A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

(Steven Felgate) #1
Ethnicity 385

unlikely representative of such a view. For, just as Moses had established the Jewish
nation amid the performance of great miracles, so Christ had founded the Christian
nation with the working of miraculous signs. Though both Moses and Jesus were accused
as being sorcerers, two “nations testify on their behalf: the Jews for Moses, while the
Christians...prove the [miraculous stories] about Jesus” (C. Cels. 1.45). This point,
raised in the first book, is reiterated in the last book. “The Greeks say these stories are
myths, even though two entire nations testify that they are true,” namely the Jews and
the Christians (C. Cels. 8.47). Again, when faced elsewhere with the accusation that the
miracles of Jesus were performed through the work of wicked demons, Origen answers
that his miracles effected positive change and called people to a better and more holy life.
He concludes: “How will it not be openly manifest from what happened under Moses
and Jesus, as entire nations were established after their miraculous signs, that they did
what they are recorded to have done by a divine power?” (C. Cels. 2.51).
The nation founded by Christ was, however, a rather unique nation, since it embraced
those from many nations who had turned from their previous ways of life. In this way,
it was shown to be superior to the nation of Moses. The establishment of the Jewish
nation following its stay in Egypt stood as a proof, for Origen, of the divine origins of
Moses’ miracles; but Jesus “performed greater things than the work of Moses.” In a
manner more daring than Moses’ liberation of the Jews and institution of the Law, Jesus
“introduced into the previously accepted communal way of life (politeia), the ancestral
customs, and the upbringing according to the current laws a way of life according to the
gospel” (C. Cels. 2.52). Christian conversion entailed the rejection of old ethnic ways
of life, whether these were identified as Jewish, Greek, Egyptian, or another; Christians
were those who had been called out of not one nation alone, but were “men enlisted
from all places” whom God was making into “the foolish nation” of the prophetic words
of Deuteronomy 32:21.
So far, the distinctiveness of Christian identity appears to reside in its adoption of a new
ethnic way of life, a different moral, religious, and cultural manner of living as a people in
the world. However, we also detect a more racial conception of identity at work, one in
which descent and lineage play a greater role. While some instances of Celsus’ reference
to a Christiangenoslack sufficient context to delineate the breadth of meaning of the
term (for instance, when he names the Christians a “cowardly and fleshly race” (C. Cels.
7.36), there is at least one instance where an evocation by the anti-Christian of notions
of descent and filial relatedness become clear. Since Christians refuse to worship in the
customary way the gods venerated by the peoples of the world, the Christians should
not be allowed to have children and so perpetuate their race to future generations. “But
they should depart from here leaving absolutely no offspring (sperma), so that such a
race should be utterly eradicated on the earth” (C. Cels. 8.55). This statement clearly
represents the Christians’ identity as something that could be passed on from generation
to generation by members of a particular people.
Origen would reply in the same terms. He declares, for example, that Christians will
continue to marry and beget children, even while seeking the heavenly life on earth and
refusing to worship the so-called gods (C. Cels. 8.56). Furthermore, in response to Cel-
sus’ wish for Christian extermination, Origen trusts in God’s providential continuation
of the Christian race. In his rebuttal of Celsus’ accusation that the Jews came into exis-
tence as a rebellion against Egypt and that Christians likewise came into existence as a

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