Ethnicity 377creed, system of transcendent meanings, constellation of symbols producing inward dis-
positions, or cosmological imaginary) could be isolated from entanglements with ethnic
conceptions or racial identities (Asad 1993: 27–54; Kimber Buell 2005: 21–4, 59–62).
Through its heightened spiritual sensibilities, early Christianity has frequently seemed to
stand in stark contrast to Hellenism, a label that is claimed to designate pagan religion,
and Judaism, the allegedly still racially bound religion of Judeans (Kimber Buell 2005:
10–13; Johnson Hodge 2007: 4–5).
The dominant modern approach has not always been expressed so schematically. Yet,
even amid the more nuanced narratives that one may find in accounts of early Chris-
tianity, it has only been quite recently that sustained criticism has arisen questioning the
basic historiographical assumptions about early Christianity and its opponents’ identities
(whether these be Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, “pagans,” or Jews, or alternatively, other
identity categories such as race, nation, sect, school, or culture) from Harnack to the
present. Important discussion has only just begun to examine carefully early Christian-
ity in its relationship to other identities belonging to particularethn ̄eas such (especially
the Greeks and Jews, but also others), with their attendant clusters of territorial claims,
particular languages, cult practices and sacred locations, (fictive) genealogies, shared his-
tories, distinct physiognomies, and so on. All of these markers of difference played various
roles within various contexts of identity formation or maintenance, on the part of both
Christians and those who interacted with them.
Indeed, in spite of the periodic rhetoric of transcendence in early Christian literature,
one is struck by the prominent and recurrent role of ethnicity in a wide range of Christian
texts, from martyrologies and epistles to apologetic treatises, heresiologies, histories, and
theological works. Broadly speaking, ethnicity’s uses among early Christians included the
following: Christians were defined (by themselves as well as by outsiders) as anethnosor
genos; Christianity’s others were identified in racial terms; conversion frequently involved
negotiation or even rupture with those identities (at least on a conceptual level); powerful
decentering tendencies developed, especially in opposition to Hellenocentric assump-
tions; and, on a more basic level, Christian intellectuals utilized the components of racial
identities or ethnographic data in the formulation and very structuring of arguments.
Though the latter—what I have called “ethnic argumentation”—is one of the most
interesting expressions of the early Christian impulse to put ethnicity to use, it remains
understudied. Following a discussion of some of the basic tendencies in the Christian
employment of ethnicity during the first two centuries, a well-known exchange between
a pagan critic (Celsus) and his third-century Christian respondent (Origen) will therefore
receive more detailed examination. We shall discover that ethnic and ethnographic con-
ceptions structured the primary arguments on both sides of the pagan–Christian debate
over the identity and legitimacy of the Christians as a people.
Christian Racial Thinking in the First Centuries
The practice of thinking with ethnicity commenced among early Christians already in the
first century. Writings that eventually became incorporated into the corpus of the New
Testament claimed that Christians were a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
a people for God’s possession” (I Peter 2:9). The heavily sensed polarities of Greeks