Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

Introduction

While scholars of antiquity have long written about ancient notions of ethnicity, race and nationalism (Hadas 1950; Bickerman 1952; Jones 1959; Sherwin-White 1967; Snowden 1970, 1983; Walbank 1972), the past few decades have witnessed a marked increase in theoretically and methodologically nuanced treatments of these categories as markers of both kinship and community in the Mediterranean world (Dench 1995, 2005; Cornell 1997; Hall 1997, 2002; Mitchell and Greatrex 2000; Goldhill 2001; Malkin 2001a; Gillett 2002; Geary 2002; Isaac 2004; Smith 2004; Zacharia 2008; Derks and Roymans 2009; Richter 2011; McCoskey 2012; Gardner, Herring, and Lomas 2013; Andrade 2013; McInerney 2014; Revell 2010, 2016). Drawing on the work of anthropologists, historians, literary critics and sociologists, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have shifted their discussions of ethnicity away from essentialist, instrumentalist and primordialist conceptualizations of the category and instead have moved toward an understanding of the ideological, historical and discursive processes by which notions of national or ethnic kinship were constructed, maintained, altered and refashioned (Barth 1969; Armstrong 1981; Gellner 1983; Smith 1986; Banks 1996; Baumann 1999; Marx 2003; Brubaker 2004; Anderson 2006; Berger and Lorenz 2008; Hobsbawm 2008). The work of the classicist Jonathan M. Hall in particular has served to recast the terms of ethnicity and ethnic kinship in archaic, classical and Hellenistic Greece and the ancient Mediterranean world more broadly. Hall harnessed the insights of contemporary theorists of ethnicity to argue that ethnicity in the ancient world was a ‘conceptual and ascriptive boundary by reference to which category membership is defined’ and not, then, an objective or biological category (1997: 24). Although Hall’s work has been subject to criticism (Konstan 1997; Jones 1998; Morris 1998; Renfrew 1998; Just 1998) his analysis has nonetheless compelled scholars to be far more precise in the way they discuss race and ethnicity as meaningful descriptions of ancient peoples, communities and social relations. Scholars now focus their attention not on the immutable essence of ethnicity as a physiological or biological marker, but rather on the malleability of its social invocation; that is, the processes by which ethnicities were imagined and asserted at particular times, in particular places, under particular conditions. This scholarly trajectory has emphasized the subjectively constructed and contingent qualities of ancient claims of ethnicity and collective origins.

In the past decade, scholars of early Christianity have likewise devoted considerable attention to the categories of ethnicity, race and nation. They have done so, moreover, within the context of the highly problematic concept of religion (Byron 2002; Goldenberg 2003; Boyarin 2004a; Buell 2005; Johnson 2006a; Johnson-Hodge 2007; Schott 2008; Townsend 2009; Nasrallah and Schüssler Fiorenza 2009; Concannon 2014; Berzon 2016). One of the lasting legacies of late antiquity—a legacy traced in histories of the category ‘religion’ (Smith 1962; King 1999; Boyarin 2004b; cf. Nongbri 2013; Boyarin and Barton 2016)—was Christian writers’ perpetuation of a dichotomy between a universalist, supersessionist Christianity (as the lone true religion) and a particularist, sometimes ethnic, sometimes religious Judaism. While Judaism was often described in antiquity as an ethnos and Christian writers often portrayed Judaism as a particularistic religion (i.e., an ethnic religion), scholars continue to debate the degree to which (if at all) Judaism or Judeanness can be said to have evolved from ethnos to religio (Lapin 1998; Cohen 1999; Boyarin 2004a; Goodblatt 2006; Mason 2007; Schwartz 2011; Miller 2014; Baker 2011, 2017). Recent scholarship has further stressed that while Christian writers frequently asserted Christianity’s supra-national or supra-ethnic aspirations—beginning with the apostle Paul’s famous words in Galatians that once baptized in Christ ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female’ (Gal. 3.28)—they simultaneously deployed decidedly ethnic terminology to establish membership in Christian communities. From this discursive tension, scholars of early Christianity now ask whether Christianity was an ethnos in its own right or an alternative to ethnos, that is, a religion. It is the effort to delineate the precise relationship between ancient notions of religion and ethnicity (and the interplay between ethnic affiliation and religious identification) that has become a matter of great interest in recent scholarship about Christianity in the ancient world.

At the same time, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have become keenly aware that terms such as ethnos, genos and natio do not easily correlate to our modern notions of race, ethnicity or nation. The etymological correlation between Greek and Latin nouns and the modern categories of peoples, nations, tribes and ethnicity does not, necessarily, imply a conceptual correlation. There is a scholastic or second-order heurism that informs these conceptual categories (Gruen 2013). Scholars have attempted to make sense of the connotations of ethnos by invoking the modern idea of ethnicity; they attempt, in other words, to analogize expressions of self-definition and self-representation. For, as Denise Buell has put it, ‘whether translated as “race,” “ethnicity,” “people,” “lineage,” “kind,” “class,” or “sex,” genos is a term that ancient readers would have understood to signal group classification’ (2005: 2). It is the indicia and criteria of group classification that undergird these etymological parallels. Concepts such as blood, descent, custom and tradition were invoked to establish the boundaries of communal coherence. It is the analytical ‘work’ that these various terms do as boundary markers of group affiliation, both for ancient and modern authors, specifically how the latter have interpreted the former, that I attempt to outline in this article.

The discussion that follows is a survey of the scholarship concerned with various aspects of ancient notions of ethnicity, race and nationalism as they intersect with the emergence of Christianity. I have chosen a select sample of contemporary scholarship (from a far larger collection, it should be stressed) in order to outline the broad contours of this ever-evolving scholarly conversation. I have taken the lay of the scholarly land in order to enumerate the types of questions scholars have asked and are continuing to ask about ethnicity and Christianity—and the complex relationship between the two. My hope is that this descriptive enterprise serves as the backdrop against which other scholars can undertake their own investigations of categories that indicate communal association in antiquity, especially as they concern theoretical and methodological conversations about Christianity as a ‘religious’ system. In order to contextualize the parameters of Christian ethnic reasoning, I begin my survey with a discussion of contemporary research about Greek and Roman notions of ethnicity. From there, I will turn to material about early Christianity itself. One could certainly propose an alternative way to organize this material—geographically or chronologically, for instance—but I have decided to juxtapose these two sections, ‘Greco-Roman’ and ‘Christian’, precisely to outline, in a more holistic sense, the continuities and disjunctures between these two sets of data. I have aggregated the material within these sections to invite the reader to draw her own conceptual and discursive connections. The title of this article, ‘Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community’ thus points to its focus or comparative anchor rather than to all of its constituent parts.

Two final words of clarifications are in order before I begin. First, I have not undertaken a detailed investigation of ethnography or ethnographic writing as a literary form or historical practice (see Woolf 2014; Almagor and Skinner 2013; Skinner 2012; Berzon 2016). Although ethnography and ethnicity can be and often are related, they are not synonymous (ethnography is not the study of ethnicity). The former designates a literary style (we might even say a genre or disposition) that is concerned (primarily) with customs, habits and dispositions, while the latter is a conceptual social category. Where I do discuss ethnography, both in ancient and modern sources, it is in reference to ethnographic descriptions and theorizations that pertain specifically to ideas of race, ethnicity and nation. Second, I have not included scholarship—with the notable exception of a few works about the apostle Paul—that focuses on notions of ancient Jewish ethnicity and nationality. While much has been written about ideas of Jewish ethnicity in the ancient world, this article, insofar as it discusses Jewish ethnicity at all, does so through the eyes of ancient Christians. It is efforts to reconstruct their perspective that is the core of this survey.

Ethnicity through Greek and Roman Eyes

Each of Jonathan Hall’s pioneering monographs, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity and Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, harness the contributions of modern anthropology to argue that ancient Greek notions of ethnicity were not ultimately essentialist or biological categorizations, but rather emerged out of dynamic processes of engagement with ethnography, geography, material culture and language. Ethnic identity was, for the Greeks, a social and political construct. Arguing against both the primordialists who insist that ethnicity is a natural unit of human history and the instrumentalists who hold that the symbolic universe engendered through claims of shared ethnicity serves to further economic or political ends, Hall contends that, ‘ethnic identity is socially constructed and subjectively perceived’ (1997: 19; original emphasis). In order to parse the distinction between a definition of ethnicity and the process by which ethnicity is identified, Hall enumerates two different elements of ethnicity: criteria and indicia. As he explains:

The criteria of ethnicity are the definitional set of attributes by which membership in an ethnic group is ultimately determined. They are the result of a series of conscious and socially embedded choices, which attach significance to certain criteria from a universal set while ignoring others (though in practice this will usually concern a putative notion of descent, as will be seen). The indicia, on the other hand, are the operational set of distinguishing attributes which people tend to associate with particular ethnic groups once the criteria have been established (1997: 20-21).

The definition of ethnicity was not determined by physical attributes, but rather was a function of conceptual and ascriptive boundaries. Ultimately, Hall concludes, the criteria of ethnicity are ‘a putative subscription to a myth of common descent and kinship, an association with a specific territory and a sense of shared history’ (2002: 9). It is these three discursive areas that, Hall posits, constituted the contours of ethnicity in ancient Greece. One did not see ethnicity so much as disclose it.

In addition to offering an analysis of the constitutive nature of ethnicity, Hall’s works also outline the development of and shifts in ancient Greek perceptions of ethnicity. The Archaic Period witnessed not just the emergence of sub-Hellenic groups—Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Achaeans—but also the start of a process through which political, military and cultural associations became embedded within a discourse of kinship ties. Those ties, in turn, heralded a sense of shared Hellenic community. At various celebratory occasions—games and cultic activities—these sub-Hellenic groups, often termed genē (indicative of descent claims) celebrated, proclaimed and reinforced their shared ties as Hellenes, a claim of common ancestral descent from Hellen. Greek communities were situated within a Hellenic genealogy, based on common descent and association, what Hall terms an aggregative ethnic arrangement. In the earliest period of Greek history, Greek self-definition developed ‘from within’ through the invocation or claim of common descent from Hellen and not via opposition to outside forces or people (1997: 47).

It was only with the Persian War that the Greeks began to think about themselves from without; it was the Persian War that produced an oppositional or external model of ethnic identity, based on the distinction between Greeks and non-Greeks. Writers such as Herodotus and Aeschylus carefully crafted a barbarian antitype, a discourse of alterity that compelled reflection on the terms of Greekness itself (E. Hall 1989). To identify the barbarian tongue or alien cultic practices was to recognize and define oneself as Greek. In a famous remark from book eight of his Histories, Herodotus placed a description of Hellēnikon (Greekness or Hellenicity) in the context of a discussion between Athenians and Spartans regarding loyalty to Greek allies (Histories 8.144). The passage, famous for its four-fold division of Greekness—common blood, common tongue, common cult practices and sacrifices, and similar customs—is remarkable precisely for what it includes. As Hall observes:

The novelty of Herodotos’ definition of Hellenicity in book 8 is that it seemingly relegates kinship to the same level as broader cultural criteria—or put another way, it promotes cultural criteria (including language and religion) to the same level as kinship. Set against the general background of the Histories, however, the four ingredients of Hellenicity actually appear to be presented in ascending order of significance, with cultural considerations ultimately outweighing ethnic notions in definitions of population groups (2002: 193).

Herodotus’s cultural explanation for human diversity was not, however, the only model posited in the fifth century (Hartog 1988; Munson 2001; Thomas 2000). The pseudo-Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, and Places, for example, ascribed cultural diversity to natural factors such as climate and geography (Isaac 2004: 60-69). By the late fourth century bce, the oppositional ethnic model of the Persian Wars evolved into a bifurcated cultural model, typified by Isocrates’s Panegyricus 50, which conceptualized Greekness as an explicitly cultural mode of being, attainable through Athenian notions of paiedeia: Hellenicity was not a product of birth, but rather a process of learning about and embracing cultural norms and practices (Hall 2002: 209; Said 2001; cf. Richter 2011: 104-108).

In the introductory essay to Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, Irad Malkin outlines not just the impact of Hall’s work, but also how ancient historians and classicists, more broadly, have approached the matter of Greek collective identity. In noting that scholars have rightfully refrained from imposing exclusionary conditions on the various functions of collective identity (genealogy, political or civic polis identity, ethnos identity, federal, colonial, intra-Hellenic and Panhellenic identity), Malkin concedes that Greek ethnicity is simply one prism through which to conceptualize the idea of Greek identity. His analysis of past and ongoing scholarly efforts to parse sensible models of ethnic identity emphasizes Hall’s oppositional model (the shift from aggregative to oppositional) and the centrality of genealogies. In the case of the latter, Malkin stresses the elasticity of heroic genealogies as tools both to be applied and adopted to various circumstances. In later historical periods, he notes, ethnicity connoted ‘a Greek frame of mind (dianoia) and a way of life (ethos). These became more prominent in defining Greekness; education had replaced physis (nature) with nomos (law)’ (2001b: 11). Ethnicity was, in that sense, something that could be acquired over time and through experience.

Malkin similarly observes that both modern and ancient discussions about ethnicity revolve around questions of primordiality (kinship through descent) and circumstantiality (flexible kinship through culture). Herodotus, for example, described both a primordial and constructed model of Greek ethnicity. According to Malkin, ‘primordiality is a shared belief that the ethnic grouping has its origins in a remote past, often centered around founding ancestors and an ever-growing genealogical tree, as well as a lieux de memoire found in the territory of origins or constitutive historical events such as the Return of the Heraclids or the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt’ (2001b: 15). Modern theorizations of ethnicity have, however, challenged primordial charters as fictive and shifting on the basis of circumstances. Ethnicity reflects a carefully articulated primordial past (based around myths, memories, territory, symbols, etc.), which stresses a shared sense of tradition and values. Malkin suggests that by focusing on the constitution of and attitudes toward primordial charters, scholars can bypass the largely circular arguments of circumstantialists or instrumentalists. The question for scholars is not if primordial histories are fictive, but rather how they operate through time, and how they garner the authority of objectivity. It is about ideological and historical function less than literary form.

According to David Konstan, moreover, ethnicity or ethnic self-awareness was ‘a reactive phenomenon’, arising from the need to assert shared characteristics over against an oppositional entity (2001: 30). In positioning ethnicity as a common essence conceptualized in contrast to civic identity (or political bonds), Konstan holds that, ‘ethnicity posits the consubstantiality of the community, whether through images of blood relationship and descent, affinity with a given territory, or shared spiritual traits such as a common language, religion, or moral outlook’ (2001: 30). Rather than a struggle between allegiance to a local polis (micro), on the one hand, and the utopian desire for a broader claim of nationalism (macro), on the other, the Greek world attests competing rhetorical strategies of identity—Greekness and local ethnic identifications—that serve complementary (though perhaps contested) interests. Whereas Hall argued that a pan-Hellenic identity emerged in the wake of the Persian wars, Konstan maintains that Athenian writings themselves demonstrate a persistent effort to construct a civic ideology that traded on Athens’ uniqueness as an ethnic entity. The tension between the deployment of myths of autochthony and assertions of Panhellenic identity (based on shared genealogy) reflects the rise of a new ethnic discourse, which mapped the tensions between various types of social commitments. Pericles’s funeral oration, to take one famous example, set aside Athenian claims of shared lineage and autochthonous origins, and instead formulated Athenian identity as a cultural marker of traits and characteristics (Athenian versus Spartan). Herodotus’s effort to present the Athenians as ambassadors of a Panhellenic identity functioned precisely to combat Athenian claims of an ethnic (and cultural) distinctiveness. The rise of the dichotomous discourse between Greeks and barbarians emerged more as a result of Athens’ imperial aspirations and hegemonic desires and less in response to the need for a Panhellenic unity (after the fact) in the face of the Persians.

Later Greek writers, notably Pausanias in his Description of Greece, explicitly devalued autochthony as a claim to Greek identity. In Konstan’s estimation, ‘it is the mixture of peoples, rather than their purity and connection to their native land, that stands out in Pausanias’s depiction of Greek history’ (2001: 39). Pausanias’s guide to Greece became a repository for a Greek identity based on collective memory and not myths of autochthony, common religion, customs or cultural values. The suggestion that Pausanias appealed to the memory of the classical era precisely because Greece was a Roman province, devoid of a sense of ethnic nationhood, simply strains the evidence (cf. Ganter 2014; Roy 2014). It was not genealogy, religion or custom that delineated Greekness (or Greek ethnic sensibility), but ‘a shared but not necessarily exclusive sense of tradition’ (2001: 43). Memory—specifically the exclusivity of memories—became the core of Greek identity.

In a seminal essay written in 1972, ‘Nationality as a Factor in Roman History’, the historian F.W. Walbank observed that extant Greek literature tended to treat the concept of a Greek nation as a kind of abstraction, which garnered attention only during crises or cultic celebrations. The idea of a Greece united by common ancestry and kinship never took hold at the political level. It was in the ethnē, in the federal states (such as Achaea) or tribal communities (such as the Aetolians), where a real sense of social unity was fostered. For Greece, it was never a genuine possibility for ‘sinking particularism’ to be bound up in a coherent whole (1972: 154). The polis, geographical dispersion, Greco-Macedonian monarchies, and the overthrow of the Persian Empire, all inhibited the potentiality of a unified Greek nation. Rome, on the other hand, while having clear opportunities to forge a national identity, preferred synoecism (the amalgamation of towns or city-states), expanding territoriality and bringing with it civitas Romana. But the modern association between citizenship and nationality poses problems for the ancient evidence. As Walbank argues,

in the developed Roman empire…the concept of nationality and nationalism is something to be outgrown (as in the case of Italy) or overwhelmed, when it finds expression in separatism and resistance to the imperial state. Greek political activity, one might say, takes place below the national level, Roman above it; but in either case nationality and nationalism are condemned to impotence (1972: 154).

Walbank insisted that although Rome was suspicious of foreigners and foreign cultures, this attitude was not, on balance, based on a belief that they were racially inferior to the Romans (see Balsdon 1979; cf. Sherwin-White 1967). Indeed, Rome displayed a fairly tolerant attitude toward native cultures (Gruen 2011). Peoples who were deemed to be more easily assimilated were extended citizenship, followed by full-scale equality, viz. access to high office. The Romans did, however, reject the Greek dichotomy between themselves and barbarians. Native cultures, the evidence firmly attests, did survive during the imperial period. The extent to which cultural preservation indicates national resistance remains far less certain. The repeated use of the term Romani, for both citizens and aliens alike, further indicates the careful and exact forging of a supranational state. By extending citizenship to the elites first, followed by the remainder of the population, Rome actively pursued a policy of supranational loyalty. Pliny the Elder suggested imposing Latin on foreigners, ‘uniting the empire and imposing humanitas on all’ (Walbank 1972: 166). During the later imperial period, however, Caracalla’s extension of civitas to all inhabitants of the empire not only reduced the importance of citizenship, but also revived the barbarian categorization: ‘we hear more of barbari—partly no doubt because there were far more barbari to hear of—but if they are to be found within the frontiers it is because they have been brought in or forced their way in’ (Walbank 1972: 167).

The empire was filled with different cultures, languages, religions, races, customs and peoples. These differences did not, it seems, inspire militant nationalism; rather, Rome consciously pursued an ideology of supranational loyalty. In the first place, Rome rewarded conformism with ‘political recognition and ultimate equality’, bringing into the fold both the upper classes and ambitious portions of the population (Walbank 1972: 167). Secondly, the refusal to permit anything resembling Greek (or even modern) democracy ‘meant that the poor saw nothing in their national differences important enough to be worth fighting about’ (1972: 167). The upper classes had precisely what they wanted—access to offices and even the imperial throne—while the lower classes had far too little. Nationalism, in Walbank’s estimation, was a marginal factor in Roman history and Roman political history in particular. Rome, after all, was a city-state empire, where the community of the city-state, ‘the same social life’, forged a much closer bond than a shared gens or lingua (1972: 168). It was the dispersion of this civic rather than national ideology that buttressed the rise of Rome.

While much has been written about Roman ethnicity since Walbank’s article was published, I will focus my attention for the next few pages on the work of only four scholars: Benjamin Isaac, Greg Woolf, Emma Dench and Daniel Richter. Their work is not only grounded in careful, systematic reading of textual and material evidence, but it is, in my estimation, illustrative of larger conceptual shifts among ancient historians of Rome. One sees in the work of Isaac, Dench, Woolf and Richter how the Romans not only thought in ethnic terms, but also how these ideas were calibrated as ideological yet flexible strategies of self-representation. In The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, the most extensive book on race or ethnicity in the ancient world (it covers eight centuries’ worth of evidence), Isaac enumerates how the Greeks (and later the Romans) developed and deployed a rhetoric of hate and thus created (proto) racial hierarchies (cf. Tulpin 1999; Dench 2005). The first part of the book, entitled ‘Stereotypes and Proto-Racism: Criteria for Differentiation’, outlines the constituent elements of ancient thought that marked particular peoples as superior or inferior. Isaac discusses issues such as physicality, conquest, slavery, notions of superiority and inferiority, descent, lineage, environmental determinism, imperialism, animalistic descriptions of humans, cannibalism, and population expulsions as they pertain to his conceptualization of proto-racism. The second part turns to specific test cases: Greek and Roman attitudes towards Jews, Egyptians, Gauls, Germans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Syrians. Isaac argues that at the core of the Greek hostility toward alien cultures lay a tendency to treat an entire people as a generalized and simplified individual mass (with a singular disposition). While no term for prejudice, racism or discrimination exists in the ancient Greek language, there is nonetheless ample evidence of a proto-racism, typified by the belief in one’s own superiority with respect to other peoples (manifested in justifications of slavery and subjugation). Isaac’s definition of racism (‘an attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities. It therefore attributes to those individuals and groups of peoples collective traits, physical, mental and moral, which are constant and unalterable by human will, because they are caused by hereditary factors or external influences, such as climate or geography’) highlights the process by which an imagined, unalterable identity of shared traits is ascribed to an individual as part of a collective, subsequently judged to be either superior or inferior on this basis (2004: 23). Traits are unalterable precisely because they are linked to physical features. Isaac identifies five concepts that were utilized to determine ethnic/racial collectivities in the ancient world: (1) environmental determinism; (2) heredity of acquired traits; (3) a combination of environmentalism and heredity; (4) constitution and form of government; (5) autochthony and pure lineage.

Environmental determinism proposes that people are defined, physiologically and culturally, by their climate and surrounding topography. The peoples of Europe, for example, were believed to be more courageous than the Asiatics of the East because they lived in a colder climate. Traits, customs and habits were constants that had derived from outside forces. By contrast, ancient authors who utilized a model of heredity to describe peoples assigned identities on the basis of biological lineage. Ancient sources that combine heredity and environmental determinism hold that the latter eventually become hereditary over the course of several generations; in essence, a trait determined by climate eventually becomes biological. The governmental model associates political institutions with the creation of specific types of human beings (e.g. oriental kingships produce slavish peoples). A group’s claim of autochthony (springing from the soil itself) and pure lineage, epitomized by the Athenians, served to affirm that rightful possession of a territory belonged to one people, while also denying that those very same people had been corrupted by foreign admixture (presupposing an idea that change was always regressive and detrimental).

The presumption that certain peoples were inherently inferior was used not only to justify slavery, but also to legitimize imperial ambitions. Greece, for example, was situated in the ideal geographic position (between Europe and Asia), producing leaders best equipped to rule over others (the Persians, who were naturally servile). According to various Roman authors, the prolonged rule of an imperial force over a native population could create the condition of natural slavery. The very success of the Roman empire, its incorporation of foreigners of all types, ‘is represented by at least some of the important Roman authors as a process which reduces those people from fierce and free humans to degenerate slaves’ (Isaac 2004: 249). The variety of racializing techniques that Isaac identifies, though fragmented, disjointed and sporadic, nonetheless evidences the existence of a vibrant system of stereotyping and essentializing peoples. Taken in toto, the ethnographic, philosophical, artistic, literary and historical evidence from antiquity suggests the historical antecedents of modern-day racism. Isaac concludes by observing the Greek and Roman literature has given to us ‘many of the ideas of freedom, democracy, philosophy, novel artistic concepts and so much else that we regard as essential in our culture’, but that it has also transmitted ‘some of the elementary concepts of discrimination and inequality that are still with us’ (2004: 518). To be in the thrall of Greek and Roman intellectual history is, then, to acknowledge the good with the bad.

In a wide range of publications, Greg Woolf has taken a critical look at recent theorizations of Romanization and Roman notions of ethnic affiliation. Traditional accounts of Roman expansion and Romanization posited ‘the spread of what was Roman at the expense of what was not’ (1997: 339). Romanization, then, was seen as a progressive movement in which communities and individuals were brought ‘towards a higher level of civilization or development’ (1997: 339). While more recent discussions, building on the work of anthropologists and sociologists (as well as postcolonial studies), have nuanced models of Romanization—though often holding decisively materialist views of Roman expansion—there remains an underlying assumption, derived from the claims of ancient writers themselves, that ‘what we have to deal with is a conflict between two peoples’ and ‘that a conflict between peoples entails a conflict between cultures’ (1997: 340). While Woolf does define Roman culture as the qualities, practices and beliefs of those who self-identified (and/or received outside ascription) as Roman, he nonetheless argues that ‘becoming Roman was not a matter of acquiring a ready-made cultural package, then, so much as joining the insiders’ debate about what that package did or ought to consist of at that particular time’ (Woolf 1998: 11).

Woolf posits that this view of a conflict between two cultures assumes, to a certain extent, static cultural entities. But in the very process of expanding its borders, a new imperial culture emerged that supplanted both earlier Roman culture and that of the individual indigenous peoples. Woolf proposes that a conceptual model of Roman imperial culture as ‘a structured system of differences that was highly differentiated, by region, class, social locale, age, and gender among other dimensions of variability’ enables scholars to observe the ‘cultural logic of empire’ (1997: 341). The point, then, is not to deny that one state systematically dominated another; rather that the hegemonic relations produced through this process of expansion and domination were not equivalent to the systematic subjugation of one culture or ethnic group to another. A brief synchronic analysis of Gaul demonstrates Woolf’s point. He observes that various regions of Gaul (pre-Roman) shared a broadly similar or common cultural vocabulary from which local communities drew and freely chose their own combinations. The introduction of Roman culture into Gaul did not suddenly replace a system of Gallic diversity with (Roman) uniformity, but rather introduced ‘diversity ordered by imperial power’ over diversity of local choice (1997: 344). Roman society likewise became more complex through this process of cultural interaction and expansion (the creation of an imperial infrastructure, and the parallel evolution of Rome ‘from a conquest state, to head of a loosely controlled Mediterranean hegemony and finally to a fully institutionalized empire’ [1997: 345]). Changes of architectural style, military profit, the recruitment of local elites, and an evolving rationale of its expansionist policies (the creation of an administrative order) were all aspects of a Roman cultural revolution that shook Gaul. The introduction of a Roman cultural vocabulary expanded the range of Gallic choices, even if those choices were defined by a Roman definition of civilization and the good life (Woolf does note that only two cultural options were explicitly prohibited: human sacrifice and inter-tribal warfare).

Woolf’s analysis fundamentally proposes that any sense of Romanization built upon cultural convergence fails to account for the various new modalities of difference (between classes, regions and individuals) created by Roman power. Moreover, Rome itself was metabolizing a new social formation for itself with complex cultural matrixes and configurations. As Woolf sees it:

Both the new rulers and their subjects came to regard themselves as in some sense descendants of a people—the Romans—who had conquered others and brought them to accept their ways. The literature and art of the period allows us to document in detail the means and stages by which that people—that imagined community—was given an origin, a history, a future and a moral and cultural definition. But we understand that identity better if we distance ourselves from it, and recognize it as the product of a particular historical moment and circumstance. It is then possible to see how it functioned not just as a means of explaining and legitimating Roman imperialism in the eyes of the Romans, but also and subsequently for the Gauls, as a consolation for conquest. If their ancestors had been defeated it was because they had been barbarians yet that had been the cost of their recruitment to the civilizing mission and was a guarantee of their future success within it (1997: 347).

The claim among extant Roman texts that Rome was destined to civilize and rule the world constitutes the core of Roman imperial ideology. Humanitas reflected a particularly Roman sensibility, informing both what it meant to be Roman and how Romans understood history and the world around them. Humanitas, as a marker of historical progress, provided justification for continual Roman expansion, for the totalizing process of bringing the world under the aegis of Rome. The Greeks may have invented civilization, but they had long abandoned their claim to it. The Greeks, indeed, stood as emblems of cultural decadence, while the barbarians of the West stood at the opposite end of the spectrum. The dichotomy often proposed, both by Greek and Roman authors, between self and other turned on similar notions of cultural or linguistic distinctions.

In contrast to Greek notions of descent, civilization was both a matter of degree and a readily acquirable reality; in decoupling humanitas from ethnicity, Roman authors emphasized membership in the populus Romanus, cultural criteria and humanistic fulfillment (‘a series of intellectual and moral accomplishments and qualities that, in a Western context, were the exclusive property of a narrow elite of Roman citizens’ [Woolf 1998: 59]). Humanitas as the embodiment of an imperial civilization stood opposed to the bestial barbarism, cultural and moral failings of those beyond the confines of the empire. The seduction of civilization, the internalization of the Roman civilizing ethos, results from the shared interests of the educated elites of the empire. It is pointless, so Woolf observes, to ask whether Gauls were civilized by Rome or if they civilized themselves: ‘the educated elite of the empire joined together in the civilizing mission, sharing an identity that was Roman, humane, and aristocratic’ (1998: 75).

Daniel Richter’s history of ancient notions of human community—the Roman imperial adoption of the classical Athenian lexicon—analyzes the inherent tension between claims of cultural and ethnic distinction within a larger cosmopolitan discourse. With attention to the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno (and later Stoics), Dio Chrysostom, Cicero, Aelius Aristides, Plutarch, Philostratus, Lucian, and others, Richter traces not only why and how the Romans adapted Greek ideas of human community, but also the lasting power of lineage and descent as markers of both ethnicity and culture. Richter understands cosmopolitanism to be ‘the set ideas clustered around the principle that the human community is, biologically speaking, an undifferentiated whole’ (2011: 18). Thus whereas the ideology of cosmopolitanism insists that ‘the natural unity of the human species results (or ought to result) in universally shared values and cultural practices’, nationalism or ethnic ideology perpetuates the idea of a particular community based on lineage and descent. Nations are naturally occurring—that is, biological—communities that demarcate micro-cultures. Biology begets politics and culture: the nation’s cultural cohesion emanates from its sense of ethnic cohesion. While both the nationalist and cosmopolitan propound theories of cohesion, they fundamentally diverge over the size and scope of human cohesion writ large. In short, ‘for the nationalist, the human community is naturally heterogeneous; for the cosmopolitan, all human beings participate equally in a common humanity’ (2011: 18). Richter’s book investigates how ‘certain intellectuals in the postclassical Mediterranean imagined the human community as a unified, homogeneous whole composed of a diversity of parts’ (2011: 4).

Like Isocrates, who defined Greekness in cultural terms even as he insisted on Athenianness as an ethnic designation, Roman writers developed a simultaneously cultural cosmopolitanism and civic nationalism. While the Roman Empire was, according to Aelius Aristides, a totally homogenous polis, it also contained an ethnically coded form of communal membership: citizenship. To be a citizen of Rome was not simply a political or juridical marker, but an ethnic designation as well. Roman citizens shared a kinship relationship with the ruling powers; those who were not citizens were, more or less, disenfranchised members of a lower class. These non-citizens lived in the Roman empire but were never ‘truly a part of it’ (Richter 2011: 134). In Richter’s reading, Aristides advanced a joint universalist-particularist model of Romanness wherein ethnicity was not, strictly speaking, about biology or blood, but instead about paideia and cultural elitism. Citizenship was, for Aristides, a thoroughly ethnic category, which divided the orbis terrarum/oikoumene into Romans and those who lived in their empire. In that sense, the tension between micro- and macro-communities remained very much alive. It is a problem that remains very much alive in the present day. For, as Richter ultimately concludes, invoking the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and twenty first century ‘what is interesting is that both the hard-core nationalists and the one-world cosmopolitan continue to agree on the basic, ancient principle that we ought to care for “our own”. The difference lies in the varying ideas about who “one’s own” people are’ (Richter 2011: 246).

Emma Dench makes a similar argument in Romulus’ Asylum, her sweeping history of the processes by which the Romans, from the Middle Republic to the High Empire, constructed, expressed and reconstructed their identities. Dench’s thematic approach to the subject of what did and did not constitute being and becoming Roman—an investigation of Italy and Romanness, ethnography and imperial expansion, citizenship, blood and descent, and language and literature—‘concerns cultural expression of empire and modes of perceiving Roman identity, its relationship and indeed compatibility with other identities’ (2005: 32). The cultural histories of the various themes Dench discusses emphasize both the diversity and commonality of opinions expressed, while also attending to the textual genres represented by the authors she discusses (including Cicero, Plautus, Josephus, Tacitus, Strabo, and others). Dench’s book, however, is not just an investigation of the myriad ways in which Romans expressed and adapted their identities, but also an exploration of how the political and social history of the modern West has shaped scholarly questions about and models of the ancient world. To that end, Dench argues against the notion (all too pervasive, she suggests) that ethnic identity in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods was linked to culture rather than myths of common descent and notions of pure blood. The insistence that the Romans created an identity system based on culture rather than racial-physiognomy derives, in part, from the ‘liberal revulsion for the race-based historiography that had been acted out in the policies of the Third Reich and Italy under Fascism’ (2005: 222). At the same time, to ignore race as a historical force and factor in antiquity was, for scholars of the late twentieth century, to entrench a certain majoritarian telling of ancient history.

For Dench, culture and physiognomy were not mutually exclusive frameworks for thinking about Romanness, but rather, complementary and correlative discursive strategies. With a methodical reading of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities, Dench demonstrates that Dionysius’s ‘attempt to prove that the Romans are “really” Greek’ hinges on an ethnic system that prioritizes the notion of common descent (2005: 235). Greekness, Dionysius argues, begins with descent and that descent manifests itself (or fails to manifest itself) in issues of custom, language, worship, law, and so on. And while most Greeks had forgotten their Greekness on account of the fact that they now lived amongst barbarians, the Romans, ‘despite the admixture of “barbarians” that made them “forget” many of their ancient institutions, and mispronounce their largely Aeolic dialect of Greek, they preserve the indications of Greek descent to an extent displayed by no other Greek colonists’ (2005: 235). Elaborate genealogies or myths of common descent did not, however, assure a common identity among descendants. Greekness and Romanness had stages and histories. Ideologies of shared descent were used both in an aggregative sense—to map all the peoples of the world—and also to create bonds of kinship and to create ethnic dissimilarity. Fundamentally, though, Dench demonstrates quite emphatically that blood and descent was certainly ‘one available way of thinking about being Roman’ (2005: 258; original emphasis). The discourse of descent represented a ‘common vocabulary of prestige and connection for the Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic and Roman periods’ (2005: 237).

For classicists and ancient historians, ethnicity has become a central theme through which to theorize the political, ideological and social dynamism of ancient identity. This renewed attention to ancient notions of ethnicity stems in part, as Dench argues, from a re-evaluation of the relationship between modernity or modern identity politics and lasting influence of classical antiquity in the West (2005: 8-12). Precisely because the ancient past has been used to suggest both progress and decline, it remains a fertile site of constant debate and dissension. The desire to find both a utopian multicultural Egypt or Rome and a proto-racist cesspool has, in large measure, determined analytical outcomes. And insofar as there is no allowing the past or ancient sources to ‘speak for themselves’—it is undeniable not only that our present circumstances direct our study of the past, but that we read antiquity through the present—it is imperative that ‘we should both have some awareness of the socio-specific nature of our own concerns and, indeed, those of the theoretical models that we invoke’ (Dench 2005: 11). It is not that we risk turning ancient Greece and Rome into societies that were obsessed or even defined by ethnicity and ethnic reasoning; but rather that we fail to see our own role in forging these images. Ancient ethnicity is a useful analytical touchstone because it forces scholars—or ought to compel scholars—to consider the modern influences on the study of the ancient world. To think about ancient race or ethnicity in a careful, methodical way requires attention to the modern categories through which scholars read, or more accurately, translate the ancient world. It is these very conversations among classicists and historians that have compelled scholars of early Christianity to reconsider whether Christians can be said to have thought and wrote in ethnic terms.

Ethnicity and Early Christianity

In his seminal study of early Christianity, The Expansion of Early Christianity in the First Three Centuries, Adolf Harnack (1851–1930) fixated on a particular Latin phrase tertium genus (‘third race’), which was attested by two third-century African Christian writers (1904: I:336-75). On the one hand, Tertullian suggested it was a term that pagans derisively applied to Christians to mark their exclusivist and outré manner of worship, while the author of De pascha compus (pseudonymously authored but assigned to the hand of Cyprian) suggested it was a term of Christian self-ascription. While the two texts offered seemingly contradictory meanings, Harnack reasoned that the designation was an essential recognition by both Christians and pagans that Christianity was a new genus of religion, one that distinguished itself as a religious culture. The designation third race positioned Christianity and Christians at the center of a vibrant and rational religion that had supplanted both Judaism and paganism. For the historian David Olster, however, Harnack’s discussion actually invites a different question:

perhaps the question is not whether Christianity was a new genus of religion in a theological or philosophical dialectic with paganism, but whether early Christians thought of themselves as a new genus of genos or ethnos in an ethnographic dialogue with classical assumptions about nation or, since the term ‘nation’ implies some link to our modern nationalism, race, which better renders the classical connotation (1995: 12).

According to Olster, race or peoplehood was a cultural umbrella term in which various complementary identities such as religion and citizenship were embedded. In the ancient Mediterranean, race was an essentialist designation, based on cultural factors such as language, geographical location, cult center, and divinely sanctioned laws and customs. The traditions of a given ethnic group were legitimate if and only if those customs had been handed down by a divine figure or to a divinely-inspired lawgiver.

Olster’s reading of the sources suggests that racial boundaries were slowly eroded as ‘Roman imperial universalism increasingly brought all inhabitants of the empire together as Romans’ (1995: 22). While the rise of a Roman universalism did not altogether quash the usage of ethnic invective or ethnographic description, it did seem to ossify ethnic categories into a collection of stereotypes. Christian universalism arose out of a particular Roman universalism, co-opting the language of ethnography with a distinctly Christian vernacular. The earliest texts of ‘Christianity’, Paul’s letters to various Mediterranean communities, posit a mechanism by which Jews and gentiles could likewise be saved. But it was precisely Paul’s universalist, ethnically-free gospel that caused problems in the development of a coherent early Christian identity. Celsus’s infamous polemic against Christianity is grounded precisely in its lack of a geographical or biological origin. While the Jews may be loathsome for the particulars of their customs, their history was legitimate. The texts of the earliest Christian writers—the Epistle of Diognetus, Aristides’s Apology, the Epistle of Barnabas, among others—show an acute awareness of the ‘intellectual force’ of the ‘religious implications of classical ethnography’ (Olster 1995: 27). Not only had Aristides understood religion as an ethnographic category—his fourfold schematization of the world into Barbarians (i.e. Egyptians), Greeks, Jews and Christians was centered around each group’s ostensibly religious disposition—but he openly and joyously conceded the fact that Christians were ‘created not through biology, but through adoption by Christ’, a race chosen by God himself (1995: 28). The ethnographic maneuverings of the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, for example, echoing the claims of Apion, sought to disassociate the Jews from their so-called history, recasting the Incarnation not as a rupture but the climax of the history of Israel. As Olster contends, ‘by claiming Jewish history as the Christians’ own, and redefining Christians as a race adopted by its God, Christians were now able to make a claim on their God that had ethnographic support’ (1995: 30). The appropriation of classical ethnography by early Christian writers was not an effort to infuse racial discourse with religious components, a phenomenon classical sources themselves explicate; rather it was a matter of imbuing the technique of ethnographic description with the religious ideology of an emergent Christianity.

The story of Christian racial and ethnic attitudes thus begins not with the Jesus of the Gospels but with the figure of Paul. For centuries, scholars of the New Testament treated Paul not only as a Christian, but also as someone who, in that capacity, preached a new religion or a supra-ethnic model of kinship in Christ. In If Sons, Then Heirs (2007), Caroline Johnson Hodge argues just the opposite: Paul did not, in fact, preach a model of universal peoplehood apart from notions of ethnicity. Indeed, Paul’s argument about Jews and gentiles—and their relationship to Christ—was steeped in a discourse of ethnic kinship. Jews were an ethnos chosen by God, while gentiles who believed in Christ were ‘adopted as sons and made into a laos of the God of Israel, a position previously occupied by the Israelites alone’ (2007: 3). The very universality of Paul’s gospel—that is, the ability of gentiles to be made into sons of the God of Israel—is dependent on the language and logic of peoplehood and ethnicity. Johnson Hodge’s goal is to dismantle ‘the contrast between a universal, “non-ethnic” Christianity and an ethnic, particular Judaism’ (2007: 4). In short, she argues that Christianity was never ‘ethnically neutral’ (2007: 4).

Johnson Hodge focuses on the ideology of patrilineal descent, what she calls ‘patrilineal ideology’ (2007: 23). For Greeks, Romans and Jews, patrilineal kinship models were fundamentally strategic claims whereby a common father was said to pass along traits to his descendants. In producing a logic of shared blood, the ideology of kinship worked by advancing the perception that kinship itself was ‘governed by the natural processes of biology (or the divine process of ritual) and is therefore beyond human control’ (2007: 42). These discourses operated to transform the rhetoric of kinship into an immutable reality. In that sense, kinship was both natural and mutable. The logic of kinship construction was based on the interaction of four components: (1) shared blood (physical kinship); (2) rituals that corroborate blood relations or enable the adoption of kin (ritual substitution); (3) the production of genealogies and histories, which allow kinship networks to be rearranged, updated, and so on; (4) a shared sense of mind, soul or spirit. Precisely because kinship models were used to create relations among groups that were ‘not traditional descent groups’—such as philosophical schools of thought—blood could be supplanted by shared practices or beliefs (2007: 40). Johnson Hodge’s treatment of Paul’s ethnic reasoning develops out of this four-fold taxonomy. While gentiles were alienated from the God of Israel, they could be adopted as ancestors of Abraham through baptism in Christ (Gal. 3.29; 2007: 67). Paul thus developed the idea that gentiles descended from a line of faithfulness, ‘an organic connective agent more authoritative than “shared blood”’ (2007: 117). But even as he crafted a logic of ethnic orientation in Christ that enabled a more expansive community of believers, Paul insisted on a hierarchy of ethnicity: Jews first, then Greeks. The God of Israel may have been impartial with respect to Jews and Greeks, but he did not hold them to be equals. For Paul, while God created access for the gentiles (via adoption) to be saved, he did not make them into Jews. Jews and gentiles were linked in Abraham, but still separate peoples. Paul’s logic of kinship did not advance a utopian equality—a revolutionary Christianity—but rather an ethnically porous and hierarchized nation of Israel.

In ‘When You Were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (2014), Cavan Concannon reaches a similar conclusion—that early followers of Jesus had not only an ethnic identity but a malleable one at that—by means of a micro-analysis of first- and second-century Roman Corinth. His thesis, building on the work of Buell in particular (see below), posits that Paul deployed rhetorics of ethnicity to ‘persuade, cajole, or challenge audiences in Corinth’ (2014: 2). In so doing, Paul becomes a foundational figure for enumerating ‘how early Christians made use of the rhetoric of ethnicity in the production of early Christian identity and in disputes and contestations over community boundaries and praxis’ (2014: 2). Corinth, Concannon stresses, was not a mini-Rome that was overrunning with veterans of Caesar’s army; it was a Roman colony that was, quite obviously, steeped in Greek history and culture. To that end, the Corinthians were not only negotiating between Greekness and Romanness—both for economic (trade) and political reasons—but also between a Roman present and a Greek past. Some (elite) Corinthians thought of themselves in both local and imperial terms. Paul, in a similar way, appeals to the idea of an Israelite past and a Corinthian present. In 1 Cor. 10.1-13, Paul genealogically connects the Corinthians to Israelite fathers ‘as a means of policing the dietary and cultic practices of the Corinthian community’, namely abstention from food sacrificed to idols (2014: 115). It is genealogy or the idea of genealogical continuity that Paul invokes in order to compel the Corinthians to ‘flee from idolatry’. In 2 Cor. 3.7-18, Paul deploys the story of Moses’ veil (Exod. 34) both to proclaim his apostolic authority as a mediator of the Spirit and to pronounce a discontinuity between the Corinthians and the Israelites. It is the Corinthians who are the saved peoples, in contrast to the gentile unbelievers and the sons of Israel (who are blinded by the conceptual veil placed over their hearts by Moses). It is the Corinthians who have become a people of the Spirit, set apart from the blind sons of Israel and the gentile unbelievers ‘who are being destroyed’ (2 Cor. 2.15, 4.3). As Concannon concludes,

taken with Paul’s off-hand, yet surprising, formulation in 1 Cor 12:2 (‘when you were Gentiles’ [ὅτε ἔθνη ἦτε]), these two uses of Israelite history show us how Paul constructs an ‘in-between’ identity for his Corinthian audience in which cultic practice and ethnicity are intertwined. Paul’s comment in 1 Cor 12:2 suggests that the Corinthians, who used to be Gentiles, have become something different (2014: 115).

But whereas Johnson Hodge focused on the figure of Paul himself, Concannon, using Paul’s letters as well as archaeological and historical evidence (on ethnicity and material culture, see Alcock 2002; Revell 2010, 2016), speculates about how the Corinthians themselves would have construed their ethnic identities and local history. Concannon wants to know how the Corinthians might have responded to these rhetorics of ethnicity. Using feminist and postcolonial frameworks, Concannon aims to rethink the stereotyped portrait of libertine, heretical or gnostic Corinthians. His analysis focuses on the political work at play in Paul’s descriptions and castigations of them. Spectral as they may be, Concannon’s observations are important reminders of the other voices lurking in Paul’s letters and in the largely forgotten communities to which he wrote. Corinth was, in Concannon’s reading, a truly Greco-Roman city, one that was bustling with a polyphony of ethnic identities. Paul’s voice may have been only one among the Christic Corinthians, but it remains the loudest and most demonstrable.

The internal politics and organizational structures of religion and society are, according to Denise Kimber Buell’s Why This New Race?, ideological constructs that aim to produce boundaries, to carve out social roles, social spheres, religious identity, and racial and ethnic identities. Buell, drawing upon contemporary sociological and anthropological writings about race and ethnicity, argues that ‘early Christians used ethnic reasoning to legitimize various forms of Christianness as the universal, most authentic manifestation of humanity, and it offered Christians both a way to define themselves relative to “outsiders” and to compete with other “insiders” to assert the superiority of their varying visions of Christianness’ (2005: 2). Buell’s analysis proposes that classificatory systems, be they racial, religious, ethnic, gendered or class-based, function as social and cultural processes, which, in turn, suggests that these seemingly ‘real and fixed human differences…are in fact social creations and not eternal realities’ (Buell 2005: 6; see also Wilhite 2007; Barreto 2010; Harrill 2014). Classification is inscribed in time, which means that it reflects particular temporal agendas and ideologies (Berzon 2016).

Buell describes the central argument of her book as follows: ‘early Christian texts used culturally available understandings of human difference, which we can analyze in terms of our modern concepts of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” to shape what we have come to call a religious tradition and to portray particular forms of Christianness as universal and authoritative’ (2005: 2). Her work demonstrates that ancient discussions (Greek, Roman, Jewish) of religious practices were frequently overlaid with claims of ethnic identity. Religious practices can be conceptualized as inscribing ethnoracial difference (i.e. the Egyptians do X) as well as reinforcing and/or producing kinship ties. To the extent that religious customs can be practiced or rejected, they affirm a sense of ethnoracial fluidity, the ability to cross ethnoracial boundaries (i.e. transformation). Christian martyr texts and apologetic literature build explicitly upon this framework. Martyr texts, for instance, hold that membership in the genos or ethnos (not exclusively the Christian genos) ‘is produced and demonstrated through proper religiosity, and charges of improper religiosity (atheism, impiety, idolatry) both structure the confrontation between state and martyr and the martyrs’ response to the state’ (2005: 53). The Apology of Aristides, for example, embraces a notion of shared Christian kinship, bound by an eponymous ancestor who ‘established the religious practices that continue to perpetuate the kin bonds and collective identity of its participant members’ (2005: 46). These strategies serve not only to define Christian ‘peoplehood’, but also to bolster claims of Christian legitimacy.

Buell also examines how Christians turned this ethnic identity, characterized by religious beliefs and practices, into a broader historical narrative. Analyzing the works of Justin, Origen, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius, among others, Buell demonstrates the fusion of ethnic and religious language as part of a distinctly Christian historical narrative, which not only positioned Christians as peoples with an ancient and illustrious pedigree, but also situated Christian identity in the context of other ethnoracial groups. In the Christian schema of history, because history evolves in relation to truths (preservation, restoration, perfection versus corruption), the teachings, texts and practices of an ethnoracial group reveal the degree to which truth has been preserved. She also offers a close reading of Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, through which Buell attempts to trace the construction of Christianness and Christian peoplehood. Christians are a people who are constituted not by blood (as with the Jews) but by faith. As the true or spiritual Israelite ethnos or the genos of Judah, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham, membership in the Christian genos is ‘gained…by changing one’s state of life, by following the commandments of Christ, by becoming like Abraham in faith, and by belief in Christ’ (2005: 98). While Justin’s definition of Christianness ‘foregrounds fluidity, making acquisition of membership universally available through a change in beliefs and practices’, his definition of Christianness is supported by both fixed and fluid ethnic reasoning (2005: 95). In the book’s fourth chapter, Buell discusses the use of ethnic reasoning in the context of Christian polemic. Origen and Clement of Alexandria, for example, framed their objections to certain heretical Christian teachings (i.e. Valentinian positions) as a question of fixity versus fluidity. They emphasized a universal doctrine of soteriology, linked to a similarly universal notion of free will, while describing heretical opponents as holding particularist or exclusivist (thus fixed) views of salvation.

Buell further posits that early Christians advanced a universalism based on ethnic reasoning. This ethnic universalism had three components: (1) universal access (the openness of membership and the bringing together of ethnic groups under the banner of Christianity of ethnicity); (2) aspirations of universal scope (because anyone can join the Christian race, all peoples ought to join); (3) universalism as unification of Christianity (ethnic reasoning became a tool through which claims of authority, legitimacy and truth were contested, i.e. racializing rivals). Taken together, these three principles advanced an idealized vision of a unified Christianity, drawn from various peoples (Barreto 2010). Thus Buell concludes that:

In depicting Christianness as the universal ideal of humanity, early Christians often do so by speaking of Christians as a people distinct from other kinds of peoples. This produces a tension: Christianness is depicted as distinct from other forms of identity yet also asserted as the ideal or most authentic form of humanness. Some early Christian authors try to grapple with this paradox by reasoning that what makes Christianness appear distinct is that most people are deluded into taking as real current kinds of categorical distinctions by race or people (2005: 164).

The impact of Buell’s observation that borders are always changing within socially constructed models of identity hinges on the seemingly paradoxical reality that these various systems are at once both open and closed (fluid and fixed). Buell takes as her model the work of anthropologists who ‘want to resituate scholarly discussions away from the question of whether or not race/ethnicity is fixed or mutable to analyses of how discourses of race and ethnicity rely upon the notion of fixity or primordiality even while they are also always under negotiation and flux’ (2005: 7). Systems or structures of classification, while ideological constructions, are realities insofar as they exist (not with regard to their inherent truth or validity) as convergent and divergent forces in people’s lives. The openness of systems, on the one hand, is manifested in the ability to cross lines via implicit and explicit routes, while the exclusionism of systems, on the other, operates simultaneously to strengthen the reified underpinnings of the systemic model by delineating intransigent operational fixtures (Nasrallah and Schüssler Fiorenza 2009).

But to think about and analyze early Christian forms of identity, as Benjamin Dunning insists, is to parse a fundamental tension in Christian expressions of community: sameness and difference, assimilation and resistance. Early Christians both belonged to the Roman world and yet, for a long period of time, were also marginal within it. In that sense, they actively styled themselves as the other, as foreigners within the Roman social order (2009: 7). Focusing on ‘“the resident alien topos”—the designation…of the Christian self as a stranger, sojourner, foreigner, and/or resident alien’, Dunning outlines not a singular purpose for this discursive refrain but a range of strategic functions (2009: 1). In asking how early Christian writers used this topos to produce a functional (that is, useable or malleable) social identity, Dunning emphasizes the doubleness embedded within the very terms of foreignness: alien status ‘retains its negative connotations of social estrangement and marginality, while also, and at the same time, being refigured…as “a mark of excellence, a source of power”’ (2009: 6-7). It is the long-standing ambivalence ascribed to the figure of the alien —a sense of revulsion and yet curiosity and desire—that made the rhetorical appellation such a useful discursive tool. Christians crafted an ideology that could, at the same time, valorize the role of the alien and also excoriate those they themselves conceptualized as marginal. At certain junctures and in certain texts, alien Christians could be depicted as a marginalized yet powerful community within the Roman empire, while in others they could be defiant figures, resisting and undercutting Roman cultic hegemony (‘they outstrip the Romans in their ability to fulfill Roman norms’ [2009: 66]). And in other contexts still, specifically the Apocryphon of John, the motif of the alien Christian was treated as a theological mistake. It was an attempt to associate, metaphorically, ‘alien status with a failure to understand salvation correctly’ (2009: 92). Christians, the text proposes, had wrongly exiled themselves from their own city. In labeling themselves aliens, they had failed to apprehend their insider status, that is, the terms of salvation as a self-propelled state.

Philippa Townsend’s dissertation, ‘Another Race? Ethnicity, Universalism, and the Emergence of Christianity’, uses Justin Martyr’s phrase allo genos as a springboard for thinking about early Christian identity formation. Genos, which can be variously translated as race, line of descent, category, group, type or class, poses a definitional puzzle, which informs the core of Townsend’s project: ‘Was Christianity an alternative ethnicity, or an alternative to ethnicity?’ (Townsend 2009: 1). Building on the work of Boyarin (2004a) and Buell (2005), who stand as modern representatives of the dichotomies Townsend describes in her question, Townsend does not aim to determine whether Christianity was ethnic or universalistic, but to analyze and identify the processes by which early Christians utilized concepts of religion and ethnicity. She asks: ‘why did the religious significance of birth, descent, geography, language, and ritual—all recognizable elements of ethnic definition in antiquity, as today—become explicitly problematized in the first three centuries of the Christian era?’ (2009: 8). Following J. Hall, Townsend emphasizes the distinction between ethnic criteria and ethnic indicia, privileging descent and kinship (common blood) as the definitional core of ethnic identity. The extent to which early Christians embraced or abandoned the criteria and indicia of ethnic identity is the focus of Townsend’s investigation. Her introduction also includes valuable discussions of ethnicity and universalism in the modern production of world religions, the problematic claim that Greekness shifted from an ethnic to a cultural category in the Hellenistic period and under the Roman Empire, the importance of distinguishing between ethnicity as a discursively constructed category and ethnic identity as fictional, and the imperial context of ethnicity and universalism.

Townsend’s dissertation discusses Paul, Justin Martyr, Manichaeism, and ancient attitudes toward sacrifice. With each of these figures/themes, she does not propose an explanatory model of how and why Christians utilized ethnic and religious concepts, but rather to study ‘some aspect of how the relationship between ethnicity and religion was being negotiated by early Christians and their contemporaries’, seeking ‘to discover what particular social, historical, and theological forces were involved in that negotiation’ (2009: 8). In her chapter on Paul, for example, Townsend identifies the emergence of the name, Christianoi (a term that identified gentile followers of Jesus), as a process of distinction from Judaism. This process, however, should not be characterized as a move away from an ethnic (religious) identification toward a universalist (religious) one. According to Paul, gentiles were drawn into the Abrahamic line of descent by the sacrifice of Christ. The designation ‘those of Christ’ (hoi tou christou) was above all else a marker of kinship between Christ and a community of his followers. Townsend identifies how some Christians ‘developed a strong sense of kinship that had little to do with traditional markers such as language or geography’, instead emphasizing ‘religious practice as not only a regulator of kinship and descent, but as the sole criterion for it’ (2009: 69).

Townsend envisions the interaction between religion and ethnicity as inextricably linked to the process of Christianization and the end of animal sacrifice. Scholars have long noted the relationship between kinship and sacrifice, how the latter helps order and govern social organization. Controversies over sacrifice in the Roman Empire can (and should) be analyzed as discursive sites of negotiation between kinship and sacrifice. The rejection of natural descent as a marker of communal coherence became a paramount feature of Christian identity formation. It was Christ’s sacrifice, celebrated through the Eucharist, that supplanted claims of natural descent, aligning peoples to an identity firmly distinct from biological affiliation. It was the blood of Christ and not the blood of animals that forged fictive bonds of kinship. These bonds were not, Townsend stresses, physiological: they were forged through what Johnson Hodge identified as shared ritual and mentality.

Christians forged a sense of community not only through a shared ethical sense or ritual behavior but also through an opposition to particular habits, customs and peoples. Gay Byron uses the figure of the Ethiopian and the discourse of blackness to situate Christian interest in otherness (particularly Ethiopians and Egyptians) as part of a theological and identificatory project. She analyzes ‘ethno-political rhetorics’, or ‘discursive elements within texts that refer to “ethnic” identities or geographical locations and function as political invective’ (2002: 2). Defining ethnicity as the ‘relationship between two contrasting individuals or groups of people’, Byron utilizes her identification of ethno-political rhetoric in order to show the process by which certain Christian teachings were advanced or silenced (2002: 2). The use of ethnic reasoning suggests not only diversity among the myriad early Christian communities, but also a process of signifying challenges, threats and opponents within this diverse field. Relying heavily on Olster’s analysis, Byron’s monograph posits a correlation between the formation of Christian identity—the erection of particular ideological and theological boundaries—and vituperative rhetoric against geographical locations and ethnic peoples. A taxonomy of Ethiopians, Egyptians and black-skinned peoples that collates various markers of ethnic identity—sexual promiscuity, physicality and mythical idealization, constructed from an odd pastiche of classical and late antique writers and six centuries of Christian literature—reveals the development of patterns of ethnic reasoning, both virtuous and vituperative, that served to advance authorial agendas.

The Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, Tertullian’s De spectaculis, Origen’s Homilies and Commentaries on the Song of Songs, and Jerome’s Homily 86 on the Psalms, all utilize tropes of color symbolism to formulate larger arguments about the truth or falsity of Christianity and the beliefs and practices of Christian communities. In the post-apostolic period, ‘the anonymous authors of each of these texts used melas (blackness) to warn, instruct, and encourage their audiences to endure internal and external threats that challenged their identity and stability’ (Byron 2002: 69). Blackness was a symbolic referent for evil, to be avoided, within the world. Ho melas (‘the black one’) need not necessarily reference Ethiopians (or Ethiopia), but nonetheless manifested images of communal crises and challenges (2002: 6, 10, 44-45, 60-67). Among the patristic writers, references to Ethiopia, Egypt, and blackness explicitly denoted sin that undermined the well-being of the Christian faith (Ethiopia as a symbolic trope marshaled to challenge intra-Christian opponents). Accordingly, ‘those who strayed from the faith became “Ethiopians” and were “blackened by their sins”’ (2002: 75). Early Christian monastic literature similarly attests to the spiritual and political threat of evil and sin (particularly the Ethiopian woman as a symbol of sexual danger in the desert) as represented by Ethiopians. Like Greco-Roman sources before them, early Christian sources explicitly associated blackness with malevolence and demonism.

While other texts (notably Jerome’s Homily 18 on Psalm 86, Ambrose, Commentary on Psalm 118 and the fifth-century Life of Melania, the Younger) employ Egypt/Egyptians, Ethiopia/Ethiopians and blacks/blackness as heretical tropes, Acts 8.26-40 and the anonymous Apophthegmata partrum (specifically the figure of Ethiopian Moses; on the figure of Moses, see Brakke 2001) characterize the Ethiopians as models of virtue, praised and exalted for their notable characteristics. In the heretical discourse, the symbolic association between heresy and Ethiopia turns on the presupposition that ‘Ethiopians had to be perceived not only as other or foreign, but also as inferior from the perspective of the audiences addressed in the texts’ (Byron 2002: 121). On the other hand, the Ethiopians as models of virtue, appealing to physical traits and geographical location, offered evidence that Christianity was open to even the farthest reaches of the world (which seems to be Luke’s overarching point). The process of delineating ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, one analogue of the supposed dichotomy between heresy and orthodoxy, is readily apparent in Christian appeal to and/or denunciation of Ethiopia, Egypt and blackness. Fundamentally, Christian writers did not invent wholesale the particular patterns associated with depictions of Ethiopia (they largely followed the conventions of Greco-Roman writers), but they did employ these motifs to challenge threats within communities and supplemented or augmented these ethnic associations to the needs of their communities.

In assessing Eusebius of Caesarea’s attitude toward Ethiopia and Ethiopians according to his Commentary on the Psalms, Aaron Johnson situates this discourse within the context of Eusebius’s larger proclamation that Christianity was ‘the Church from the nations’, wherein nations (Scythians, Persians, Egyptians, etc.) abandoned their geographical and/or ethnic identities and submitted themselves to a new identity in Christ. Archaic and classical constructions of Ethiopian identity hold them to be the remotest of peoples (their precise geographical position is ambiguous), a community often imbued with a Greek sense of utopian fantasy. Homer and Hesiod both describe the land of Ethiopia as blameless, while the latter specifically believed Ethiopia to be the boundary of the human world, the earthly retreat of the gods. Herodotus also perpetuates an image of the Ethiopian as noble savage, beautiful and tall, though the blackness of their skin, a trait absent from the poetry of Homer, emerges as part of a climatic and ethnographic understanding of the world. There were some Greek authors, notably Pseudo-Aristotle and Philo, who associated the Ethiopians with cowardice and lowliness.

The image of the Ethiopian within Christian discourse was highly influenced by Origen, who, following Philo’s etymological association between the biblical figure of Cush and dirt/filth, argued these most foreign of peoples signified ‘the blackness of a sinful soul in need of the cleansing that Christ’s teaching offers’ (2006b: 170). The Ethiopian bride of the Song of Songs represented the sinful soul that converts to Christianity, emblematic of an unenlightened nation that ultimately finds its way to Christ. For Origen, Ethiopia’s geographical remoteness is hardly ever discussed let alone emphasized; it is the nation’s spiritual remoteness that garners his attention. The symbolic capital of the Ethiopians as the church of the gentiles turned on the process of Christian enlightenment: ‘the purified soul of the Christian has, therefore, been freed from its darkened Ethiopian-like state. Ethiopian identity, allegorically understood, is the pre-conversion state of the soul; it is an identity to be shunned, a sinful darkness to be washed in the whitening process of conversion’ (2006b: 173). Eusebius’s analysis and careful theological maneuverings stand in stark contrast to the color symbolism perpetuated by Origen. The blackness of the Ethiopians is immaterial insofar as their geographical remoteness emphasizes the totality and expansion of Christ’s kingdom. It is a triumphalist narrative of Christianity that Eusebius produces with the aid of Ethiopian remoteness; indeed, God breaks down the barriers of impossibility. The rebirth of the Ethiopians as part of a new people—and the simultaneous shunning of their former identity—expresses the magnanimity of God, who created all peoples in his image, even those who symbolized ignoble birth. As Johnson surmises, ‘Eusebius’s Ethiopians, as well as others enumerated with them, represented people of dubious racial and spiritual backgrounds; they were born among foreign nations. In spite of such limitations, they were granted participation in the calling of the nations’ (2006b: 185). The Ethiopians stood as the prime representatives of the triumphalistic expansion of Christianity.

In his study of Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica (PE), Johnson further contends that Eusebius’s effort to construct a coherent Christian identity relies on a process of ethnic argumentation: ‘The apologetic method of the PE—what I designate “ethnic argumentation”—centers upon a construal of the ethnē (or nations) of the world and upon the construction of Christianity as an ethnos which stands as a stark alternative to those other ethnē’ (2004: 27). Ethnic identity, modern theorists have argued, is not a biologically determined identity; rather it is a discursive phenomenon in which markers of difference are mapped onto groups to erect boundaries. The particular constitution of an ethnic group’s identity is actively constructed (as opposed to capricious constructivism or claims of objective realism), utilizing various markers, among them name, myth of descent, shared history, territory, religion, language, dress, and so on. ‘What is or is not part of an ethnic identity is less important than how a given feature is manipulated to establish difference between groups’ (2004: 30). The question at hand, then, is how discourse represents peoples as distinctive (‘the rhetorical mechanisms of constructing peoplehood’ [2004: 32]).

The PE can be broken down into two large sections. In the first, Eusebius tells the Greek narrative of descent (alongside other nations’ myths), while in the second he recounts the Hebrew narrative of descent. Later, Eusebius would use his Demonstratio Evangelica to present Christianity in distinctly ethnic terms (as a peoples with their own narration of descent and shared history). Chapters 1–6 hinge on Eusebius’ claim that the Greeks are, in fact, a derivative, later peoples. The Greeks actively stole myths from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, which were misinterpreted and reconstructed by Greek allegorists. Eusebius turns Greek charges of Christianity’s newness on their head. It is the Greeks who are most susceptible to the criticism of novelty and cultural and ethnic borrowing (the figures of Cadmus and Orpheus loom large).

Johnson’s analysis focuses on three aspects of the narrative of Greek descent. First, the narrative as told by Eusebius actively undermines Greek claims to intellectual or cultural primacy. Greece derives its character, its national disposition, from earlier primal nations. Indeed, Eusebius actively thwarted efforts by Greek authors who allegorized and thus dehistoricized Phoenician (and Egyptian) myth in order to hide its ethnic derivation and dependency. He collapses the myth–history distinction precisely to demonstrate that the pagans use euhemerism to deny the historicity and ethnicity of the founders of nations. Second, the narrative of descent offers a picture of the characteristics and constitution of the nations described. In addition to traditional listings of customs, cultic practices, dress, and so on, Eusebius emphasizes that theological and philosophical thinking are attributes of national identity: ‘to be a member of a certain nation is to think a certain way about the world and about the gods’ (2004: 47). The Greeks, as seen from their theology, are irrational, brutal and impious. Their cultic practices indicate as much! Finally, Johnson turns to the process of narrating and legitimating the Christian nation. The Christian nation began with the Hebrews, the patriarchs of Bible, who epitomized virtue, purity, rationality and piety. Ultimately, however, the Hebrews were corrupted during their years in Egypt, becoming instead Jews. The Law, then, was a corrective to Egyptianizing tendencies. For Eusebius, Christ becomes the figure of national restoration. The Christian nation thus stood in direct contradistinction to the Greeks: Christians were the descendants of the noble Hebrews, not a derivative people.

Jeremy Schott’s monograph, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, analyzes the fluid and carefully constructed processes that produced Christian and pagan identities. Schott situates pagan polemicists (Celsus and Porphyry) and their Christian opponents (Aristides, Lactantius, Porphyry and Tatian) within competing and complementary discursive traditions of ethnography, philosophy and imperial ideology. With the aid of post-colonial theory, Schott evaluates the intersecting concepts of religion, culture and ethnicity as they pertain to Christian and pagan identity formation. The distillation of a universal philosophical ideal (advocated most vociferously by Porphyry as transcending ethnic and cultural particularism) emerged in conjunction with Greek engagement (Plutarch, Numenius, among others) with barbarian culture (Momigliano 1971; Stroumsa 1999). Schott explains that ‘by reading barbarian texts in Greek and interpreting them for a Greek readership, these philosophers were engaged in a process of intellectual despoliation homologous to the Roman conquest of peoples and territory’ (2008: 27; original emphasis; Richter 2001). Native cultures were subjected to a Greek hermeneutic that would both assimilate and reject elements of foreign wisdom for the benefit of an ecumenical philosophy. While Porphyry explicitly drew upon native customs and teachings for his via universalis, he adamantly maintained the superiority of the Greek intellectual tradition. His being a philobarbaros did not obviate the need to assert the integrity of Greek identity.

The Christian apologists Justin Martyr, Tatian, Lactantius and Eusebius all deployed similarly cross-cultural techniques in the production of a thoroughly Christian version of history. Lactantius, most notably, used oracular sources (the Hermetica and Sibylline Oracle) and the ‘barbarian’ Hebrew Bible to argue that Christianity was the lone true religion and philosophy, while simultaneously constructing a universal history of religions. In the second instance, ‘Lactantius crafted a new geography in which Christianity enjoyed privilege of place over and against the error-ridden religions of the world’s many peoples, or gentes’ (Schott 2008: 81). Building on the Pauline theodicy of Romans 1, Lactantius posits an Ur-monotheism, vera religio, obscured over the course of history by various ancestral cults, falsae religiones. For Lactantius, the link between ethnogenesis and religion is of paramount value. Schott, indeed, makes much of the fact that ‘for Lactantius, to be a distinct people was to develop a new religion, and vice versa. Religious differentiation and ethnic differentiation are indistinguishable. Consequently, to write a history of religions is simultaneously to conduct an ethnographic survey’ (2008: 97). Vera religio, in contrast to the falsae religiones of human minds, stands outside of time, the product of divine not human tradition. Eusebius, in contrast to Porphyry’s appeal to foreign wisdom, sought to erect a Christian identity unmarred by ethnic or cultural specificity. ‘Christianity is precisely what Porphyry fears most—a people identified not by their ethnicity but by the explicit rejection and erasure of ancestral identity’ (2008: 138). According to Eusebius, Christianity’s mission to the gentiles and Rome’s imperial aspirations merged under Constantine, though the latter remained a tool of the former. As Schott avers, ‘the imperial conquest of peoples and the conversion of the gentiles have become two prongs in the same offensive against native error and barbarism’ (2008: 157). Christianity’s territorial expansion, hastened by an imperial apparatus, erased ethnic and local identities, uniting the church and empire through a universal sacred history. Even as Christian writers assembled their Christianity both in contrast to and with the aid of decidedly ethnic wisdom, they simultaneously elaborated a universal philosophy. This imperial ambition did not, of course, dissolve or subsume all local identities, but it did work to explain them as part and parcel of a Christian history of religion and culture. Christianity, through its imperial expansion, brought order and logic to a world marked by diversity and difference.

Conclusion

As the contents of this survey have made clear, scholars are very much invested in analyzing the heuristic, historical and political implications of employing the concept of ethnicity to describe communal formation, social relations and religious movements in the ancient Mediterranean world. As the field has moved well beyond the essentialist and (often flat-footed) one-to-one correspondence posited between ancient ethnos and modern ethnicity or between the ancient genos and race, they have embraced models of kinship that emphasize strategies of representation and expression. These careful and sophisticated modern treatments of ancient ethnicity have had an impact on the wider field by attuning scholars not only to the fact that ethnic affiliation emerged out of self-consciously constructed processes, but also to the observation that circumstances and situations gave rise to periods of increased ethnic awareness, dissimilarity and cohesion. To write about ethnicity in antiquity is not to trace the diachronic history of a fixed and stable category or idea, but rather to see the category itself emerge, fall away, take shape, fall apart, and altogether shift in import as political, social, military and migratory events unfolded.

In Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity, which I discussed above, Irad Malkin elaborates a series of functional categories of collective identity, ranging from political and civic affiliation to colonial, federal or Panhellenic modes of collective being. In rounding out his list, Malkin tellingly and importantly emphasizes the fact that, ‘in no such way were such collective identities exclusionary’ (2001a: 3). While Malkin’s observation that modes of identity (whether they be collective or individualistic) are not necessarily mutually exclusive is undeniably true, his qualification appears to collapse a multiform distinction between self-recognized or self-applied categories of identity, externally deployed names and titles, on the one hand, and groupings and identifications scholars apply heuristically to ancient peoples and collectivities, on the other. It is precisely the complex unfolding and continual negotiation of multiple, evolving (i.e. the fixity and fluidity Buell emphasizes) modalities of collective and individual identity and the scholastic effort to trace these processes that requires ample and carefully reasoned scholarly attention. One particularly fruitful and quite popular case converges, as I have discussed, around the rise of Christianity. The anthropologist Anthony D. Smith has argued, despite his observation that religious communities and ethnie commonly intersected in the ancient world (emphasizing Egypt, Assyria, Sumer and Persia) that ‘the rise of monotheistic salvation religions…tended to override ethnic and political boundaries’ (1986: 35). The early Christian movement, Smith continues, was characterized by its ecumenical disposition, ‘help[ing] to break down class barriers and transcend ethnic divisions’. While it was de rigueur to posit a hard and fast distinction between ethnicity and Christianity, scholars of early Christianity have increasingly and rightly sought to situate the myriad problems and questions raised by discussions of ancient ethnicity within a more complex narrative of the emergence and formation of Christian collective identities and communities. Paul’s insistence in his letter to the Galatians that for those who have been baptized in Christ ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female’ (3.28) is not necessarily a call to a universal religion that existed apart from ethnicity. Paul, as Johnson-Hodge argues, ‘calls for a unity of those in Christ, but not an erasure of other identities’ (2007: 126). Paul, instead, is using ethnic reasoning to graft the gentiles into the nation of Israel, while also creating a hierarchy of gender, class and ethnicity. Christianity, even in its Pauline guise, was never ethnically neutral. The twin propositions of self-representation and accommodation have been particularly fruitfully in rethinking the history of early Christianity and the development of early Christian models of community.

For early Christian writers, invoking notions of ethnicity and nation was a way to participate in an expansive conversation about human diversity and difference. To that end, scholars now focus not on whether early Christians thought in ethnic terms (or used ethnic reasoning), but rather on how and to what ends they engaged in this rhetorical strategy. The answer these scholars provide, however, is almost uniformly the same: ethnic discourse was part of, even a critical part of, an adaptable and functional Christian identity; that is, how Christians described themselves as a community or group defined by notions of descent, history, custom and belief. And while this claim is, to some degree, unassailable—it is clear that Christians thought about themselves through the terms genos, ethnos, natio, and so on— there is more to ethnic reasoning than the forging of identity or even identities. Ethnicity encapsulates more than the distinction between self and other or even the idea of the self as other. Rather, ethnicity is part of a worldview in which communal description is used, on the one hand, to advance epistemological and theological agendas and ideologies and, on the other hand, to reify social, religious and intellectual expectations (Wendt 2016). Ethnic reasoning operated as a political and intellectual strategy wherein the world was given both order and ranking. There are myriad questions to be asked about the epistemological, taxonomic and ideological implications of ancient Christian ethnicity. How did ethnic reasoning fit into larger knowledge systems about the world, both natural and supernatural? What sorts of knowledge about the world were produced by thinking in ethnic terms? How, if at all, did this knowledge adapt to changing historical circumstances? How was ethnic knowledge organized and systematized in texts? Insofar as ethnic reasoning was not an end in itself but rather a discursive operation driven toward a particular end, it is incumbent on scholars to develop models that attend to ethnicity as an epistemological and organizational technology. It is these issues, looking beyond the framework of identity, that demand further attention from scholars interested in early Christian notions of race and ethnicity.