CHAPTER 25
Ethnicity
Greeks, Jews, and Christians
1Aaron P. Johnson
Introduction: Ethnicity and Religion
In the very years that saw the rise to sole rule of Constantine, the first Christian
emperor—that is, at a watershed point for the prospects of Christianity in the religious
history of the Mediterranean, and indeed of the world—Eusebius of Caesarea, one of
the greatest Christian intellectuals of the time (ca. 260–339), described Christianity
(Christianismos) as the elevated peak of piety and rationality between and, at the same
time, above the lesser forms of Judaism and Hellenism (IoudaismosandHell ̄enismos)
(Dem.evang. 1.2.10, p.8.33–9.8 Heikel). Christianity was superior both to the poly-
theism and muddled confusion of the Greeks on the one hand, and to the “fleshly”
and (geographically and temporally) limited religious life of the Jews on the other. The
student of early Christianity might readily recall the claim of the apostle Paul that “in
Christ” there would no longer be “Jew or Greek” (Gal. 3:28) (Johnson Hodge 2007:
105–6, 1126–31), and so conclude that Eusebius merely marks another instance of the
well-known attempt by the first generations of Christians to escape ethnic identities by
transcending them (Johnson 2006a).
Adolf von Harnack stands as one of the most eminent scholars to find in Christianity a
religionsui generis, which, as it moved from its Jewish roots, was able gradually to strip
away its ties to the narrower racially and bodily circumscribed religion of Judaism (Jüth-
ner 1923: 90–3; von Harnack 1962: 240–78; Feldman 1990: 107; Olster 1995; Boyarin
2008). By the time of Eusebius in the fourth century, “religion” as a conceptual cate-
gory distinct from ethnicity or culture had, according to this view, survived its labor pains
and finally completed its birth into the world. Presumably, Christianity stood now as a
harbinger of the modern category of “religion” wherein a society’s or individual’s beliefs
about the divine (or ultimate concern, mode of consciousness, state of mind, doctrinal
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.