letters betray a level of anxiety that comes into greater focus in the later letters, where we learn that he has received reports that the church there has “found peace” and that “their own corporate body has been restored to them,” and where he requests that churches send delegates to help celebrate the restoration.108 Evidently Ignatius’s arrest had coincided with some situation of conflict and disunity, a situation that later was resolved. A previous generation of scholarship tended to understand the problem simply as one of external persecution. What is more likely, however, is that internal dissension had broken out—perhaps even centered on the bishop himself—spilling out beyond the community itself and attracting unwanted attention from the civic authorities.109
Two other recurring themes to be mentioned are more theological in nature, or at least have to do with theological diversity. One is docetism, that form of hyperexalted Christology in which Christ is seen as only appearing to be human. Especially in his letters to Tralles and Smyrna, Ignatius inveighs against those who say that Christ “only appeared to suffer” (To the Trallians 10), emphasizing instead that “he was truly from the family of David according to the flesh” and “was truly nailed for us in the flesh” (To the Smyrnaeans 1.1–2). The other, which concerns us more directly, has to do with Ignatius’s opposition to Judaizers and with the more general relationship between what he calls “Judaism” and “Christianity.”110
We will turn to this in a moment, but first we might note two additional questions that have been discussed with respect to these theological themes. One has to do with the suggestion that docetism and Judaizing were closely linked; that is, that Ignatius was confronting a single deviant group, in which Jewish and proto-Gnostic elements were combined. There is little evidence, however, of such a combination in the letters themselves.111 It is more probable that we should see these polemical themes as directed at two distinct movements or tendencies.112 The other question concerns location. Was Ignatius simply fighting Syrian battles on Asian soil, or did his attacks on docetism and Judaizing also reflect situations in the churches addressed in the letters? Since his knowledge of the churches in Asia was limited, there can be little doubt that he was viewing the situation there through the lens of his experience in Syria. Nevertheless, both phenomena were present in Asia as well,113 and so it is probable that he was reacting, at least in part, to things that he had observed and experienced in his encounters with Asian Christians.114
Ignatius uses ethnē on two occasions, the first of which has to do with outsiders. In a manner similar to passages that have come up for discussion already (Polycarp, To the Philippians 10.2–3; 2 Clement 13.2), Ignatius exhorts his readers not to engage in behavior that would give the church a bad reputation among outsiders: “Let none of you hold a grudge against your neighbor. Give no occasion to the ethnē lest on account of a few foolish persons the entire congregation in God be slandered” (To the Trallians 8.2).115 As with these other passages, the reproach is followed by a statement of woe: “For woe to that one through whom my name is slandered in vain by some.” As with the other passages, it is clear that the statement is based on Isa 52:5, even though (unlike 2 Clement 13.2) the text is not cited explicitly. And like the others, an admonition initially addressed to Israel is here addressed to the church. Clearly we are dealing here with a widely used exegetical tradition.116
An exegetical tradition may also underlie the other occurrence of ethnē, where it clearly denotes non-Jewish believers. In the doxology with which Ignatius begins his letter to the church in Smyrna, at the end of a quasi-creedal and antidocetic section, he declares that the purpose of Christ’s resurrection was that “he might eternally lift up the standard for his holy and faithful ones, whether among Jews or ethnē, in the one body of his church” (To the Smyrnaeans 1.2). The idea of raising (airō) a standard (syssēmon) clearly echoes Isaianic language (LXX Isa 5:26; 49:22; 62:10); in all three passages, the standard is raised for the ethnē. In this doxology, then, the language of Greek Isaiah has been reworked christologically to describe the union of the “holy and faithful ones,” Jews and non-Jews alike, in one church. As Schoedel observes, such a union of Jews and gentiles is “not characteristic of Ignatius,” who places the emphasis instead on the distinction between “Judaism” and “Christianity.” This, he suggests, is one of the reasons for discerning dependence on tradition here.117 While this is certainly correct, Ignatius’s reuse of traditional material here suggests that he was able to accept at some level the idea that “the one body of [Christ’s] church” included Jews and gentiles.
To explore this further, we need to return to the issue of Judaizing. The key passages are as follows:
Do not be deceived by false opinions or old fables that are of no use. For if we have lived according to Judaism until now, we admit that we have not received God’s gracious gift. (To the Magnesians 8.1)
It is outlandish to proclaim Jesus Christ and practice Judaism. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity—in which every tongue that believes in God has been gathered together. (To the Magnesians 10.3)
But if anyone should interpret Judaism to you, do not hear him. For it is better to hear Christianity from a man who is circumcised than Judaism from one who is uncircumcised. (To the Philadelphians 6.1)
The statements are puzzling in a number of respects, but at least two things are clear. First, Ignatius warns his readers to beware of certain persons who believed in Christ but also practiced some aspects of Judaism and encouraged others to do the same. These people were deceptively propagating “false opinions” and “old fables” that involved “liv[ing] according to Judaism”; they were “proclaim[ing] Jesus Christ and practic[ing] Judaism”; they were attempting to “interpret Judaism” to those who were already Christians. At least some of these were non-Jews: he warns the church in Philadelphia not “to hear … Judaism from one who is uncircumcised.”118
Second, the terms on which he denounces such interpretive initiatives indicate that his objection to Judaization is based on a fundamental conviction that Christianity and Judaism were distinct and mutually exclusive ways of life. That is, what he objects to is not simply a situation where non-Jews are encouraged to adopt Jewish practices by Jewish or gentile Christians, but the very idea that Christian proclamation and Jewish practice could be combined at all, even for Jews. It is totally out of place (atopon) “to proclaim Jesus Christ and practice Judaism.” Any Christians, Jews included, who are also living “according to Judaism” are attempting to straddle an unbridgeable gap and thus “have not received God’s gracious gift” (To the Magnesians 8.1). A little later in his letter to the Magnesians, he holds up the example of Jews who, in coming to believe in Christ, abandoned their old Jewish way of life: “And so those who lived according to the old ways came to a new hope, no longer keeping the Sabbath but living according to the Lord’s day” (9.1). While Schoedel is probably right in seeing this statement as referring primarily to the Jewish believers in the days of the apostles—those “who once lived as Jews (by observing the Sabbath) but came to live as Christians (by observing Sunday)”—it is also open to a more general application.119 Jews who want to believe in Christ need to abandon their “old [Jewish] ways” and take on a new (Christian) identity.
But the opposition between the two seems to be even more fundamental. Ignatius is apparently not prepared to grant any positive aspect of a life “according to Judaism” (cf. To the Magnesians 8.1) even prior to Christ. As he continues: “For the most divine prophets lived according to Jesus Christ. For this reason also they were persecuted” (8.2). The prophets in a sense were Christians before Christ, persecuted precisely because they “lived according to Jesus Christ” and not “according to Judaism.”120 To be sure, he acknowledges elsewhere that there is “something distinct” about the gospel; what the prophets could only anticipate, the gospel events have actually accomplished. Even so, it is this fully conscious anticipation, rather than anything to do with a Jewish way of life, that matters; Christ is the “door … through which Abraham and Isaac and the prophets and the apostles and the church enter” into the “unity of God” (To the Philadelphians 9.1–2). This is probably the sense in which we are to understand the enigmatic statement in To the Magnesians 10.3: “For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity.” Christianity, for Ignatius, does not base its faith on Judaism,121 in the sense that it is the new Israel, or the fulfillment of the Jewish story, or the like.122 Rather, the only value to be found in Judaism is that the patriarchs, prophets, and priests were actually “Christians-in-waiting.”123 When the apostles and other early believers, who had been living “according to the old ways,” recognized the truth of the gospel, they “came to a new hope,” abandoned their Jewish ways for Christian ways (To the Magnesians 9.1), and—in the most probable interpretation of To the Philadelphians 6.1 (“it is better to hear Christianity from a man who is circumcised”)—began to proclaim Christianity to the gentiles.
All of this provides the framework within which Ignatius is able to speak of the presence of Jews and gentiles “in the one body of his church” (To the Smyrnaeans 1.2). In the founding generation of the church, Jewish apostles proclaimed the gospel to Jews and gentiles alike, drawing them into the new unified body of Christ’s church. But while the tradition on which he drew may have assigned a more positive significance to the initial Jewish component, Ignatius leaves no space for the idea of a Jewish foundation, core, or remnant. In responding to the gospel, Jews and gentiles alike became Christians, a new identity that superseded, or at least completely overshadowed, their prior identities.
In addition, it should be noted that Ignatius finds little that is positive in the gentile side of things either. He draws a sharp contrast between believers and the world: “there are two kinds of coin, one from God and the other from the world, and each of them has its own stamp set upon it: the unbelievers the stamp of this world and the believers the stamp of God the Father, in love, through Jesus Christ” (To the Magnesians 5.2). Although he is heading to Rome, the imperial center of the Mediterranean world, he displays little interest in the Roman Empire in and of itself. As part of the unbelieving world, however—what he elsewhere calls the evil “ancient realm” (palaia basileia)—it has already been “destroyed and … brought to ruin” through the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, three decisive events that had been accompanied by celestial signs, even though they had “escaped the notice of the ruler of this age” (To the Ephesians 19.1–3).
In contrast to the four writings considered to this point, 1 Clement is steeped in Scripture, primarily in the form of quotations from the Scriptures of Israel (in Greek) but also in the use of Septuagintal language and turns of phrase and in allusions to material that was eventually included in the New Testament.124 By one count, 1 Clement contains some seventy-five quotations, amounting to one-quarter of the text as a whole.125 Partly for this reason, ethnē appears in a richer array of uses than was the case in these other writings.
Unlike 2 Clement, 1 Clement is indeed a letter, sent from “the church of God that sojourns in Rome” to the church in Corinth. The letter begins with a reference to “the matters causing disputes among you” (1.1), a factional insurrection (stasis) in which “the dishonorable rose up against the honorable, … the young against the elders [presbyterous]” (3.3). However, it is not until much later in the epistle that the author returns to the topic and provides more explicit details about the matter: despite the apostles’ foresight in planning for an orderly succession of leadership, the Corinthians “have deposed some [of the presbyters] from the ministry held blamelessly in honor among them” (44.6). The purpose of the letter, then, is to denounce what has been done, to call for repentance on the part of the perpetrators, and to exhort the church to restore the presbyters to their rightful position.126 The material in between chapters 3 and 42 serve this overall purpose, much of it by pointing to examples of righteous people who had been attacked unjustly but who had remained faithful and were ultimately vindicated by God, and by the models of order and harmony that can be found in the created order, in a well-organized army, in a healthy body, and in the sacrificial system of the Jerusalem temple. Scholars have observed that both in its vocabulary and its themes, 1 Clement resembles Greco-Roman political rhetoric whose purpose was to denounce unrest and insurrection (stasis), to encourage order, peace, and concord (taxis, eirēnē, homonia), and thus to defend the constitution (politeia) of a well-ordered city-state.127
Concerning authorship, tradition going back to Dionysius of Corinth (ca. 170 CE) has attributed the letter to Clement, a leader in the church of Rome during the reign of Domitian.128 While the tradition gains some indirect support from the reference in the Shepherd of Hermas to a Clement who was responsible for communicating with other churches on behalf of the church in Rome (Visions 2.4.3), discussions about the author’s identity remain inconclusive. Here, however, we are more interested in the author’s ethnicity than in his individual identity. As has already been observed, the author was thoroughly conversant with the Scriptures of Israel, and this has led some to conclude that he must have been Jewish.129 The conclusion does not necessarily follow, however; as we will see, the way in which he reads what Christians later call the Old Testament makes it almost certain that he was not.130 With respect to date, while older attempts to date the epistle on the grounds of a supposed persecution in the time of Domitian have been rightly abandoned, a date around the turn of the century remains probable on other grounds.131
The term ethnē appears eight times in 1 Clement, three of these in scriptural citations.132 We will begin with the one instance in which it is used explicitly of outsiders (55.1). The passage appears just after the author has encouraged the schismatics to repent and depart for the good of the “flock of Christ” (ch. 54) and within a longer section (chs. 53–55) in which he provides a series of examples of noble leaders who were prepared to suffer themselves in order to protect the well-being of the larger community. (That the examples do not exactly correspond to the situation at hand does not seem to have caught the author’s attention.) He begins with Moses, who was prepared to be blotted out with the people of Israel if God was not willing to “forgive the sin of this people” (53.4). After urging the insurrectionists to leave and allow the original presbyters to be reinstated, he continues: “but we should bring in examples from the ethnē as well” (55.1). The examples are vague and quickly dealt with: “many kings and rulers” who accepted death “in order to deliver their fellow citizens”; “many” who “left their own cities to avoid creating more factions.”133 Then he turns from the ethnē to “ourselves” (55.2). Again he lists some anonymous examples: “many among us [en hēmin]” who accepted prison or even slavery for the benefit of others; “many women” whom God empowered to perform masculine deeds. This latter example leads into a longer recitation of the deeds of “the blessed Judith,” because of her love for “the homeland [tēs patridos] and the people [tou laou],” and of Esther, on behalf of “the twelve tribes of Israel who were about to perish” (55.5–6).
Two things are to be noted here. First, the author makes a clear distinction between the ethnē and “us.” As with the other writings considered to this point, ethnē is used to denote outsiders, those who are not Christ-believers. Second, the author includes in his own group both Judith and Esther (and probably the “people” or “twelve tribes of Israel” associated with them as well). Taken in isolation, the passage might appear to suggest that the author and his group are part of the people of Israel—that is, that they are Jewish Christ-believers. But since it appears in a letter addressed to the church in Corinth—a church founded by Paul, a “herald [kērux] in both East and West” who “taught righteousness to the whole world [holon ton kosmon]” (1 Clement 5.6–7), a church that contained non-Jews from the very beginning—such a reading is clearly out of the question. Here we need to turn to other instances of ethnē in the letter.
In 1 Clement 29.1, the author sums up the exhortations of the previous chapters by encouraging his readers to give undivided devotion to “our gentle and kind-hearted Father, who made us his own chosen portion [meros].” This leads into a citation of the well-known passage in Deut 32:8–9 about the choice of Israel out of all the nations as God’s special portion:
For so it is written: When the Most High divided the ethnē and scattered the descendants of Adam, he established the boundaries of the ethnē according to the number of the angels of God. His people [laos], Jacob, became the portion [meris] for the Lord; Israel became the allotment of his inheritance. (29.2)
After punctuating this citation with his own pastiche of phrases drawn from several scriptural passages—“See, the Lord takes from himself an ethnos from among the ethnē”—he continues with an exhortation to Christians: “Since then we are a holy portion [meris], we should do everything that pertains to holiness” (30.1).134
This reading of the scriptural text is striking in its naive immediacy. The author identifies himself, his readers, and Christians in general with the “people” that he encounters in Israel’s Scriptures. The people that, alone of all the ethnē, became God’s portion is identified in a simple and straightforward way as the church. He simply takes it for granted that Christians now bear Israel’s identity. Indeed, to say “now” is perhaps to say too much; the time between the “then” of the text and the “now” of the contemporary situation seems to have collapsed completely. In Skarsaune’s words: “So directly is the Old Testament applied to the Church, that the author betrays no awareness of a radical new beginning, a new covenant established by Christ; no awareness of the deep disruption between the Christian community and the Jewish people.”135
This form of naive appropriation of Israel’s identity appears elsewhere in the letter as well, not only in casual language about “our father Abraham” (1 Clement 31.2) but also in a similar scriptural pastiche found in the prayer with which the letter moves toward its conclusion (59.3–61.3).136 Here the author prays that “the eyes of our heart” might be opened that we may recognize” God as the one who (among many other things) “destroys the reasonings of the ethnē … who multiplies the ethnē upon the earth and who from them all has chosen those who love you through Jesus Christ” (59.3). Here the language of Deut 32:8–9 is simply appropriated as a straightforward statement about the church.137 The prayer continues with a similar statement about the church in the scriptural language about Israel: “Let all the ethnē know you, that you alone are God, that Jesus Christ is your child, and that we are your people [laos] and the sheep of your pasture” (59.4).
The one remaining occurrence of ethnē requires little comment. In 1 Clement 36.4, the author cites Ps 2:7–8, in the context of a larger passage that echoes Heb 1: “But the Master says this about his Son: ‘You are my Son, today I have given you birth. Ask from me, and I will give you the ethnē as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.’” While the passage might have been used as an opportunity to say something about the ethnē and Christ the Son, the author simply passes it by.
Three final observations need to be made before we move on. The first has to do with the author’s identity. The easy assumption that believers in Jesus are simply part of the same people who appear in the Scriptures, with no complicating concerns about the historical identity of Israel or the relations between the church and contemporary Jews, speaks strongly in favor of a gentile author. As Hvalvik has observed, “Clement’s lack of interest in Israel’s salvation-historical uniqueness” makes it “difficult to imagine that Clement himself was a Jewish believer in Jesus…. His teachers may have been Jewish believers, but his own naive approach to the Jewish traditions seems more characteristic of a third generation Gentile believer.”138
Second, and somewhat surprisingly, 1 Clement is virtually devoid of adversus Judaeos tendencies. His “lack of interest in Israel’s salvation-historical uniqueness” seems to be accompanied by the absence of any need to validate the church’s identity as God’s chosen portion by denigrating Israel or the Jews. Scriptural passages critical of Israel that, in other hands, might have been used to demonstrate the disobedience and desolation of the Jews are instead used to encourage the readers to turn to God.139 The Jerusalem cult is introduced as an example of divinely appointed orderliness rather than as an opportunity to contrast carnal and spiritual interpretation (ch. 41). While the author makes some reference to people in Scripture who were persecuted or cast out, and makes it clear that those responsible were “lawless,” “unholy,” and “transgressors of the law,” the only example he gives is that of Daniel and those (officials of the Medes and Persians) who had him “cast into the lions’ den” (45.2–5). In sum, passages that others might have used to denounce the Jews as people who capped their long history of persecuting the prophets by betraying and murdering the Righteous One (cf. Acts 7:52) are here used instead for internal critique and hoped-for restoration.
Finally, we have already noted how 1 Clement tends to deal with problems of communal organization in Corinth by treating the church as if it were a city-state whose “peace and harmony” and common life (politeia) were being threatened by internal insurrection (stasis). Many of these themes come up one final time in the prayer with which the letter moves to its conclusion (59.3–61.3). With reference to this prayer, scholars have noted in addition the extent to which it displays a positive attitude toward the state, which in view of the circumstances of the letter means not simply the state in general but the Roman Empire in particular. The prayer asks for “harmony and peace” not only for “us” but also for “all those who inhabit the earth,” and it acknowledges that God has given “to those who rule and lead us here on earth … the authority of rulership [basileias]” (60.4; 61.1). As Horrell has observed: “Clement’s model for behavior in the church and the household is also his model for society. Peaceful existence is ensured when all remain quietly and humbly in their place, submitting gladly to those who wield authority in whichever sphere.”140 In this sense, 1 Clement represents a quite different model for the relationship between the church and wider society than we have observed in the Shepherd of Hermas, its literary Roman companion.
There is little to suggest that the author has given much thought to the place of the ethnē within this model, as it pertains either to the church or to the Roman Empire. Still, the fact that both church and empire are subsumed under the same hierarchical model with the “Heavenly King” (61.2) at its apex suggests that elements were in place for such thinking to take place—something to bear in mind as we proceed.141
The anonymous writing that has come down to us as the Epistle of Barnabas bears this name on account of the belief, appearing as early as Clement of Alexandria, that its author was Barnabas, the companion of Paul and (according to Acts) a prominent member of the churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.142 Given Barnabas’s close association with Jewish Christ-groups in the first generation of the movement and his apparent sympathy for the sensitivities of Jewish Christ-believers, it is surprising (to say the least) that his name would come to be attached to what Ehrman calls “the most virulently anti-Jewish” writing of this period.143
The Epistle of Barnabas can be classified as a letter, though one with significant didactic and homiletical elements.144 The body of the letter falls into two unequal parts: chapters 2–17, which begins with a declaration that God has shown “through all the prophets … that he has no need of sacrifices” (2.4) and which then continues with an extended scriptural argument for a categorical distinction between “them” (the people of Israel) and “us” (the people of the church); and chapters 18–20, a description of the “Two Ways,” the way of darkness and the way of light. Among the many puzzles presented by the work is that of the relationship between these two apparently disparate sections. Related to this is the striking contrast between the author’s familiarity with Jewish literary and exegetical traditions (including the two-ways material) and his categorical rejection of any Jewish claim to the covenantal underpinnings of these traditions.145
The author, who is well known to the recipients of the letter (Epistle of Barnabas 1.4–8), is clearly a teacher, though he is hesitant to emphasize this status (1.8), even though he also feels that he has received “perfect knowledge” that he would like to impart to them (1.5). His hesitancy perhaps reflects some awareness of potential resistance to the arguments of his letter.146 As we will see when we look at the occurrences of ethnē in the letter, the author clearly identifies himself and his readers as gentile Christians. To be sure, the issue has been debated; the Jewish elements in the letter have led some to argue that the author was indeed Jewish.147 Most interpreters, however, point to several passages as evidence that both the author and (at least most of) his readers were non-Jews: the concern that “we not be dashed against their law as proselytes” (3.6);148 and the descriptions of their former state (“after redeeming our hearts from darkness” [14.6]; “before we believed in God” [16.7]).149 As we will see, his use of ethnē provides additional evidence in this regard.
Even so, the author is clearly preoccupied with questions concerning Jews and Judaism and the relationship between Judaism and the church. While some interpreters have seen this as an abstract concern—that is, one arising from internal considerations of identity and scriptural interpretation—it more probably had to do with an actual situation in which Jews, Jewish Christ-believers, and gentile Christians lived in close social proximity.150 The author seems to be responding to a situation in which gentile Christians were attracted to Jewish beliefs and practices, as found either in Jewish synagogues or in Jewishly oriented Christ-groups, and writes to warn his own circle of the dangers of such attraction.
The question of the letter’s context also comes up in discussions of its date, in that the most pertinent evidence concerning date is provided by a passage that speaks of a possible rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple.151 The passage appears in chapter 16, where the author argues that the true temple of God is to be found not in Jerusalem but in the hearts of believers. In the course of this argument, however, he refers to the Jerusalem temple in a citation of an unknown text: “See, those who have destroyed this temple will themselves build it” (16.3). Then he continues: “This is happening. For because of the war, it was destroyed by their enemies. And now the servants of the enemies will themselves rebuild it” (16.4). While the passage has engendered considerable discussion, with scholarly opinion coalescing around dates either during the reign of Nerva (96–98 CE) or during the reign of Hadrian, but prior to the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt (i.e., ca. 130 CE), for present purposes it is not necessary to decide between the two.152 What is more pertinent is that the passage seems to reflect a situation in which the Jewish community was poised to regain some of the social status it had lost during the Flavian period, and thus one in which attraction to Jewish belief and practice might have intensified.
There are seven occurrences of ethnē in the letter, six of which are contained in scriptural quotations. In these six occurrences, however, ethnē is not simply a passing reference; in each of them, the term is central to the citation, and the citation is embedded in the surrounding argument sufficiently enough that we can readily discern the author’s understanding and use of the term. We begin, however, with the one occurrence that is not a citation, which is also the one instance in which the term refers to outsiders.
The verse in question stands at the beginning of the section we have just noted, in which the author speaks of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple. After denouncing the Jews (“those wretches”) for their false belief that the temple “was actually the house of God,” he continues: “For they consecrated him in the Temple almost like the ethnē do” (Epistle of Barnabas 16.1–2). In contrast to the occurrences that we have examined to this point, here ethnē refers not simply to non-Christian outsiders but to a group that is differentiated from the Jews as well. In other words, here the original sense of the term—that is, as non-Jewish outsiders—is also in view. But even as it evokes the difference, however, it simultaneously negates it. That is, the author perceives Jewish temple worship as almost equivalent to paganism; Jews are virtually indistinct from the ethnē. This leads us into the most stunning (and distressing) aspect of the Epistle of Barnabas.
The author’s introductory statement about sacrifice, with its language about “the new law of our Lord Jesus Christ” and the nullification of the sacrificial system (noted above; Epistle of Barnabas 2.4–6), might seem to suggest that the author holds to a temporally progressive concept of supersessionary fulfillment.153 But while there is a temporal element, the process of supersession (if that is even the appropriate category) is much more radical than anything encountered in other early Christian literature. In the Epistle of Barnabas’s view, the covenant was nullified even before it was enacted. As Moses was receiving it on Mount Sinai, the people of Israel “turned back to idols” in their worship of the golden calf. Perceiving their sin, Moses “cast the two tablets from his hands,” thus smashing “their covenant” irrevocably: “They permanently lost it … that the covenant of his beloved, Jesus, might be established in our hearts.”154 The sole purpose of the subsequent laws of Moses, the writings of the prophets, and of Israel’s Scripture as a whole was to speak of this true covenant, something that could be perceived only by those whose hearing and hearts had been circumcised (10.12). It was only because they had been led astray by “an evil angel” that the people of Israel thought that circumcision and other provisions of the law were to be understood in a fleshly way (9.4; cf. 2.10).155 Indeed, the author cites Jer 9:26 (“See, says the Lord, all the ethnē are uncircumcised in their foreskins, but this people is uncircumcised in their hearts”; 9.5) to suggest that a people unable to see that circumcision is a matter of the heart rather than of the flesh is no better than the ethnē. For the Epistle of Barnabas, then, the religious and cultic life of Israel as a whole was the result of demonic deception.
The author’s argument that the people of Israel permanently lost the covenant because of the golden calf incident is prefaced with his denunciation of “some people” who say “that the covenant is both theirs and ours” (Epistle of Barnabas 4.6).156 Here we need not linger over the identity of these people. As we have already observed, the author seems to be reacting against Judaizing in some form, probably one in which gentile believers were attracted to mixed-ethnic Christ-groups where they adopted some Jewish observances and thus were considered as sharing in God’s covenant with Israel. What is of greater interest at this point is how he conceives of the two groups that he typically refers to as “them” and “us.”
When he speaks of “them,” it goes without saying that he has the people of Israel in view. At the end of chapter 4, for example, he instructs his readers “to observe that Israel was abandoned even after such signs and wonders had occurred in it” (Epistle of Barnabas 4.14). But what about “us”? In chapter 13 he returns to the question of which group (“this people or the first one”) “receives the inheritance, and whether the covenant is for us or for them” (13.1). The antecedent for “this people” (i.e., the Christians) is found in the preceding verse, which concludes an extended section on the christological meaning of Scripture (chs. 11–12) by citing a text from Isaiah:157 “The Lord said to Christ my Lord, ‘I have grasped his right hand that the ethnē will obey him, and I will shatter the power of kings’” (12.11). Clearly, the author here identifies the Christian “people” with the obedient ethnē of Isa 45:1.
Such an identification of “us” with the ethnē is confirmed and reinforced in the argument contained in the next two chapters, which consists of commentary on a running series of scriptural citations, several of which make reference to the ethnē. To be sure, we cannot place much weight on the first of these, a passage having to do with the twins in Rebecca’s womb (Epistle of Barnabas 13.2): “the Lord said to her, ‘There are two ethnē in your womb and two peoples [laoi] in your belly, and one people will dominate the other and the greater will serve the lesser’” (Gen 25:21–23). But after another example of a favored younger son, the author turns to the case of Abraham, where non-Jewish ethnē are clearly in view: “What then does [God] say to Abraham, when he alone believed and was appointed for righteousness? ‘See, Abraham, I have made you a father of the ethnē who believe in God while uncircumcised’” (13.7).158 Further, in the following chapter, as he brings his argument to a conclusion, he cites several passages from Isaiah in which the “holy people,” which came into being after Christ “redeemed us from darkness,” is identified with the ethnē who are to be illuminated through the worldwide mission of the servant of the Lord (“I have given you as a covenant of the people, as a light to the ethnē”; “I have set you as a light to the ethnē that you may bring salvation to the end of the earth”).159
The author’s answer to the question “whether the covenant is for us or them” is not simply “us” as believers in Christ but “us” as distinctly gentile people—“a people not of Jews, but of Gentiles.”160 While in one place he can use the term ethnē as a designation for outsiders (Epistle of Barnabas 16.2), the emphasis in his usage falls on ethnē as a continuing identity rather than an identity left behind. He and those like him are “ethnē who believe in God” (13.7) rather than simply a new people called out from among the ethnē.
Nevertheless, the term is of interest to the author only within a very limited sphere. It provides convenient scriptural reinforcement for the sharp distinctions he wants to make between his group and mixed-ethnic Judaizing Christians, between “the new law of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2.6) and the malevolent interpretive influence of evil angels (cf. 9.4), and between “this people [and] the first one” (13.1). No doubt it also reflected his own native identity as a non-Jew. Apart from this, however, the term is of little apparent interest, its usefulness restricted to the internal identity concerns of his own group and its relations to other Christian and Jewish groups.
The author’s attitudes to the wider world of the non-Jewish ethnē are shaped by the same sort of dualistic outlook that characterizes his internal identity concerns: “The days are evil and the one who is at work holds sway” (Epistle of Barnabas 2.1); “hate the error of the present age, that we may be loved in the age to come” (4.1); the “path of light” is under the supervision of “light-bearing angels of God” (who is “the Lord from eternity past to eternity to come”), while the “path of darkness is governed by “angels of Satan” (who is “the ruler over the present age of lawlessness”) (18.1–2). The Roman imperial character of the “present evil age” probably comes into view in the author’s citation of texts from Enoch and Daniel, as he informs his readers that “the final stumbling block is at hand” and that God’s “Beloved One” will soon “arrive at his inheritance” (4.3–5).161 In such a dualistic and apocalyptic understanding of the wider world in which he and his readers find themselves, a world categorically divided between those on “the path of light” and those on “the path of darkness,” their identity as “ethnē who believe in God” is of limited additional usefulness.
In the remaining four writings to be considered here, ethnē is not used as a term for outsiders; otherwise, the ways in which the term is used are quite varied. Again, we will deal with the material in the order of increasing interest in ethnē as an identity term.
With the majority of commentators, I take the Pastoral Epistles to be pseudonymous, written after Paul’s death by a leader within a group of churches that traced their origins to the apostle, who wrote to bring Paul’s voice and authority to bear on issues facing these churches in his own day.162 To be sure, one needs to recognize that there are differences between 2 Timothy and the other two epistles, which have suggested to some that it was written by Paul himself or by someone other than the author of the other two and in a different context.163 For my part, I see no need to postulate separate authorship, but I nevertheless consider it prudent to treat 2 Timothy on its own terms, rather than simply lumping it together with the others.
While this is not the place for any detailed discussion of the Pastoral Epistles, some comments are in order about the ethnicity of the author. As was observed above, in contrast to the issue of pseudonymity, scholarly discussions of the author’s ethnic identity are rare. One way of framing the issue is to ask this question: If we start from the position that the epistles were written by someone other than Paul, in a situation some time after his death, is there any compelling reason to believe that the author was Jewish? As a useful point of reference, we can consider the cases of Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Peter. As we observed in chapter 4, in each of them, the author simply assumes that “Jews” and “gentiles” are familiar and significant categories and addresses gentile readers from the perspective of a Jewish Christ-believer. In the Pastoral Epistles, however, this is simply not the case.
We begin with 1 Timothy, where the issue of authorial ethnicity can conveniently be discussed in the context of the two instances of ethnē (2:7; 3:16) itself. The first of these appears in a section dealing with the practice of prayer in the context of communal worship (2:1–8). The section begins with an exhortation that prayers of various kinds be offered “for all human beings [pantōn anthrōpōn].” While the text continues with a more specific reference—“for kings and all who are in high positions”—the universal scope quickly reappears: “This is right and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior who desires all human beings [pantas anthrōpous] to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (vv. 3–4).164 This leads into a quasi-creedal formulation, again within a universal framework: “For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind [anthrōpōn], the human Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all [pantōn]” (vv. 5–6). The reference to ethnē appears in the following verse, where the author declares emphatically that he “was appointed a herald and apostle” of this message—“a teacher of ethnē in faith and truth” (v. 7).
The NRSV renders ethnē here as “Gentiles,” and this translation cannot be ruled out. Any reader of 1 Timothy who was familiar with the other letters bearing Paul’s name would be aware that Paul understood himself to be the apostle of the ethnē in the sense of non-Jewish nations and individuals.165 Going further than this, some commentators have argued that a Jew-gentile contrast has been evoked implicitly already in the epistle, in the context of the admonition with which the epistle begins. Here the author warns Timothy about people who were teaching a “different doctrine” (1 Tim 1:3), which a little later is restated in terms of their desire “to be teachers of the law [nomodidaskaloi]” (1:7).166 As the argument unfolds, this polemical admonition concerning teachers of the law is then linked with key aspects of the passage under discussion (i.e., 2:1–7): the theme of universality, including the emphasis on God’s desire that all be saved; the appeal to the oneness of God (heis gar theos: “God is one”) as the basis of this universal desire; the vehement assertion of Paul’s apostleship (“I am telling the truth, I am not lying”). Linking the warning against false “teachers of the law” in 1:6–7 with the universality of the message about Christ in 2:4–6, such commentators have argued “that the inclusion of Gentiles alongside Jews in salvation is the primary issue here” and “that the point of stressing God’s desire to save all people is to indicate that his desire includes Gentiles as well as Jews.”167
To be sure, some early readers of the epistle might have understood it this way and could well have appealed to other letters of Paul for support. But it is quite an overstatement to say that the text itself invites such a reading. For one thing, there is no hint in 1 Tim 1:3–11 that the problematic teaching about the law had anything to do with those aspects of the law that differentiated Jews from gentiles and thus would exclude non-Jews from a universal message of salvation. Instead, the problem had to do with “myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations” in place of the “household administration of God that is in faith” (1:4).168 Further, the author’s attempt to set out the legitimate use of the law in 1:8–11 provides no reason to believe that he was polemicizing against an illegitimate attempt to exclude gentiles from “the glorious gospel of the blessed God” (1:11).169 Indeed, nothing in these verses would lead us to believe that the author had any inside knowledge of what a torah-centered life might have been like at all.
There is little to suggest, then, that distinctions between Jews and gentiles, and issues concerning the inclusion of non-Jews within the sphere of the gospel, would have been to the fore as readers reached the end of chapter 1.170 With respect to 1 Tim 2:1–7, apart from the reference to Paul’s status as “apostle of the ethnē” in v. 7, the universal thrust of the passage has to do more with an undifferentiated humanity—“all human beings” (pantes anthrōpoi), “humankind” (anthrōpoi), “all” (pantes)—than with the incorporation of the two parts of a bifurcated humanity. Would the reference to Paul as a “teacher of the ethnē,” then, be sufficient in itself to bring a Jewish bifurcation of humanity into view?171 Here we need to remember that ancient readers of a Greek text did not face the kind of either-or decision that is present for modern English readers, who need to decide whether to read ethnē as “nations” or “gentiles.”172 The term itself is bivalent—carrying in itself the potential to be taken in two different (though closely related) ways, with various additional factors coming into play in the determination of which sense is most appropriate. While a Jewish reader might have been inclined to read didaskalos ethnōn as “a teacher of the non-Jews,” in the absence of clear textual signals (such as are found in Ephesians, for example), the default reading for non-Jews would be “a teacher of the nations.” In short, while the alternative reading cannot be completely excluded, it is more likely that non-Jewish readers would have taken their clues from the expressions of undifferentiated humanity that permeate the passage as a whole. It is also likely that such a reading was in keeping with the author’s intentions as well; that is, from the author’s perspective a “teacher of the ethnē” (2:7) is one who would lead “all human beings [pantes anthrōpoi] to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2:4).
The second instance of ethnē in 1 Timothy (3:16) is found in the context of another christological hymn, this time as part of the hymn itself. Coming at a transitional point in the letter, the hymn quite clearly is a piece of preformed tradition, which the author has cited to punctuate his admonition to Timothy about “how one ought to behave in … the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (3:15). Introduced as “the mystery of our eusebeia [piety, devotion],” the hymn consists of six participial phrases that each refer to Christ.173 Ethnē appears in the fourth line: “proclaimed among ethnē.”
A certain element of structuring can be discerned in the hymn as a whole, though not without some uncertainty. The first two lines seem to constitute a contrasting pair (“revealed in flesh”/“vindicated in spirit”), and the last two lines seem to follow a similar pattern (“believed in throughout the world [kosmos]”/“received in glory”). In each case, the first line can be seen as having to do with the earthly realm, the second with the heavenly. The pattern seems to be broken with the middle pair, however, where the earthly/heavenly sequence is inverted: “seen by angels”/“proclaimed among ethnē.” Perhaps, as Hurtado has suggested, the presence of earthly and heavenly planes in each pair is more significant than the sequence.174 Alternatively, one might posit a chronological sequence, which seems to be discernible in the first five elements at least: earthly life (“revealed in flesh”); resurrection (“vindicated in spirit”); postresurrection exaltation (“seen by angels”); proclamation (“proclaimed among ethnē”); response (“believed in throughout the kosmos”).175 As an alternative sequence, some commentators have suggested that angeloi in the third line should be rendered “messengers”—that is, the apostolic witnesses to the resurrection who then proclaimed it among the ethnē.176 Either way, however, it is not readily apparent how we are to understand “taken up in glory” as something sequential to the worldwide acceptance of that truth for which the church is “the pillar and bulwark.”
Nevertheless, we do not need to resolve these questions before we can say anything about the proclamation “among the ethnē.” Here the matter is more straightforward than was the case with the previous passage. The fourth and fifth phrases in the hymn are tightly related: the proclamation “among the ethnē” results in belief “throughout the kosmos”; ethnē and kosmos stand in parallel. Unless one can imagine an early Christ-hymn that would disregard entirely the initial proclamation to Jews, ethnē here cannot carry the distinctively Jewish sense of “gentiles.”177 The worldwide spread of belief in Christ has resulted from the proclamation of this message to the nations of the world. While a phrase such as “proclaimed among the ethnē” might have originally emerged in the discourse of early Christ-believers as a reference to the gentile mission, its use in 1 Tim 3:16 needs to be seen as evidence that the distinctively Jewish sense of the term could recede into the background as its more basic sense moved to the fore.
This leads to a further observation about the epistle as a whole. As we have seen, literature produced by Jewish Christ-believers is marked by a concern to provide a rationale for the inclusion of Christ-believing gentiles, by linking it in some way with the people of Israel and with the belief that Christ represents the fulfillment of Israel’s hopes. In 1 Timothy, such a concern is severely attenuated at best. Christ’s significance has to do with generic humankind tout court: Christ as the one who “came into the world to save sinners” (1:15); Christ as the “one mediator between God and humankind” (2:5); Christ as “believed in throughout the world” (3:16). Israel and its history are simply cut out of the picture. Even where there is a reference to the law (1:7–11) or to the Scripture (5:18), there is nothing to suggest that these existed in an inextricable relationship with a specific people.178 This observation tends to confirm the perception that the epistle was written by a gentile Christian and provides one window into the sense of Christian identity within which he writes.
Ethnē appears once in 2 Timothy (4:17), in the account of Paul’s first defense in Rome (cf. 1:17), with which the body of the epistle comes to a conclusion (4:16–18).179 Despite the fact that “no one came to [Paul’s] support,” he was strengthened by the Lord, “so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the ethnē might hear it.” The account represents one of the strikingly personal and detailed passages that are especially prominent in 2 Timothy and that have led some to postulate that they were excerpted from earlier letters written by Paul himself, and others to believe that 2 Timothy as a whole was authentic.180 However, the retrospective tone of the warning about what would come “in the last days” (3:1) is a strong indication that the letter was written after Paul’s death, and the similarities between various passages in 2 Timothy and the other two Pastorals suggest that the same author was responsible for all three. So even if it were the case that the passage under discussion here depends on earlier material, we are justified in taking it, in its present form and context, as the work of the same author.
On the most straightforward reading of it, the “full proclamation of the message” referred to in v. 17 was part of what Paul said in his own defense (the basic sense of apologia; 4:16), a proclamation that was made possible by the fact that “the Lord stood by [him] and gave [him] strength.”181 In this reading, “all the ethnē” denotes the audience at his hearing. There is something odd, however, about the use of the phrase (panta ta ethnē) to denote the collection of individuals who happened to be present at the hearing. It should be noted that if the phrase refers to individuals, ethnē must have the sense of non-Jewish individuals; only in such cases can ethnē be used of individuals. Unless we are to assume that there were Jews present as well, why use such a grandiose term (panta ta ethnē) to denote a small group of people (“all the non-Jews who were there”)?182 The statement about “the message [to kērygma]” being “fully proclaimed [plērophorēthē]” to the ethnē, however, with its echoes of Rom 11:25 (“until the fullness [to plērōma] of the ethnē come in”), might suggest a reading in which the successful outcome of the hearing (“I was rescued from the lion’s mouth”) opened up the possibility of further proclamation among “all the ethnē.”183 But such a reading would strain the syntax of the sentence: the proclamation in question was made possible not by the divine rescue but by the divine presence and empowerment during the defense itself.
The verse, then, presents some puzzling problems. Perhaps the phrase panta ta ethnē appeared in a source used by the author in which it was appropriate for the context but then was rendered problematic in its new setting. Or perhaps the term was chosen by the author himself, because of its Pauline overtones (cf. Rom 1:5; 15:11; 16:26; Gal 3:8) or the symbolic place of Rome at the center of a worldwide empire.184 For our purposes, there is no need to settle on a specific solution. It is sufficient to note that the phrase depicts the ethnē as targets of mission and that non-Jews are probably in view, though this is not made explicit.
Turning briefly to a consideration of this reference to the ethnē in its larger context, we can note that, in the epistle, there is a little more evidence of a Jewish framework than we observed in 1 Timothy. The gospel proclaimed by Paul is said to consist of “Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant [ek spermatos] of David.”185 The scriptural account of Korah’s rebellion is cited in 2 Tim 2:19 (a citation of Num 16:5, together with a pastiche drawn from various other passages).186 Reference is made to “Jannes and Jambres” as opponents of Moses (2 Tim 3:8), using names for Pharaoh’s magicians that are known from Jewish tradition (CD V, 17–19) but that do not appear in the scriptural account (Exod 7:11).
At the same time, however, except for the description of Christ as being “from the seed of David,” there is no evident interest in the relationship between the community of those “who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:12) and the people of Israel. The story of salvation moves directly from “the grace [that] was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” to its revelation “in the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 1:9–10). Timothy may have known from childhood “the sacred writings that are able to instruct you in salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:15), but the letter contains no indication that these Scriptures also told the story of Israel and the promises of salvation made to them. Both 1 and 2 Timothy reflect a form of gentile Christianity for which the Jewish origins of the faith could simply be disregarded or left behind.
While the Apology of Aristides betrays no awareness that ethnē could be used as an identity term for non-Jewish Christians, the term does appear as part of an extended exercise in competitive ethnography. As will be readily apparent, the ethnographical argument is much more rudimentary than most of those that have come into view in previous chapters. Nevertheless, it represents perhaps the earliest explicit attempt on the part of a gentile Christian writer to enter this arena of identity negotiation.
Up until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Apology was known only indirectly through statements by later writers, the earliest of whom was Eusebius. Before the end of the century, however, two full versions of the work came into public view through separate manuscript discoveries, one in Syriac and the other in Greek. Since the latter was embedded in a longer narrative, however, we cannot simply assume that it is closer to the original.187 There are differences between the two, several of which have a bearing on our own discussion. The Syriac version is longer than the Greek by about a half, as it contains both longer versions of common material and segments not contained in the Greek. In addition, one segment of particular interest—the description of the Jews in chapter 14—differs considerably between the two. Robinson believed that the Greek version preserved the original work, except for “the very few places in which modification was obviously needed” in order to incorporate it into the longer narrative.188 While his arguments were initially influential, closer examination has led to a shift of opinion, so that the common view now is that the Syriac more closely reflects the original for the most part.189
Eusebius makes two statements about the Apology of Aristides, each of which connects it with the reign of Hadrian. The first simply describes it as “a defense [apologian] of the faith addressed to Hadrian” (Ecclesiastical History 4.3.3). The second appears in his Chronicle, a chronological work that contains a section in which events are listed in correlation with the years in which they were presumed to have taken place. Here Eusebius says that the Apology was presented to Hadrian in Athens in the eighth year of his reign (i.e., 124 or 125 CE). At first glance, this information appears to receive general confirmation from the prescript in the Syriac manuscript: “Apology made by Aristides the philosopher before Hadrianus the King, concerning the worship of almighty God.”190 However, this is immediately followed by what appears to be a second prescript, this time addressed to Antoninus Pius: “Caesar Titus Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius, from Marcianus Aristides, a philosopher from Athens.” Although Harris took this second prescript to be the original, so that the work should be dated in the time of Antoninus Pius (138–61), current scholarly opinion tends to favor the time of Hadrian.191
The Apology begins with a short chapter in which Aristides presents the “king” (mlkʾ [Syr.]; basileu [Gk.]) with his understanding of the nature of God—an all-powerful, immortal, incomprehensible, unmoved first mover.192 Then he moves quickly to the human race and the question of “which of them hold any part of that truth which we have spoken concerning Him, and which of them are in error” (2.1). He asserts that “there are four races [gnsʾ; genē] of men in this world: Barbarians and Greeks, Jews and Christians,”193 something he believes that the king will accept as clearly evident (2.2).194 With this fourfold division of humankind in place, he proceeds to assess them one by one on the basis of their deities and conception of the divine, with some attention to religious observance and moral life.
As he treats these four races or types of humankind, he also uses the category of “nations” (all but once in the plural). Where the Greek overlaps with the Syriac, the term is ethnē. The Syriac (with vocalization) is ʿammaʾ. While we might have expected a form of gôy, it is apparent that in Syriac usage ʿammaʾ has replaced the Hebrew and Aramaic term gôy, especially in its sense of pagan or gentile nations.195 In what follows, then, I will use ethnē in citations of the English translation of the Syriac, instead of an English equivalent for ʿammaʾ.196
The term first appears as Aristides picks up the case of the barbarians: “Let us begin with the barbarians, and by degrees we will proceed to the rest of the ethnē” (Apology of Aristides 3.1). Given the way he has set up his discourse, ethnē is to be understood as referring to the four races or types (genē) that constitute humankind; that is, each of the types constitutes a nation. The characteristic feature of the barbarians is that they failed to comprehend God and thus “began to serve created things instead of the Creator of them” (3.1). This leads into an extended catalog of the things worshiped (humanly created idols and images, elements, water, fire, sun, great men of old, etc.), with a typical denunciation of the folly of it all (chs. 3–7).
In chapter 8 he turns to the case of the Greeks, whose greater wisdom simply means that they “have erred even more than the barbarians” (Apology of Aristides 8.1). He describes the Greek pantheon in considerable detail (Kronos, Zeus, Hephaestus, Hermes, Asclepius, and so on down the list), highlighting the moral and sexual misbehavior of each and making the point that the character of the gods has provided human beings with license to behave the same way (chs. 8–11).
In chapter 12 he moves on to the Egyptians, who presumably are to be classified with the race or type of the Greeks. The Egyptians, “because they are more evil and ignorant than all the ethnē upon the earth” (Apology of Aristides 12.1), have added to the idolatrous sins of the barbarians and Greeks not only some new gods of their own (e.g., Isis and Osiris) but also the worship of animals. On two other occasions in his account of the Egyptians, he describes them as worse than the rest: “the Egyptians are more ignorant than the rest of the ethnē” (12.4); “The Egyptians have erred with a great error, above all the ethnē that are upon the face of the earth” (13.1). With these references to “all the ethnē” on the face of the earth, Aristides seems to have set his fourfold categorization to one side for a moment and to have in view a human population divided more generically into a larger number of constitutive ethnē.
In contrast to the barbarians, Greeks, and Egyptians, the Jews receive a surprisingly positive assessment (ch. 14).197 In their recognition that “God is one, Creator of all and almighty,” who alone is to be worshiped, the Jews “appear to be much nearer to the truth than all the ethnē” (Apology of Aristides 14.3). Also commendable is that they “imitate God” in their compassion for the poor, their concern for the captive, and their burying of the dead. Where they fall short, however, is in their observation of “sabbaths and new moons and the passover and the great fast, and the fast, and circumcision and cleanness of meats” (14.4). While they think that they are serving God in all this, in reality, “their service is to angels.” In this way, they “have gone astray from accurate knowledge.”
Finally, then, he comes to the Christians, who through “seeking have found the truth” and thus “are nearer to the truth and to exact knowledge than the rest of the ethnē” (Apology of Aristides 15.1). The extended description of the Christians (chs. 15–16) is striking for the absence of Christian distinctives.198 What Aristides presents instead is what might be seen as an expanded description of the kind of ethical monotheism that he praised in his chapter on the Jews, with a few added references to “their Christ” (15.7, 8; 16.2). As Wilson has observed, chapters 15–16 “amount to little more than Jewish apologetic arguments lightly adapted for Christian use: a commitment to monotheism and to the virtuous life.”199 Aristides concludes this section by characterizing the Christians as “a new ethnos” in that “there is something divine mingled with it” (16.3). Further, “the world stands by reason of the intercession of Christians, but the rest of the ethnē are deceived and deceivers” (16.6).
In Aristides’s ethnographical map of the world, then, the nations of the world can be grouped into four distinct types, which he can also call ethnē. The Christians constitute the newest and best of these ethnē, in that they have discovered the truth about God and have mirrored the divine nature in their own ethical way of life. While they resemble the Jews to a certain extent, the resemblance is analogical rather than genealogical. That is, Aristides is unaware—or chooses to appear unaware—that the first Christians were Jews and that the Christian movement began within the ethnos of the Jews. In this connection, it is not without significance that he describes Jesus’s mother as a “Hebrew virgin” and Jesus himself as “born of the tribe of the Hebrews” (Apology of Aristides 2.4). He makes no reference whatsoever to Israel’s Scriptures, and he certainly shows no interest in rooting the Christian faith in the scriptural promises.200 While the Christians may represent a new ethnos, in no way do they see themselves as a new Israel. They might stand alongside the Jews in a fourfold classification of the nations of the world, but they are a distinct and separate people. As a non-Jewish people, they might be seen from one angle as a gentile people, a people drawn from the ethnē; Aristides, however, betrays no awareness of this alternative ethnographical map of the world.
Nevertheless, in contrast to the material we have looked at to this point, the Apology of Aristides represents a significant attempt to engage the wider Greek world on terms that outsiders would recognize.201 Presenting the Christians as an ethnos—a new ethnos perhaps, but one that can be classed alongside the other ethnē—he redraws the ethnic map of the world so as to locate the Christian ethnos in the most advantageous position.202
In contrast to other pertinent literature from this period, Luke-Acts is marked by the frequency with which it uses ethnē as an identifier for non-Jews, especially as an identity term for Christians, and by the thematic significance of the mission to the ethnē within the work as a whole. From the Song of Simeon in the Jerusalem temple (“a light for revelation to the ethnē” [Luke 2:32]) to Paul’s closing declaration in Rome (“this salvation of God has been sent to the ethnē” [Acts 28:28]), the geographical arc of the narrative is matched by the progressive expansion of the ethnic sphere of the “salvation of God.” Further, this geographical arc is securely moored in the time frame and territory of the Roman Empire. The story of Jesus’s birth and the beginnings of Jesus’s public ministry are each introduced chronologically with references to the currently ruling emperor (“a decree went out from Caesar Augustus” [Luke 2:1]; “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar” [Luke 3:1]); the story ends with a meeting between Paul and the Jews of Rome, at which he informs them that he was there because he was “compelled to appeal to Caesar” (Acts 28:17).203
The secondary literature on Luke-Acts is immense, and we will need to forgo anything like a full discussion in order to keep our treatment within limits commensurate with our treatment of other literature in this section.204 Some introductory issues can be dealt with briefly. Luke and Acts are clearly the work of the same author (whom for convenience we will call Luke), writing sometime toward the end of the first century CE. Further, Luke and Acts should be seen as parts of a single, two-volume work (Luke-Acts). Luke’s interest in the ethnē and their place in the Christian movement is just one of a number of themes that run through the two writings and bind them together in a single work.205 This interest in the ethnē is also one of the considerations that has led most interpreters (though not all) to believe that the author was a gentile, perhaps originally a Godfearer of the type that frequently comes into view in the work. The evidence is not conclusive, however, and so we will return to the question a little later.206 With respect to genre, Luke-Acts can be fruitfully read as an example of apologetic historiography, even though there are differences in genre between the two parts of the work.207
The plural form ethnē, used to denote non-Jewish nations or individuals, appears some forty times in Luke-Acts. More than thirty of these are in Acts, and these will be of primary interest to us here. The majority of these occurrences are linked explicitly with Christ-belief. In some cases, the ethnē appear simply as the sphere of mission in general.208 After Paul’s conversion, it is revealed to Ananias that Paul “is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before ethnē and kings and the people of Israel” (Acts 9:15). Later in Pisidian Antioch, Paul declares to a Jewish audience: “Since you reject [the word of God] and judge yourselves to be unworthy of eternal life, we are now turning to the ethnē,” punctuating the declaration with a statement drawn from Isa 42:6: “I have set you to be a light for the ethnē” (13:46–47).209 Usually the mission to the ethnē is spoken about in optimistic terms (“they will listen”; 28:28), and so it is not surprising that it almost invariably brings positive results. After the conversion of Cornelius, “the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the ethnē had also accepted the word of God” (11:1). Somewhat later in the chapter, Peter declares: “you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the ethnē would hear the message of the good news and become believers (v. 7).210 In Luke’s view, then, the mission to the ethnē is a decided success. Further, those ethnē who believe continue to be identified as ethnē. Speaking of “the ethnē who are turning to God,” James describes them as “the ethnē over whom [God’s] name is called” (v. 17). Elsewhere in the chapter, they are described as “brothers from the ethnē” or “those of the ethnē who turn to God” (vv. 23, 19). While in some of the other occurrences, the ethnē are presented in negative terms, there is no sense that negative behavior is to be seen as such a defining characteristic of the ethnē that non-Jews necessarily cease to be ethnē when they became believers.211 In other words, the idea that ethnē is an identity that believers left behind is not present in Acts. God may have decided to take “a people for his name” “from the ethnē,” as James declares in Acts 15:14, but these believers “from the ethnē” remain ethnē, “ethnē over whom [God’s] name has been called” (v. 17).
To be sure, within the narrative itself, nothing explicitly indicates what gentile characters thought of the term. Nowhere in the narrative do gentiles use ethnē of themselves.212 In the two episodes in which Jewish characters use the term in direct address to non-Jews, although the non-Jews in each case respond positively to the address as a whole, the term itself receives no attention.213 The most one can say is that Luke assumed that there was no resistance to the term. But if the author of Luke-Acts was gentile himself, the positive place of the ethnē within its overall themes and narrative progression can be taken as evidence of a readiness on the part of gentile Christ-believers to accept the ascribed identity and to make positive use of it.
While these narratively developed themes raise many interpretive questions, there is general agreement on the broad outline of the author’s interests and concerns. First, he clearly wants to convince his readers that the ekklēsia stands in legitimate continuation with the scriptural people of Israel and their history.214 Second, as already noted, the author wants to set the story of “the events that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1) in the broader context of the Roman world and to present the Christians as a legitimate people deserving a place of recognition and respect within it. In addition, these two concerns are related to a third, having to do with the delay of the parousia (Luke 19:11; Acts 1:6) and the construction of a period in the divine purposes, occupying the space between the resurrection and the final restoration, for the ekklēsia and its mission.
These generally recognized concerns provide the context within which we need to locate an issue of more particular interest—that of the relationship between Jewish and gentile believers in the ekklēsia. A striking feature of Acts is Luke’s concern to maintain the distinction between Jews and the ethnē, not only generally but within the community of Christ-believers as well. In Luke’s view, the ekklēsia is a community that contains both torah-observant Jews (even those who are “zealots for the Torah” [21:20]) and God-fearing ethnē, distinct yet equally significant. On one side, the leaders of the ekklēsia reject the position that ethnē be required (in effect) to become proselytes to Judaism as a condition of membership (ch. 15). On the other, they reject just as firmly any suggestion that Jewish Christ-believers should be pressured to compromise their torah-observance in order to accommodate non-Jewish believers (21:18–26).
To be sure, there is considerable room for discussion about how this dual-identity ekklēsia is to be understood. For one thing, Luke seems to present two distinct theological rationales for the inclusion of the ethnē. The more widely recognized of these is one in which the gentile mission is predicated on the failure of Jews to respond. This sequence of rejection (by Jews) and extended mission (to the ethnē) comes into view especially in the three scenes in which Paul declares that he is turning from the Jews to the ethnē (Acts 13:46; 18:6; 28:25–28). But this theme of rejection should not be allowed to overshadow another aspect of the narrative. Luke also goes out of his way to emphasize the great numbers of Jews who became Christ-believers, from the three thousand on the day of Pentecost (2:41) to the “many thousands” reported by James in his meeting with Paul (21:20), with many other mass conversions in between.215 Here another rationale can be discerned, one in which gentiles come in not to replace unbelieving Jews but to share in the saving blessings that have been granted to the already-existing community of Jewish Christ-believers.216
These two rationales are probably not to be seen as incompatible. Perhaps the key to Luke’s view is to be found in statements he attributes to Peter at the end of his sermon in Acts 3, a sermon in which he identifies Jesus as the promised prophet like Moses of Deut 18:15–19. On the one hand, he identifies his hearers as descendants of the covenant that God gave to Israel in the promise to Abraham: “And in your seed all the families [patriae] of the earth shall be blessed” (3:25). On the other, those who do not listen to the prophet like Moses “will be utterly rooted out of the people” (3:23). The picture that emerges here is one that includes both a division within Israel and the extension of the blessing to “all the families of the earth.” The preaching to Israel takes temporal priority: “When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you” (3:26). When Jews have had a chance to respond, the message is extended to the ethnē, who then have the opportunity to share in the blessing that is already enjoyed by the believing Jews.
In chapter 4, I argued that in the early chapters of Acts, Luke was drawing on source material stemming from earlier groups of Jewish Christ-believers. Further, in that chapter, I also constructed a typology of the ways in which Jewish Christ-believers conceived of the salvation of the ethnē. One of the types, which was based on Peter’s sermon in Acts 3:11–26 along with other related material—“Christ as inaugurating a new era of fulfillment for (a remnant within) Israel, which gentiles were invited to share”—was very similar to the position I have just attributed to Luke himself. While there might be a perception of circular reasoning here, the existence of the type is not dependent on Acts alone. The more pertinent observation, I believe, is that Luke appears to endorse a rationale for the salvation of the ethnē that originated with Jewish Christ-believers and thus assigns a much more positive role to torah-observant Jewish Christ-believers than can be found in any other gentile Christian writing under consideration here.
Still, this is not the whole picture. For the most part, this positive role comes into view primarily with respect to the Christ-groups in Jerusalem and Judea. In the latter half of the work—that is, the account of Paul’s missionary travels in the gentile world (Acts 13–28)—Luke places much more emphasis on the hostility of the unbelieving Jews than on the positive response of a Jewish remnant. Indeed, even when he does note a positive response on the part of some Jews, he often attributes subsequent hostility simply to “the Jews” without qualification.217 Further, this portrayal of “the Jews” as implacably hostile stands in sharp contrast to the depiction of Roman officials, who tend to appear as fair-minded protectors of the Christians in situations of conflict.218 While this is not to say that Luke-Acts should be seen as a full-throated endorsement of Roman rule and an apologia for Christian acquiescence to the imperial state,219 the contrasting portrayal of Roman officials and “the Jews” in the narrative is striking nonetheless.220 All of this gives added force to the final scene in the narrative, in which Paul denounces his Jewish hearers in the words of Isaiah (Isa 6:9–10) and declares, “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the ethnē; they will listen” (Acts 28:25–28). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, for Luke, “the time of mass conversions lies … in the past,” and the bipartite character of the ekklēsia—a Jewish remnant supplemented by a company of believing ethnē—is largely confined to the transitional first generation.221 It is for this reason that, despite his Jewish sympathies and thoroughgoing familiarity with Jewish Scripture, the author of Luke-Acts is probably to be seen as a gentile.
With its dual apologetic concerns—the (largely gentile) ekklēsia as the legitimate continuation of the story of Israel and as a legitimate people deserving a place of recognition and respect within the Roman Empire—Luke-Acts anticipates gentile Christian material that will come more fully into view in the next chapter. Before turning to this, however, it will be useful to make a few summarizing observations about the material examined in this section.
The ten pieces of literature examined in this section were all written in the period between the two Jewish wars (or perhaps a little later in one or two cases); all of them, we can say with a reasonable level of confidence, were written by gentile authors for a primarily gentile readership; and all of them use the term ethnē in one or more senses. In most cases, the use of ethnē suggests some degree of dependence on the original use of the term by Jewish Christ-believers as an ascribed identity for non-Jewish believers. And with perhaps two exceptions, these writings display little interest in the term as a positive identity marker.
The most frequently encountered use of the term is as a designation for outsiders, the others who do not share a faith in Christ. Ethnē is used in this way in six of the writings we have examined. The usage is especially frequent in the Shepherd of Hermas (a dozen times). Elsewhere, it is used on three occasions as part of an admonition to believers not to behave in a way that would cause God’s name to be blasphemed by outsiders (Polycarp, To the Philippians 10.2; 2 Clement 13.1–2; Ignatius, To the Trallians 8.2), an admonition based on LXX Isa 52:5.222 The other two writings are 1 Clement and the Epistle of Barnabas.
Ethnē is used as an identity term for gentile Christ-believers in a couple of writings. As we have just seen, Luke uses it in this sense. The most explicit instance, however, is found in the Epistle of Barnabas. In addressing the question “whether the covenant is for us or them” (where “them” refers clearly to the Jews), he sets out a catena of scriptural citations having to do with the salvation of the ethnē (13.1 and following), thus clearly identifying “us” Christ-believers as ethnē.223 More generally, ethnē are also depicted as the targets of mission in Luke-Acts and 2 Timothy.
Ethnē is also used in a universal sense, to refer to the whole of humankind as comprising distinct ethnic people groups. The Shepherd of Hermas speaks of the “twelve ethnē” “that inhabit the entire earth” and of “all the ethnē that dwell under the sky” (Similitudes 9.17.2, 4).224 In a different way, Aristides speaks of “all the ethnē upon the earth” (Apology of Aristides 12.1), which he also classifies according to four types (genē) or ethnē (2.2). In 1 Timothy, the statements about Paul as a “teacher of the ethnē” (2:6) and about Christ as having been “proclaimed among the ethnē” (3:16) seem to use the term in a universal sense as well.
Turning from matters of usage, let us look at two broader questions, the first of which concerns the way in which Christian identity is construed in these writings with respect to the Scriptures, religion, and people of Israel. One striking thing to emerge from our examination of these writings is that a number of them display very little awareness of the Jewish origins of the Christian movement and very little interest in questions of the relationship between the two. Polycarp speaks of “the prophets who preached, in advance, the coming of our Lord” (To the Philippians 6.3) but does not quote any of them, despite his frequent quotations of and allusions to apostolic writings. While the Shepherd of Hermas contains a number of Jewish-sounding themes and material, the closest it gets to the question of the relationship between the believers of the present and Israel in the past is the concern about the salvation of the righteous who lived in the previous era. In Aristides’s depiction of the four basic types (or ethnē) into which humankind can be grouped, while he presents Jews as being much closer to the Christians in their conceptions of God than are the Greeks or barbarians, he is neither interested in nor troubled by the historical relationship between the two. The form of belief reflected in 1 Timothy, and to a slightly lesser extent in 2 Timothy, is one in which Christ is the savior of an undifferentiated humanity and in which Paul’s differentiated world of Jews and gentiles has receded into the background.
First Clement is the sole representative of another way of construing the relationship between the Christian movement and scriptural Israel. Clement simply assumes, in a naive and straightforward way, that the church bears the identity of scriptural Israel. There is no hint of any kind of temporal progression in which the identity that once belonged to the people of Israel has now passed to the new people of Christ. Rather, what we encounter is an unreflective appropriation of the identity markers of Israel: “we” are the special portion that God has chosen from out of all the ethnē of the world (Deut 32:8–9), a people that includes Christ-believers as well as the saints of Scripture without any apparent differentiation (1 Clement 29–30). In this sense, 1 Clement can be seen as holding to a gentile version of the type of identity construction found in Jewish Christ-group literature such as 1 Peter.225 First Clement is also marked by the complete absence of any adversus Judaeos polemic or hostility toward contemporary Jews.
Another way of construing the relationship between the church and Israel comes into view in the Epistle of Barnabas and in Ignatius. In both cases, Christianity and Judaism are categorically distinct, a distinction that extends back into the pre-Christian past. In both cases, torah-observant Judaism represents a false path; any mingling of faith in Christ with Jewish observance is categorically excluded. In both cases, the patriarchs and prophets, along with a few other righteous people, were in effect Christians before Christ, as they recognized that the real purpose of Scripture was to speak in a symbolic way about the coming of Christ.226 The relationship between Christians and Jews in the present, then, is just a continuation of a duality that has characterized Israel from the beginning.227
Finally, Luke-Acts represents another construal, one in which a church consisting of a torah-observant core of Jewish Christ-believers, together with a growing number of gentile believers (whom God has called as “a people for his name” [Acts 15:14]), is seen as the legitimate continuation of scriptural Israel. This conception corresponds closely with one of the types that was present among early Jewish Christ-believers, though we have also seen reasons to believe that Luke saw this as a transitional stage on the way to a predominantly gentile church.
The second question has to do with attitudes toward the outside world and the place of (gentile) Christ-believers within it. A number of the writings examined in this section are marked by a sharp duality between the church and the outside world, set within an eschatological framework of judgment, vindication, and reversal. Such a view is present to a certain extent in 2 Clement, especially in the sharp contrast between “this age and the age to come” (6.3) and the expectation that in the day of judgment unbelievers will “be shocked when they see that the rulership of this world has been given to Jesus” (17.5).228 We find more explicit hints of an expected eschatological triumph over the powers that be in the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, and Ignatius. Hermas’s Similitudes, which have to do with the possibility of repentance up to the time of the final judgment, are prefaced with a comparison between the believer’s life in the present world and the situation of a resident alien in a foreign city, who lives under the whims of the city’s “ruler” (kyrios; 1.1–6).229 The Epistle of Barnabas warns its readers that “the final stumbling block is at hand,” citing passages from Dan 7, which could only have been read in an anti-Roman way.230 And Ignatius, writing during his journey to Rome, claims that the victory over “the ancient realm [palaia basileia]” has already been accomplished in the incarnation.231
Alongside this stance of separation from the wider world and of hope for the final overthrow of the rulers of the earth, some of the literature under examination here displays a more nuanced readiness to engage with the outside world and its leaders. This is present to a certain extent in Polycarp’s call to pray for “kings and magistrates and rulers.”232 More pointedly, Aristides, with his reconstruction of the ethnic map of the (Greek) world, and Luke, with his account of the emergence of the Christian movement within Judaism and its spread outward into the Roman world, represent attempts to engage with the wider Greek and Roman world and to negotiate a favorable place for the Christians within it. The author of 1 Clement seems to move beyond engagement and negotiation and in the direction of obedient subservience, as he prays that God would allow Christians “to be obedient to your all powerful and all virtuous name, and to those who rule and lead us here on earth,” whose “authority to rule” has been given directly by God (60.4–61.1).
In the literature to which we now turn, both questions—the way Christian identity is construed with respect to the Scriptures, religion, and people of Israel; and the place of Christians within the wider Greek and Roman world—are taken up in a more deliberate and thoroughgoing way. As we will see, ethnē as a positive identity term plays a much more central role in the ensuing discourse.
1. An important recent exception is Cavan W. Concannon, “When You Were Gentiles”: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Still, he addresses his attention more to ethnic discourse in general than to ethnē specifically; see further below.
2. Cf. Shaye J. D. Cohen’s description: “After his [Jesus’s] death his followers, all of whom were Jews like Jesus himself, constituted a Jewish movement, perhaps a sect, meeting and praying regularly in the Temple of Jerusalem and interacting with other Jewish worshipers. (At least this is the story in the opening chapters of Acts.)”; “The Ways That Parted: Jews, Christians, and Jewish-Christians, ca. 100–150 CE,” in Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum 70–132 CE, ed. Joshua Schwartz and Peter J. Tomson, CRINT 15 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 307–39, here 307.
3. And even then we need to make room for a figure such as Nicolaus (Acts 6:5), a proselyte incorporated into the larger Jewish community in Antioch who subsequently became a member of the Jerusalem Christ-community.
4. On all this, see ch. 2 above.
5. For a caution in this regard, see James Carleton Paget, “Jewish Revolts and Jewish-Christian Relations,” in Schwartz and Tomson, Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries, 276–306. He is primarily interested, however, in the extent to which the revolts might have led gentile Christ-believers to distance themselves more emphatically from Jews and the Jewish roots of the movement. The impact on Jewish Christ-believers is a separate matter (partially, at least).
6. Uncertainties about dating in some instances mean that the boundaries between the three periods are not to be drawn too sharply.
7. On the nature and use of this material, see the discussion in ch. 4.
8. For a discussion of Jewish material, see ch. 4. Pertinent gentile material will be identified and discussed later in this chapter.
9. For the most part; Luke-Acts is a prominent exception.
10. Among these proto-orthodox groups, both the increased use of Christian and Christianity, as identity terms, and the normative trajectory of which these groups were a part justify the use of these terms when discussing this period.
11. E.g., Mark 10:42; Matt 6:32; 18:17; Rev 11:2; Didache 1.3.
12. E.g., Rom 1:5; Gal 1:16; 1 Thess 2:16; Mark 13:10; Acts 15:7.
13. Also Rom 1:5–6, 13; Gal 2:11–12; Acts 11:1; Eph 3:1, 6; Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.42.1.
14. Also 1 Pet 4:3; Eph 4:17. More generally, in some texts addressed to non-Jewish believers, those outside the ekklēsia can be described as ethnē (1 Cor 5:1; 1 Pet 2:12).
15. This is not to disregard the diverse ways in which this eschatological fulfillment was understood and depicted in Jewish tradition.
16. Type 3 is readily susceptible to the idea of ethnic supersessionism, though a distinction needs to be made between type 3 as a form of identity constructed by Jewish Christ-believers and the transformation that is effected when it is taken over by gentile Christians.
17. Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–84).
18. For detailed studies, see especially John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Benjamin H. Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
19. Nothing appears in Stern’s collection, and I have not discovered anything else in my research into the use of the pertinent terms (ethnē, gentes, nationes, etc.).
20. Justin acknowledges the oddness in his First Apology when, after claiming that “the Gentile Christians [tous ex ethnōn … Christianous] are more numerous and true than those from among the Jews and the Samaritans,” he adds a word of explanation: “For all the other human races are called Gentiles [ethnē] by the prophetic Spirit, but the Jewish and Samaritan [races] are called the tribe [phylon] of Israel and the house of Jacob” (53). I have not been able to find any analogous evidence among earlier Christian or Greco-Roman sources, but the usage would have struck most outsiders as odd.
21. To be sure, there were work-arounds—e.g., allophylos (Acts 10:28); ethnikos (Matt 18:17); Hēllēn (Gal 2:3). But these simply underlined the oddness of the plural.
22. For a significant full-length treatment, see Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); see also John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 862–75; David A. Snow and Cynthia L. Phillips, “The Lofland-Stark Conversion Model: A Critical Reassessment,” Social Problems 27 (1980): 430–47; David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, “The Convert as a Social Type,” in Sociological Theory, ed. Randall Collins (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983), 259–89; Snow and Machalek, “The Sociology of Conversion,” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984): 167–90. Despite its specifically Christian orientation, helpful surveys can be found in H. Newton Malony and Samuel Southard, eds., Handbook of Religious Conversion (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1992), especially Lewis R. Rambo, “The Psychology of Conversion,” 159–77, and William Sims Bainbridge, “The Sociology of Conversion,” 178–91.
23. Snow and Machalek, “Convert as a Social Type,” 266–69.
24. Rambo, “Psychology of Conversion,” 160.
25. Brian Taylor, “Recollection and Membership: Converts’ Talk and the Ratiocination of Commonality,” Sociology 12 (1978): 316–24; see also 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.
26. 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; see Fredrik Barth, Process and Form in Social Life: Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
27. Especially in his book Social Identity, now in a fourth edition: Richard Jenkins, Social Identity, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014).
28. See Jenkins, Social Identity, 45–47, and ch. 9 (“Groups and Categories”).
29. Jenkins makes use of social deviance theory here: “Internalisation may occur if an individual is authoritatively labelled within an appropriate institutional setting…. The capacity of authoritatively applied identification to constitute or influence individual experience affects whether or not individuals internalise the label(s) concerned. This is a matter of whose definition of the situation counts (put crudely, power). Identification by others has consequences”; Social Identity, 44–45.
30. As Jenkins puts it, “the internal and external moments of the process of collective identification [i.e., respectively, “group identification” and “categorisation”] … take place most definitively—although not only—at the boundaries of identification”; Social Identity, 160. It is when a group is confronted with a boundary between itself and some significant other that issues of identity become pressing and need to be negotiated.
31. The Gospel of Mark is usually dated to a few years on either side of 70 CE.
32. Concannon, “When You Were Gentiles”, e.g., xii.
33. E.g., Peter S. Oakes, Reading Romans in Pompeii: Paul’s Letter at Ground Level (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009).
34. Especially Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Early Christian Beginnings (New York: Crossroad, 1983), and, on a more focused topic, Antoinette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990).
35. In addition to Concannon (“When You Were Gentiles”), see Davina C. Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), and Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).
36. “I make no presumptions that these conjurings were the ‘real’ Corinthians…. The Corinthians whom I have sought to conjure in this book are possibilities that may have been and might yet be, possibilities that beg to be given even spectral bodies as some kind of existence. It is my hope that what amounts to a number of séances might have conjured for the reader new ways of thinking of what might have been, what could be, and what should be different in how we tell our histories of earliest Christianity, of Paul, and of the Corinthians”; Concannon, “When You Were Gentiles”, 172.
37. This figure excludes the occurrence in Rom 16:26, which is probably part of a later non-Pauline addendum.
38. See the discussion in ch. 4 above.
39. In the account of Cornelius’s encounter with Peter (Acts 10), although ethnē is present in the narrator’s discourse (10:45), it is absent from the dialogue among the characters themselves.
40. At the beginning of the narrative, the non-Jews are identified as “those who fear [hoi phoboumenoi] God” (13:16); at the end of the first sermon, they are described instead as “devout proselytes [tōn sebomenōn prosēlytōn]” (13:43). For a discussion of this puzzling shift, see Terence L. Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 426–29.
41. E.g., the address (Antioch, Syria, Cilicia), which, on the one hand, does not correspond well with the geography of the narrative to this point and which, on the other, is much more limited in scope than Luke’s universal vision (cf. “the ends of the earth”; Acts 1:8); the specific requirements of the decree (15:29), which are not thematized by Luke elsewhere. See the discussion in C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994–98), 2:709–11.
42. Cf. “a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear” (v. 10); “to impose on you no further burden than these essentials” (v. 28).
43. Cf. 15:28, where the letter conveys the decision “to impose on you no further burden than these essentials.”
44. For an illuminating reconstruction of the perspective of the rival teachers and of the place of the ethnē in their own version of the gospel (with particular attention to the universal role of the torah and the significance of Abraham as the first proselyte), see J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 120–26.
Fredriksen has shed light on one aspect of this appeal to become circumcised, by delineating the ambiguous situation in which gentile Christ-believers found themselves. From the beginning, gentiles who wanted to become Christ-believers were required to dissociate themselves from the worship of the array of pagan gods. Such worship was widely regarded as an essential aspect of human existence and ethnic identity, and such atheistic refusal to honor the gods was viewed with deep suspicion. The only exception were the Jews, with their exclusive devotion to their own ethnic god—an exception that was eventually accepted by outsiders as a tolerable aspect of ancestral tradition. Proselytism—“a pagan’s ‘becoming’ a Jew”—also came to be “tolerated, if resented, because Judaism itself was a familiar point on the urban landscape.” But in becoming Christ-believers, non-Jews adopted a similar anomalous religious exclusiveness while remaining non-Jews—a practice that both disrupted the social order and threatened to arouse the anger of the gods. In such a situation, identifying fully with the Jewish people could readily become an attractive option. See Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 88–93 and passim; the quotations are from p. 90. See also James B. Rives, “Animal Sacrifice and Political Identity in Rome and Judea,” in Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History, ed. Peter J. Tomson and Joshua Schwartz, CRINT 13 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 105–25.
45. “You want [thelete] to be enslaved [to the elemental spirits] again?” (4:9); “you who desire [thelontes] to be subject to the law” (4:21).
46. “You are deserting the one who called you … and are turning to a different gospel” (1:6); “Who has bewitched you?” (3:1); “Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?” (3:3); “how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits?” (4:9).
47. “The circumcised” (2:8, 9); “those of the circumcised” (2:12); “Jews” (2:14, 15). In 2:14 the adverb ethnikōs is thrown in for good measure.
48. Here in contrast to the plural of v. 13 (“you ethnē”), we encounter the singular (ereis, “You will say”); cf. the singular, “you [sy], a wild olive shoot,” in v. 17.
49. See ch. 4 above.
50. This is a briefer and more gentile-specific version of the identity indices set out in ch. 4, which were formulated as follows: (1) a range of conceptions concerning the nature and purpose of scriptural Israel and its religion, as understood in relation with new beliefs about Christ and his significance; (2) a range of conceptions concerning the place and status of the continuing Jewish people and their religion; and (3) a range of conceptions concerning the place and status of Jewish and gentile believers within groups of Christ-believers of varying ethnic composition.
51. In many instances, for example, it is difficult to date the material with any confidence and, in any case, any attempt to trace lines of development would take us too far afield.
52. We begin with two writings in which ethnē is used only with reference to outsiders (Polycarp, To the Philippians, 2 Clement) and then go on to those in which the term is used in more than one way (Shepherd of Hermas, Ignatius, 1 Clement, Epistle of Barnabas). In addition to these writings, ethnikos appears once in the Johannine epistles (3 John 7) as a term for outsiders. The striking lack of interest in Jewish issues, which contrasts sharply with the Fourth Gospel, might suggest gentile authorship for the epistles. But since ethnē does not appear, and since 3 John 7 would not add much to the discussion here, it will be left out of account.
53. 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Apology of Aristides, Luke-Acts.
54. For a comprehensive listing of material, see Paul Hartog, ed., Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Introduction, Text, and Commentary, OAF (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–9.
55. See Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.2; 12.2; 13.1; 17.2; 18.1; 19.1.
56. All nine of them continue with the text of the Epistle of Barnabas, beginning at 5.7, which implies dependency on a single textual ancestor. In addition, Eusebius quotes two portions of the letter (all of ch. 9; most of ch. 13).
57. See P. N. Harrison, Polycarp’s Two Epistles to the Philippians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). The primary alternative is that the letter can be understood as a unity, written on a single occasion; so, originally, J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers: Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp: Revised Texts with Introductions, Notes, Dissertations and Translations, part 2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1989), 1:588–89, followed (with some hesitation or qualification) by others; e.g., Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 132–33; and Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, who also provides an up-to-date survey of the discussion (pp. 33–40). In addition, some have argued for a later interpolation, an argument tied up with older debates about the authenticity of the epistles of Ignatius; see Thomas Lechner, Ignatius adversus Valentinianos? Chronologische und theologiegeschichtliche Studien zu den Briefen des Ignatius von Antiochien, VCSup 47 (Leiden: Brill, 1999).
58. He appears to acknowledge his lack of knowledge of the Scriptures in 12.1.
59. The designation Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians is a composite of the titles that appear in the three surviving manuscripts—Alexandrinus (“Epistle of Clement B”); Hierosolymitanus (“Clement to the Corinthians B”); Syriac (“Of the same Clement to the Corinthians B”); for details, see Wilhelm Pratscher, Der zweite Clemensbrief, Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Väter 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 9–11.
Stylistically, the two writings (neither of which bears the name of Clement) are quite distinct. Nevertheless, the fact that 2 Clement follows 1 Clement in the three manuscripts that contain 2 Clement may suggest some connection between the two (e.g., a Roman or Corinthian provenance).
60. So, e.g., Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part 1, 2:194–97; Pratscher, Der zweite Clemensbrief, 25–27; Alistair Stewart-Sykes, From Prophecy to Preaching: A Search for the Origins of the Christian Homily, VCSup 59 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 174–87.
61. Regardless of whether “what is written” refers to Scripture (so Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part 1, 2:195), the most plausible understanding of the “request” (or appeal; enteuxis) that is being read is that it has to do with the sermon that precedes (so Karl Paul Donfried, The Setting of Second Clement in Early Christianity, SupNovT 38 [Leiden: Brill, 1974], 14–15; Wilhelm Pratscher, “The Second Epistle of Clement,” in The Apostolic Fathers: An Introduction, ed. Wilhelm Pratscher [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010], 72–73). But it seems odd that the person who has spoken directly and personally to his audience through chs. 1–18 would then refer to himself in 19:1 as “the one who is your reader.” It is more likely that the “I” of chs. 1–18 and the “I” of chs. 19–20 are distinct.
62. See, e.g., Bart D. Ehrman, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1:159–60.
63. On the place of origin, see Pratscher, Der zweite Clemensbrief, 59–61.
64. On the foreignness of the present age, cf. 5.5: “our visit in this world of the flesh [en tō kosmō toutō tēs sarkos tautēs].”
65. To which he adds another citation of unknown origin: “And again he says, ‘Woe to the one who causes my name to be blasphemed.’” A similar woe formulation appears in Polycarp, To the Philippians 10.2–3.
66. This last phrase appears in the LXX but not in the MT. The Greek version also contains the phrase “because of you [di’ hymas],” which is reflected in the phrase in the sentence before the citation (“because of us”).
67. See 2.1–2 (Isa 54:1); 7.6 (Isa 66:24); 14.1 (Jer 7:11); 15.3 (Isa 58:9); cf. 11.1–4.
68. 2 Clement 2.1. Some see Isa 54:1 as the text on which the whole sermon is based; see, e.g., Holmes, Apostolic Fathers, 73.
69. So Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part 1, 2:214–15; followed by others.
70. “But I cannot imagine that you do not realize that the living church is the body of Christ. For the Scripture says, ‘God made the human male and female.’ The male is Christ, the female the church. And, as you know, the Bible [Or: the books] and the apostles indicate that the church has not come into being just now, but has existed from the beginning” (14.2). On this primordial syzygy, see Pratscher, Apostolic Fathers, 79–80.
71. The Shepherd of Hermas is normally seen as comprising three sections—Visions, Mandates, and Similitudes. See further below.
72. These details are all found in Visions 1.1.1–9 (using the traditional system of citation).
73. “When you were wealthy, you were of no use; but now you are useful and helpful in life” (Visions 3.7.7).
74. These problems are introduced in Visions 1.3.1–3 and repeated with further detail in 2.2.2–3 and 2.3.1.
75. Note how the woman’s admonition about the sins of Hermas’s children (Visions 2.2.4) shifts smoothly into an admonition that “those who lead the church” need to “make their paths straight in righteousness” as well (2.2.6).
76. In the first three, she is elderly; in the fourth she appears as “a young woman … clothed as if coming from a bridal chamber” (Visions 4.2.1). In all four, however, she represents the church in its heavenly glory.
77. Visions 5.7; Mandates 12.4.7; Similitudes 9.1.1; 9.14.3; 9.23.5; 9.24.4.
78. “A person has two angels, one of righteousness and the other of wickedness” (Mandates 6.2.1).
79. For discussions of such earlier approaches, see, e.g., Carolyn Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 28–29, esp. n. 219; Harry O. Maier, The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of Hermas, Clement, and Ignatius (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991), 58–59; David Hellholm, “The Shepherd of Hermas,” in Pratscher, Apostolic Fathers, 225–26.
80. To borrow the title of Carolyn Osiek’s pioneering work: Rich and Poor in the Shepherd of Hermas: An Exegetical-Social Investigation, CBQMS 15 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1983). See pp. 39–45 of her work for a survey of the pertinent vocabulary and a catalog of key texts.
81. The word-group occurs some fifty-five times in the work; see Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 30–31.
82. In addition to Osiek and Maier (cited above), see, e.g., Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser, ed. Marshall D. Johnson (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 90–93.
83. Compare this description of the narrative shape of the Shepherd of Hermas with the widely accepted description of apocalypse as a literary genre, in John J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), 9.
84. E.g., the periodization of history leading up to the end; the closest analog in the Shepherd of Hermas is the elaborate categorizations of the different types of people (with respect to the mixture of sin and repentance) in several of the Similitudes (especially the eighth and ninth). One apocalyptic feature that is not often highlighted is the concern that the revelations be written in books and disseminated (Visions 2.4.3). On the Shepherd of Hermas as an apocalypse, see the discussion in Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 10–12.
85. See the helpful discussion in Mark Grundeken, Community Building in the Shepherd of Hermas: A Critical Study of Some Key Aspects, VCSup 131 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1–22.
86. Osiek, Rich and Poor in the Shepherd of Hermas, 91–135; Maier, Social Setting of the Ministry, 59–65; Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 90–99, 234–36.
87. See, e.g., Hellholm, “Shepherd of Hermas”; for a brief history of the theories of multiple authorship, see Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 9–10.
88. Specifically, the reference to a “Hermas” in Rom 16:14; the reference to a “Clement” in Visions 2.4.3; and the statement in the Muratorian Canon that Hermas wrote the Shepherd of Hermas “while his brother Pius was sitting as bishop” in Rome.
89. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and (if it is a second-century document) the Muratorian Canon; for details, see Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 4–7.
90. Other occurrences of a general nature: Mandates 4.1.9 (“whoever behaves like the ethnē commits adultery”); Similitudes 9.28.8 (“If the ethnē punish their slaves for denying their own lord, what do you suppose the Lord who has authority over all things will do to you?”).
91. The ethnē “will be burned like withered trees and shown for what they are, because they did what was evil in their lifetimes … the ethnē will be burned for not knowing the one who created them” (Similitudes 4.4).
92. Similar warnings have already appeared in Mandates 10 and 11. Those who “become mixed up with business affairs and wealth and friendships with outsiders [philiais ethnikais] and many other matters that pertain to this age” run the risk of becoming corrupt and “barren in spirit” (10.1.4). Such double-mindedness can result in the adoption of the ways of the ethnē: “But all those who are of two minds and who are constantly changing their minds, consult the oracle as do even the ethnē” (11.1.4).
93. The believers are characterized as “those who have been called by the name of the Lord [and have come] under the shadow of the willow” (Similitudes 8.1.1).
94. The two categories (ethnē and believers who have completely fallen away) appear together in Visions 1.4.2 (“the ethnē and the apostates [apostatais]”) and Similitudes 4.1.4 (“the ethnē and the sinners”).
95. Presumably as mediated by Jewish Christ-believers. Unlike most commentators, who simply translate the term as “heathen” or “outsiders,” Osiek stops to give it some attention. However, depending on BADG, she treats the term as a generic, transcultural term for “outsider”: “for Greeks, non-Greeks; for Romans, non-Italians; for Jews, Gentiles; for Christians, pagans” (Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 50, n. 21; see also Osiek, Rich and Poor in the Shepherd of Hermas, 124, n. 118). As we have seen, however, there is no solid evidence that ta ethnē as a stand-alone, unmodified term was used to denote the other anywhere but in Jewish contexts.
96. Later we learn that “the believers from the eighth mountain, where there were many springs that provided drink to all the creatures of the Lord, … are apostles and teachers who proclaimed their message throughout the whole world” (Similitudes 9.25.1–2).
97. Quoted material from Similitudes 9.17.1, 2, 4, 5.
98. For such an attempt, see, e.g., Graydon F. Snyder, The Shepherd of Hermas, vol. 6 of The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary (Camden, NJ: Thomas Nelson, 1967), 14, 147.
99. See Grundeken, Community Building, 44–45.
100. Their ascent through the watery depths providing an equivalent to the seal of baptism: “Through these people [i.e., the apostles and teachers], therefore, they were made alive and came to know the name of the Son of God. For this reason also they rose up with them and were fit together with them into the building of the tower; and without being hewed they were put into the building together. For they died in righteousness and great purity—only they did not have this seal” (Similitudes 9.16.7). This interest in those who are righteous but unbaptized parallels the more extensive interest in those who have been baptized but become (or remain) unrighteous; see Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas, 238.
101. An apocryphal work (named after two prophets mentioned in Num 11:26–30) that circulated in early Christian circles but has not survived.
102. Snyder places a lot of weight on such Jewish features; Shepherd of Hermas, 16–17.
103. Reidar Hvalvik, “Jewish Believers and Jewish Influence in the Roman Church until the Early Second Century,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 214–15.
104. Eusebius speaks of letters to these seven recipients (Ecclesiastical History 3.36.1–11).
105. Theodor Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1873); Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part 2, vol. 1.
106. For surveys of the issues and discussion, see William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 1–7; Hermut Löhr, “The Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch,” in Pratscher, Apostolic Fathers, 91–115; Thomas A. Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish-Christian Relations (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009).
107. See Mikael Isacson, To Each Their Own Letter: Structure, Themes, and Rhetorical Strategies in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, ConBNT 42 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2004).
108. In the earlier letters, see, e.g., To the Ephesians 21.2; To the Magnesians 14; To the Trallians 13; To the Romans 9.1–3. And in the later ones, see To the Smyrnaeans 11.1–3; To the Philadelphians 10.1; the quoted material is from To the Smyrnaeans 11.2.
109. On the situation in Antioch and the related issue of the reasons for Ignatius’s arrest, see Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, 10–11; Christine Trevett, A Study of Ignatius of Antioch in Syria and Asia, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 29 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 52–66.
110. As Schoedel observes, this is “the first appearance of the proper noun ‘Christianity’ in Christian literature”; Ignatius of Antioch, 126, n. 1. More generally, see Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 250–59.
111. As Ehrman points out, Ignatius addresses the two issues in different letters, Judaizing in the letters to Magnesia and Philadelphia, docetism in those to Tralles and Smyrna; Apostolic Fathers, 1:206.
112. The theory of “a kind of judaizing Gnosticism” (Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:206) was advocated by Zahn and Lightfoot, among others. For the position that Ignatius was addressing distinct groups, see (in addition to Ehrman) especially Trevett, Study of Ignatius of Antioch, 147–93.
113. On Judaizing, see, e.g., Rev 2:9; 3:9.
114. For a reference to actual encounters, see To the Philadelphians 8.2: “For I heard some saying….”
115. Although the behavior in question is described in general terms (literally, “have anything against your neighbor”), the admonition is sandwiched in between passages having to do with divisions caused by heretical teachings and lack of submission to the bishop and other ministers (To the Trallians 6–10). Trevett suggests that Ignatius’s concern here about the effect of internal disunity on the opinion of outsiders may reflect his own experience in Antioch; see Study of Ignatius of Antioch, 61, 88.
116. For a discussion, see Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, 150. Schoedel observes that Isa 52:5 was used in two ways in the early church: in-group admonition, as here; and polemical denunciations of Jews for their supposed failings (e.g., Rom 2:24; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 17.2).
117. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, 223.
118. On this group, see Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians, 70–170 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 163–65.
119. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, 123.
120. See also To the Philadelphians 5.2: “And we should also love the prophets, because their proclamation anticipated the gospel and they hoped in him and awaited him. And they were saved by believing in him.”
121. Trevett’s helpful rendition of the phrase; following Corwin, she believes that Ignatius is echoing a slogan of the Judaizers (viz., “Christianity bases its faith on Judaism”); Study of Ignatius of Antioch, 172.
122. Ignatius displays little interest in christological readings of the Scriptures or of positioning the gospel with respect to the story of Israel. In response to those who did (those whom he heard saying, “If I do not find it in the ancient records, I do not believe in the gospel”), he simply replaced “the ancient records” (which at least included Israel’s Scriptures) with Christ: “But for me, Jesus Christ is the ancient records; the sacred ancient records are his cross and death, and his resurrection, and the faith that comes through him” (To the Philadelphians 8.2). Trevett suggests that this reflects not simply a lack of interest but a lack of scriptural knowledge, especially in comparison with the Judaizers; see Study of Ignatius of Antioch, 99.
123. A phrase borrowed from Robinson: “Ignatius presents the Hebrew prophets more as Christians-in-waiting than as Jews (Ign. Magn. 8.2–9.2)”; Ignatius of Antioch, 210, n. 26. See also Schoedel: “‘Judaism,’ then, is not granted even a historically limited role in the unfolding of God’s plan. Consequently Ignatius radically Christianizes the ‘prophets’ … and elsewhere also the ‘law’ (Sm. 5.1). Thus the negative view of Judaism is more emphatic in Ignatius than in the Pastorals and approaches the extreme position of Barnabas”; Ignatius of Antioch, 119.
124. E.g., the prayer in 59.3–61.3; see Robert M. Grant and Holt H. Graham, First and Second Clement, vol. 2 of The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1965), 92–96; Andreas Lindemann, Die Clemensbriefe, HNT 17, Die Apostolischen Väter 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 162–76.
125. Donald Alfred Hagner, The Use of the Old and New Testaments in Clement of Rome, NovTSup 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 21–23.
126. And the letter probably also calls for self-exile: “Let that one say, ‘If I am the cause of faction, strife, and schisms, I will depart; I will go wherever you wish …’” (54.2).
127. All these words and related terms appear frequently in 1 Clement. See Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:19–20; David G. Horrell, The Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence: Interests and Ideology from 1 Corinthians to 1 Clement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 251–57; Barbara Ellen Bowe, A Church in Crisis: Ecclesiology and Paraenesis in Clement of Rome, HDR 23 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988), 86–87.
128. Tradition cited by Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 4.23.9–13).
129. So Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part 1, 1:59–61, in the context of a discussion about whether Clement was actually the consul Flavius Clemens; Hagner, Use of the Old and New Testaments in Clement of Rome, 6–7, following Lightfoot.
130. See especially Hvalvik, “Jewish Believers and Jewish Influence,” 211–12; also Adolf von Harnack, Einführung in die alte Kirchengeschiche: Das Schreiben der Römischen Kirche an die Korinthische aus der Zeit Domitians (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929), lxiii; Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 75–76.
131. E.g., the statement that the deaths of Peter and Paul took place “in our own generation” (5.1), together with the statement that some who brought the letter from Rome to Corinth had been members of the church “from youth to old age” (63.3). See Lindemann, Die Clemensbriefe, 12–13; Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:23–25.
132. In one of the other instances (6.4), the term is used generically (“Jealousy and strife overturned great cities and uprooted great ethnē”) and thus requires no further comment here.
133. For a discussion of specific instances that the author might have had in mind, see Lindemann, Die Clemensbriefe, 154–55.
134. While he introduces it as a citation found “in another place,” it combines parts of several verses (Deut 4:34; Num 18:27; Exod 22:29[28]).
135. Oskar Skarsaune, “The Development of Scriptural Interpretation in the Second and Third Centuries—Except Clement and Origen,” in From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300), vol. 1 of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Saebø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 381–82.
136. Note also 32.2–4, with its smooth and continuous chain from Jacob to “the priests and all the Levites who minister at the altar of God,” to “the kings, rulers and leaders in the line of Judah,” to “the Lord Jesus according to the flesh,” to us “too who have been called through his will in Christ Jesus”—all of whom “God has made … upright, from the beginning of the ages.”
137. There is little reason to believe that ethnē here is to be understood as denoting the non-Jewish nations exclusively.
138. Hvalvik, “Jewish Believers and Jewish Influence,” 212.
139. See especially the catena of passages in ch. 15 and the lengthy citation of Isa 53 in ch. 16.
140. Horrell, Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence, 277. See also Klaus Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 106–17.
141. Also bearing in mind Barbara E. Bowe’s cautionary word: “It goes without saying, however, that such a positive view of the existing political reality contains within it a dangerous precedent”; “Prayer Rendered for Caesar? 1 Clement 59.3–61.3,” in The Lord’s Prayer and Other Prayer Texts from the Greco-Roman Era, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 93.
142. Miscellanies 2.6.31.2; 2.7.35.5; 2.20.116.3–4 and passim.
143. Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 2:3.
144. On the question of genre, see Reidar Hvalvik, The Struggle for Scripture and Covenant: The Purpose of the Epistle of Barnabas and Jewish-Christian Competition in the Second Century, WUNT 2.82 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 66–81.
145. For a helpful summary of the Jewish material, including postbiblical traditions known only through rabbinic material, see James Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background, WUNT 2.64 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 7–8.
146. Wilson, Related Strangers, 127–28.
147. For details, see Hvalvik, Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, 43–44.
148. There is a textual variant here: epēlytoi is found in one Greek MS (Sinaiticus); prosēlytoi appears in the other main Greek MS (H) and is reflected in the Latin version (proseliti). This has little bearing on the meaning of the statement, however; as Philo’s usage indicates, the two terms are more or less synonymous in this context.
149. See Hvalvik, Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, 43–46; Wilson, Related Strangers, 128; Peter J. Tomson, “The Didache, Matthew, and Barnabas as Sources for Early Second Century Jewish and Christian History,” in Tomson and Schwartz, Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries, 361. Nevertheless, there continues to be room for disagreement; see Paget, Epistle of Barnabas, 7–9.
150. See the survey in Hvalvik, Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, 6–16. For a more general development of the former approach, see Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, StPB 46 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).
Taking the latter approach, Tomson draws our attention to the evident links connecting the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and Matthew, links suggesting that the “three texts belonged to a larger Christian milieu of mixed Jewish-gentile ethnicity,” one in which “ample use was made of Jewish traditions,” even though the texts reflect strikingly different positions on the status of Jews and Jewish traditions within the Christian milieu; “The Didache, Matthew and Barnabas,” 355.
151. The reference in the Epistle of Barnabas 4.3–5 to Daniel’s “ten kingdoms” and “the fourth beast” might also have some bearing on the issue, though scholarly discussion has been quite inconclusive.
152. For thorough discussions, see Hvalvik, Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, 17–34; Paget, Epistle of Barnabas, 9–30. Hvalvik opts for Hadrian, Paget for Nerva. See also Peter Richardson and Martin B. Shukster, “Barnabas, Nerva and the Yavnean Rabbis,” JTS 34 (1983): 31–55.
153. Wilson recognizes the possibility but rightly rejects it; Related Strangers, 129. In addition to “the new law,” see also the expression “new people” (5.7; 7.5).
154. Quoted material from 4.6–8.
155. As Ferdinand R. Prostmeier puts it: “Because Scripture as a whole promises Christ and Christians, there is no salvation story that precedes God’s investment of salvation in Christ. Everything that happened then, including circumcision, the Sabbath, and the Day of Atonement, and the like, exhausts itself pointing to the Christ event”; “The Epistle of Barnabas,” in Pratscher, Apostolic Fathers, 35.
156. This reading follows the Latin text, which is probably closest to the original. Robert A. Kraft has argued for a reading based primarily on H, with some modifications from S (“by claiming that your covenant is irrevocably yours”), thus understanding the verse as a warning against complacency (cf. 4.14); see Barnabas and the Didache, vol. 3 of The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1965), 90. Most commentators, however, prefer the reading preserved in Latin; see, e.g., Hvalvik, Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, 90.
157. Albeit as filtered through Christian tradition. The original Isaianic text referred to Cyrus (Kyrō) as God’s anointed. In Barnabas’s rendering, Kyrō (Cyrus) has become Kyriō (Lord), and it is unlikely that he was responsible for the change. See the discussion in Paget, Epistle of Barnabas, 161.
158. The echo of the Pauline formulation (cf. Rom 4:11) is probably due to a free-floating tradition rather than to any direct dependence on Paul; see, e.g., Kraft, Apostolic Fathers, 123.
159. 14.7, citing Isa 42:6–7; 14.8, citing Isa 49:6–7.
160. Hvalvik, Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, 147.
161. On the “strongly apocalyptic anti-Roman sentiment” of 4.3–5, see Paget, Epistle of Barnabas, 7, n. 25.
162. For me, the issue was largely settled when I read P. N. Harrison’s study of vocabulary and style while I was still a student; The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). Although some of his statistical analysis has been shown to be in need of correction, the overall impact of his study remains unchanged. For attempts to put the analysis on a sounder footing, see K. Grayston and G. Herdan, “The Authorship of the Pastoral Epistles in the Light of Statistical Analysis,” NTS 6 (1959–60): 1–15; Kenneth J. Neumann, The Authenticity of the Pauline Epistles in the Light of Stylo-Statistical Analysis (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).
163. See, e.g., Michael Prior, Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy, JSNTSup 23 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989); Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “2 Timothy Contrasted with 1 Timothy and Titus,” Revue Biblique 98 (1991): 403–18.
164. “This” probably refers to vv. 1–2 as a whole, rather than just to the more limited statement about “kings and all who are in high positions” (v. 2).
165. E.g., eimi egō ethnōn apostolos (Rom 11:13).
166. The phrase in 1 Tim 1:3 renders a stand-alone verb: heterodidaskalein (to “other-teach”; “to teach otherwise”).
167. I. Howard Marshall, with Philip H. Towner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 425. Likewise Luke Timothy Johnson: “Paul’s insistence on the title ‘teacher’ [didaskalos] here, then, and his placing it in direct connection with ‘Gentiles’—as well as his insistence that he is telling the truth—draws our attention to the probable polemic function of his self-designation in this specific situation. Against those would-be teachers of Law who seek to impose it on Gentile Christians, Paul teaches the primacy of God’s grace, which empowers humans to have faith”; The First and Second Letters to Timothy, AB (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 195.
168. A literal rendering of oikonomian theou tēn en pistei.
169. Older arguments that the Pastorals were written to counter “a kind of Judaizing Gnosticism (with speculation and observance of the law)” may have been overstated and one-dimensional, but the evidence to which such arguments appealed is certainly pertinent here; see Martin Dibelius and Hans Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary, trans. Philip Buttolph and Adela Yarbro, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972); the quoted material appears on p. 3.
170. Indeed, given the polemic in the epistle against “what is falsely called gnōsis” (6:20), the universal emphases in the epistle could just as easily be read in contrast to the sorts of anthropological distinctions that appear in groups that have traditionally been labeled “Gnostic”; see, e.g., Raymond F. Collins, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 60.
171. Johnson points to Rom 3:29–30, where the similar assertion “God is one [heis ho theos]” (cf. 1 Tim 2:5) is used in the context of such a bifurcation (“Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also?”); First and Second Letters to Timothy, 197. But the assertion of God’s oneness stands on its own; its use in 1 Timothy is quite different from that in Romans.
172. On this point, see Johnson, First and Second Letters to Timothy, 197.
173. Though not explicitly; as with other christological hymns (e.g., Phil 2:6; Col 1:15), it begins with a relative pronoun. On the christological hymns, see Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 146–49, 514–15 (on 1 Tim 3:16).
174. He describes it as “a symmetrical alternation between actions on the two planes,” by which he means that the sequence in the middle pair is opposite to that in the pairs that flank it; Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 514, n. 54. For an earlier two-planes reading of the hymn, see Dibelius and Conzelmann, Pastoral Epistles, 61–62.
175. Hurtado also discerns a chronological sequence, though without highlighting it.
176. See, e.g., Johnson, First and Second Letters to Timothy, 233.
177. Even Marshall, who sees the inclusion of the gentiles as an important theme in 1 Timothy, recognizes this: “Through the apostle’s ministry, the Gentiles have been reached …, but the scope is doubtless wider. Ἔθνη (2.7: 2 Tim 4.17), which does not necessarily exclude Jews, regards the gospel ministry in its universal scope”; Pastoral Epistles, 527. Some other commentators slide back and forth between “nations” and “Gentiles” without addressing the difference between the two renderings; e.g., Dibelius and Conzelmann, who see “the missionary term ‘nations,’ ‘pagans’” as synonymous with “man”; Pastoral Epistles, 62; also Collins, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, 110–11.
178. The only biblical personages who receive mention are Adam and Eve (4:13–15), the primordial “man” (anēr; 4:8, 12) and “woman” (gynē; 4:9, 10, 11, 12).
179. Some MSS add ethnōn after didaskalos in 1:11 (“for this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher of the ethnē”; so א2 C D F G K L P Ψ). The shorter reading is to be preferred, both on manuscript grounds (omit: א* A D* vgmss) and the probability of influence from 1 Tim 2:7.
180. For the former view, see, e.g., Harrison, Problem of the Pastoral Epistles, 87–135, esp. 121–22. And for the latter, see, e.g., Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 356–59. A compelling aspect of his argument is that an authentic 2 Timothy helps to explain both why the later pseudonymous epistles (1 Timothy and Titus) were readily accepted and why there were two letters addressed to Timothy.
181. The hina (so that) clause is an expression of purpose or, less likely, of result.
182. And if it were a mixed group—i.e., a group that included some Jews—why exclude them from the hearing of the message?
183. So Collins, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, 286.
184. Cf. Marshall, Pastoral Epistles, 824.
185. 2 Tim 2:8; “gospel” (euangelion) also appears in 1:8, 10.
186. See the discussions in Johnson, First and Second Letters to Timothy, 386–87; and Marshall, Pastoral Epistles, 757–59.
187. The Syriac manuscript was discovered by Agnes and Margaret Smith in St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and published by J. Rendel Harris. The Greek version was discovered by Harris’s Cambridge colleague J. Armitage Robinson, who, having read a prepublication version of Harris’s translation, recognized it as a somewhat longer version of something embedded in the Life of Barlaam and Joasaph, an early Christian narrative with which he was familiar. The two versions were published together in a single volume: J. Rendel Harris and J. Armitage Robinson, The Apology of Aristides on Behalf of the Christians, from a Syriac Ms. Preserved on Mount Sinai, with an Appendix Containing the Main Portion of the Original Greek Text (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2004). For the story of the Smith sisters, including an account of the discovery, see Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). In addition to the full versions, fragmentary portions of the work are extant in Armenian and Greek; for a full discussion of the manuscript tradition, see Bernard Pouderon and Marie-Joseph Pierre, eds., Aristide: Apologie, SC 470 (Paris: Cerf, 2003), 107–41; a survey of patristic references to Aristides is provided on pp. 25–31.
188. Harris and Robinson, Apology of Aristides, 80.
189. Nils Arne Pedersen, “Aristides,” in In Defence of Christianity: Early Christian Apologists, ed. Jakob Engberg, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Jörg Ulrich, Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 37–38. For a full discussion, see Pouderon and Pierre, Aristide, 143–71.
190. The Armenian is similar, at least in content: “To the autocratic Caesar Adrianos from Aristides, Athenian Philosopher” (Harris and Robinson, Apology of Aristides, 30). Given its context in the continuing narrative of the Life of Barlaam and Joasaph, the Greek version has no prescript.
191. Pouderon and Pierre, Aristide, 32–46. But for a recent argument in support of Harris’s original position, see Pedersen, “Aristides,” 43–47.
192. The following discussion is based on the Syriac version, using Harris’s translation, with references to the Greek version where appropriate. References are based on the versification of Pouderon and Pierre.
193. The Syriac gns᾿ is a Greek loanword; see Michael Sokoloff, A Syriac Lexicon: A Translation from the Latin: Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2009), 249.
194. The Greek version has just three categories: aside from the Jews and the Christians, the rest of humankind is lumped into the group of those who “worship the gods acknowledged among you” (2.2). Both categorizations, however (the threefold and the fourfold), are somewhat arbitrary. The Greek version subdivides the first category into three: the Chaldeans, the Greeks, and the Egyptians. The Syriac treats the Egyptians as a subcategory of the Greeks (chs. 12–13). For our purposes, it is not necessary to decide which of these categorizations is original.
195. See the entry in Sokoloff, Syriac Lexicon, 1112. Sokoloff cites as an example the Harklean version of Matt 18:17, where ʿammaʾ renders ethnikos. The term appears for gôyîm in the Peshitta; see, e.g., Takamitsu Muraoka, Classical Syriac: A Basic Grammar with a Chrestomathy, PLO 19 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 12 (in the Chrestomathy section).
196. Harris uses “the peoples,” Pouderon and Pierre “les peuples.”
197. Here the Greek version differs considerably. Despite the many wonders and signs they had experienced, the Jews were stubborn and sinful; they “often served the idols of the ethnē and put to death the prophets and just men who were sent to them,” including (finally) the Son of God himself. Although they “worship the one God almighty,” in that they reject the Son of that one God, they are “very much like the ethnē” (14.2–3). Pouderon and Pierre have attempted to argue that both sets of material—the more laudatory material in the Syriac, and the christological polemic of the Greek—were present in the original Greek version (Pouderon and Pierre, Aristide, 57–58). It seems difficult to imagine, however, that the two could have gone their separate ways so neatly in the subsequent textual tradition. It is much more likely that the Syriac version preserves the original and that this was replaced with a more typical Christian critique of the Jews when the Apology came to be incorporated into Barlaam and Joasaph.
198. Though a more creedal form of the faith comes to expression in ch. 2.
199. Wilson, Related Strangers, 31.
200. The closest he gets is his statement that the Jews have derived their commendable qualities from “things that they have received from their fathers of old” (14.3). By contrast, in the case of the Christians, he makes more explicit reference to their “writings” (15.1; 16.4; cf. 2.4).
201. Despite the address to the emperor, Rome does not come into view in the Apology itself.
202. As Aaron P. Johnson observes: “Aristides bases his whole argument on an ethnic legitimation of Christianity. That is, his defence of Christianity rests upon a distinctively ethnic conceptualization of the Christians”; Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6.
203. As Luke reminds his readers, who have already encountered seven references to the appeal to Caesar.
204. I have dealt elsewhere with the issues to be considered in resolving questions about identity construction in Luke-Acts, with particular attention to the relative place and status of Jewish and gentile believers in the early Christ-movement; see Terence L. Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations (London: SPCK; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 55–80.
205. Geography is another theme: the centrality of Jerusalem in Luke (the narrative begins [1:8–9] and ends [24:53] in the temple); and the expansion from Jerusalem to Rome in Acts (though not without recurring reconnections with Jerusalem). The role of witnesses is another (Luke 24:47–49; Acts 1:8; etc.), especially in view of the qualifications for a witness expressed in Acts 1:21–22. Still, the unity of the two writings is not beyond question; see Mikeal C. Parsons and Richard I. Pervo, Rethinking the Unity of Luke and Acts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
206. While a broad segment of scholarly opinion has taken the author’s identity as a gentile to be almost self-evident (e.g., Werner Georg Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. Howard Clark Kee [Nashville: Abingdon, 1975], 149; Barrett, Acts of the Apostles, 2:xxx), more recently some have suggested that he was Jewish, pointing especially to his familiarity with Israel’s Scriptures and his sympathies for traditional, torah-observant Judaism; see Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography, NovTSup 64 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 327–28, and the scholars cited in n. 86; V. George Shillington, An Introduction to the Study of Luke-Acts (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 10. See also the more general discussion in Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012–15), 1:404–5.
207. See Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition.
208. This is signaled already by a statement of the risen Jesus at the end of Luke: “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all the ethnē, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47). The Jerusalem starting point seems to imply that the ethnos of the Jews is included here.
209. Other statements about a mission to the ethnē are found in Acts 18:6; 22:21; 26:17–18, 23; 28:28.
210. Also Acts 11:18; 14:27; 15:3, 14–18, 23; 21:25.
211. E.g., “For in this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the ethnē and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed” (Acts 4:27); also 14:2, 5; 21:11.
212. Non-Jewish believers get speaking parts only rarely in Acts—the Ethiopian official (8:31, 34, 36); Cornelius (10:4, 30–33); the man from Macedonia whom Paul saw in a vision (16:9); Lydia (16:15); the Philippian jailor (16:30, 36); the Ephesians who had received John’s baptism (19:2–3)—all of them brief and perfunctory.
213. Paul’s declaration to a mixed crowd of Jews and non-Jews in Pisidian Antioch (13:47–48) and the letter from the Jerusalem apostles and elders “to the brothers from the ethnē in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia” (15:23, with the response in 15:31).
214. “It is universally agreed that Luke wishes to present Christianity as an extension of Judaism”; Wilson, Related Strangers, 64.
215. Acts 4:4; 5:14; 6:1, 7; 9:42; 12:24; 13:43; 14:1; 17:12; 19:17–20. Jacob Jervell was one of the first to recognize this aspect of Acts and its significance; see his Luke and the People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1972).
216. Oskar Skarsaune labels these two rationales the “substitution model” and the “association model,” respectively; The Proof from Prophecy: A Study in Justin Martyr’s Proof-Text Tradition; Text-Type, Provenance, Theological Profile, NovTSup 56 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 326. See also Susan J. Wendel, Scriptural Interpretation and Community Self-Definition in Luke-Acts and the Writings of Justin Martyr, NovTSup 139 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 214–24.
217. See Acts 13:45, 50; 17:5; 18:5–6, 12, 14; 20:3; but cf. 14:2, where he adds a qualifier (“the unbelieving Jews”).
218. See Acts 13:7–12; 16:35–40; 18:12–16; 19:35–41; 21:27–40; 22:22–29; 23:16–35; 24:22–23; 25:1–27; 26:24–32; 27:42–44; 28:16.
219. C. Kavin Rowe has demonstrated convincingly that, far from cozying up to imperial power, Luke with skill and subtlety confronts the claims of empire with the subversive proclamation of an alternative Lord; see World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For an earlier example of a similar argument, see Richard J. Cassidy, Society and Politics in the Acts of the Apostles (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987). Cf. Drew W. Billings, Acts of the Apostles and the Rhetoric of Roman Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
220. On this aspect of Luke-Acts, see Paul W. Walaskay, “And So We Came to Rome”: The Political Perspective of St. Luke, SNTSMS 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ, 89–105.
221. The quoted material is from Wilson, Related Strangers, 66; see also Jervell, Luke and the People of God, 68–69.
222. Explicitly in Polycarp and 2 Clement; implicitly in Ignatius.
223. Cf. Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 1.2: “so that through his resurrection he might eternally lift up the standard for his holy and faithful ones, whether among Jews or ethnē, in the one body of his church.” It is clear, however, that Ignatius sees these identities as superseded by a Christian identity.
224. He also uses “twelve tribes” as an equivalent of “twelve nations.” While this seems to echo Jewish usage, any Jewish sense of the term has been eclipsed here.
225. Which I defined in this way: “Christ as inaugurating a new era and a new Jewish-centered people, in which the traditional distinction between Jews and gentiles has been transcended or overshadowed (though not eliminated)”; see type 3 in ch. 4 (“Ascribed Identities”). In the case of 1 Clement, however, the Jewish elements have fallen away, and the identity of the Jewish people has simply been assumed by a gentile church.
226. “For the most divine prophets lived according to Jesus Christ” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 8.2). “Because the prophets received his gracious gift, they prophesied looking ahead to him” (Epistle of Barnabas 5.6).
227. With its contrast between the Jews (“those who appear to have God” [2.3]) and the Christians (“our people” [2.3]; “the church that was created before the sun and moon” [14.1]), 2 Clement might be included here as well.
228. Cf. Polycarp’s expectation that “the saints will judge the world” (To the Philippians 11.2); “the world” stands in parallel with “the gentes” in the previous sentence.
229. At the final judgment, “the outsiders [ethnē] will be burned for not knowing the one who created them” (4.4).
230. Epistle of Barnabas 4.3–5. See Paget, Epistle of Barnabas, 7, n. 25.
231. “Hence all magic was vanquished and every bondage of evil came to nought. Ignorance was destroyed and the ancient realm was brought to ruin, when God became manifest in a human way” (To the Ephesians 19.3).
232. Polycarp, To the Philippians 12.3; also 1 Tim 2:1–2.