386 Aaron P. Johnson
rebellion against the Jews, Origen begins with an argument for the racial distinctiveness
and purity of the Hebrews from the Egyptians. Those who left Egypt under Moses were
descended from Hebrew forefathers and spoke a language that exhibited their difference
from Egyptians. The Christians, in their turn, could not have originated in a revolt from
Judaism since they had been trained in philanthropic and pacifistic behavior, even when
opposed by those who wanted to kill them. They could maintain their piety through the
recognition of the inextinguishable nature of their existence as a people. “God prevented
their whole nation from being defeated; for He wanted to establish it and to have the
whole earth be filled with this salvific and most pious teaching” (C. Cels. 3.8).
After pronouncing that the Christians have become “a kingdom worthy of God,” who
have “parted company and broken themselves off from people who are foreigners to
the commonwealth (politeia) of God and are strangers of His covenants, in order that
they might organize themselves according to the citizenship (politeuma politeus ̄ontai)in
heaven,” and now coming into “the city of God” (C. Cels. 8.5), Origen declares that “in
a manner akin to his blessedness we live by a special spirit of adoption; a spirit that exists
among the sons of the heavenly Father” (C. Cels. 8.6). Later, Origen would refer to the
birth of the Christian race: “That ‘new thing’ has happened since the time Jesus suffered,
I mean that [new thing] of the city [of God], all that which belongs to the nation, and
the sudden birth (genesin) of the race of Christians as though it were born all at once”
(C. Cels. 8.43).
It is customary to see early Christianity transcending ethnic identities, but the ethnic
argumentation employed by both Celsus and Origen exhibits the depth and force with
which ethnic conceptions provided the mechanisms for the articulation of communal
identity and social, religious, and theological concerns. Far from being a residual
effect of ancient ethnic frameworks, the historical development of Christianity cannot
be adequately understood apart from the centrality of ethnicity for early Christian
self-identifications and ways of representing their world.
Conclusion
In spite of what we might expect, the adoption ofethnosorgenosas collective metaphors
for Christianity did not dissipate after Constantine’s conversion to the faith and the
gradual and variegated “Christianization” of the Roman Empire. Eusebius, John
Chrysostom, and Theodoret would maintain the identification of Christians as an
ethnosand continue to deploy many of the basic modes of ethnic argumentation.
With the development of Christian master narratives of the world’s nations and their
histories, ethnographic data continued to be collected, organized, and reformulated
within Christian conceptual frameworks (Maas 2003). Widespread modern assumptions
notwithstanding, Christianity’s fellow travelers and rivals, in particular the Hellenes,
continued to be represented in a broad ethnic discourse that combined elements of
territory, history, language, and customs in addition to acutely felt religious differences
(Johnson 2012). Only with difficulty would “religion” as a conceptual category discrete
from ethnicity develop in an inchoate and disjointed manner, usually in proportion to
the growth of imperializing epistemologies, finally to flourish with a false sense of clarity
in the modern world.^2