Rethinking the relevance of race for early Christian self-definition

Harvard Theological Review

Volumn 94, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 449-476

  Buell, Denise Kimber ^a  

^a WILLIAMS COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 67649161304     PISSN: 00178160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Sheila Bri̇ggs lucidly articulates how both time and social location produce differences in understandings of race (as well as sex and religion) in her" 'Buried with Christ': The Politics of Identity and the Poverty of Interpretation," in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary-Theory (ed. Regina Schwartz; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 283, 285.
2. Ann Laura Stoler usefully historicizes scholarly interest in writing the history of race, especially preoccupations with tracing the origins of concepts of "race" and "racism" in her "Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth," Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997) 183-206.
3. In this essay, I deliberately use the terms "race" and "ethnicity" interchangeably; see also Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 189 n. 1;
4. and Werner Sollors, "Foreword: Theories of American Ethnicity," in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (ed. Sollors; New York: New York University Press, 1996) xxix-xxxv. This decision is intended to signal my views that neither term has a one-to-one counterpart in antiquity and that neither term can be neatly distinguished from the other even in modern parlance. I also want to keep modern readers alert to the contemporary stakes of historical work. By excluding the category of race from work on classical antiquity we risk conveying the implications that our modern legacy of racial thinking can be shut off when we turn to examine ancient texts, and that our versions of ancient history are either irrelevant or alien to the ways that we tackle questions of human sameness and difference in the present.
5. E.g., "Most religions limit themselves to a particular people or nationality, and if they spread and are accepted by other nations, it is as part and parcel of the civilisation to which they belong; but these two alone [Buddhism and Christianity] address themselves, not to a single people, but to all men [sic] and to every nation in its own language. In short, Buddhism and Christianity are universalistic in character, while all other ethical religions are in the main particularistic" (Cornelius P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion [2 vols.; New York: Scribner's Sons, 1897] 1:125-26).
6. See also Jonathan Z. Smith's discussion of Tiele in Smith's "Classification," in Guide to the Study of Religion (ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon; London: Cassell, 2000) 41-42.
7. Slightly later, Walker continues: "How can preachers and people of America believe the Bible? Does it teach them any distinction on account of a man's color? Hearken, Americans! To the injunctions of our Lord and Master, to his humble followers: 'And Jesus came and spake unto them saying, "all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen." ' [Matt 28:18, 19, 20]. Do you understand the above, Americans? We are a people, notwithstanding many of you doubt it" (194, my emphasis). A more recent example, of the experiences of Korean-American Christian immigrants to the United States, contains a similar critique: "A large number of Christian immigrants came to the United States from Asia . and they have built their own Christian communities and sought a fellowship with the existing U.S. Christian establishment by joining their denominations. However, because they are from cultures very different from the dominant U.S. culture, they have received a very cool reception . the U.S. establishment is not willing to accept culturally different immigrants unless they are totally acculturated into American life. They seem to have forgotten the fact that right from the beginning, the Christian community has been as diverse as twentieth-century America in respect to its cultural mix and ethnic composition. The early Christian community accepted the cultural and ethnic diversity among its membership as a norm; it accepted ethnically as well as culturally diverse gentile Christians into its fellowship without asking them to follow the religious practice of a particular group. Peter realized that this was God's intention [referring to Acts 10:1-11:18]" (Chan-Hie Kim, "Reading the Cornelius Story from an Asian Immigrant Perspective," in Reading from This Place, volume 1: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States [ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995] 171-72).
8. Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 99.
9. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 35.
10. Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Sexism and God-Language," in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ; San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989) 156.
11. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 276 n. 116.
12. For an English translation of Renan's work see Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus (trans. Charles Edwin Wilbour; New York: Carleton, 1864).
13. Heschel, Abraham Geiger, 156.
14. Ernest Renan, Oeuvres complètes (ed. Henriette Psichari; 10 vols.; Paris: Colmann-Lévy, 1947-61) 5.1142;
15. Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History (trans. Charles Newburgh; New York: Bloch, 1911) 200-01
16. See, e.g.,Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 16-45.
17. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) 171-72. Jacobson (3-4, 171-72) notes that European Christian colonists in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also classified Jewish differences in terms of religion rather than race.
18. See e.g., Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982);
19. and Sander L. Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
20. In a coauthored piece, they trace some of the forms of resistance to scientific racism: Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, "Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism," in The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (ed. Sandra Harding; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 170-93.
21. Whiteness has, however, only recently become the object of systematic analysis as a racial construct. See, for example, Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992);
22. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
23. Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (2 vols.; London: Verso, 1994);
24. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998);
25. Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York: Continuum, 1999);
26. and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999).
27. In his recent examination of the mutual construction of Indian and British national cultures, Peter van der Veer notes how this shift needs to be understood not only in terms of the rise of scientific authority but also in terms of imperial and political goals; see his Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 13, 53-54, and 134-57.
28. For further discussion of the role of religion in producing various, competing understandings of racial differences prior to the nineteenth century, see Peter Harrison, 'Religion' and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
29. For more on the connection between kinship, ethnicity, and ritual, including their implications for social relations, political power and enfranchisement, see Nancy Jay, "Throughout Your Generations Forever": Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
30. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999) 199; while the entire book outlines and illustrates the "ethics of interpretation," she offers a useful appendix highlighting its main features, 195-98. Her Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (2000) offers a book length application of the ethics of interpretation to scholarship on the historical Jesus.
31. This association between religion and race has been widely accepted by scholars interpreting non-Christian materials across a broad historical and cultural sweep. See, for example, on Hebrew Bible materials, Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 121;
32. for ancient Greece, see Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo ([1933] Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 18-19;
33. for Roman culture, see Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)221;
34. for Judaism in Hellenistic and Roman periods, see Judith Lieu, "Race of God-Fearers," JTS n.s. 46 (1995) 483-501.
35. See Eve D'Ambra, Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 13.
36. The relative weight given to religion as a defining feature of ethnic or civic identity varies according to context, and other factors play important roles as well, including language and legal customs. For nuanced discussions of how factors other than religion played shifting roles in defining Greekness and Romanness, see Greg Woolf, "Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 40 (1994) 116-43;
37. and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "To Be Roman, Go Greek: Thoughts on Hellenization at Rome," in Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman (ed. Michel Austin, Jill Harries, and Christopher Smith; London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1998) 79-91.
38. Indeed, the eventual use of certain forms of Christianity as emblematic of Romanness offers just one striking example of this phenomenon of change over time in using religion to demonstrate Romanness. For further discussion of this link between Christianness and Romanness, see David M. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) esp. 30-50.
39. Douglas R. Edwards, Religion and Power: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greek East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 58.
40. D'Ambra, Roman Art, 55.
41. Adolf von Harnack, Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (trans. James Moffat; 1904-05; 2 vols.; repr., New York: Arno, 1972) 1.309. Harnack identifies this citation as the first stage in what he sees as an aberrant trend in some early Christian texts that culminates in the formulation of Christians as a third genos/genus. The other texts are Tertullian, Nat. 1, and Pseudo-Cyprian, De pascha computus. Harnack states, "so far as I am aware, the blunt expression, 'We Christians are the third race,' only occurs once in early Christian literature subsequent to the Preaching of Peter . and that is in the pseudo-Cyprianic tract de pascha computus (c. 17), written in 242-243 A.D." (1.313). But he notes that this is also true for the phrase "we are Jews," despite the fact that Jews were clearly recognized as a distinct people (1.337).
42. In trying to reconstruct the significance of the term genos in this passage, as it appears here in the dative case, Harnack argued that genos here has the sense of "kind" or "type" of worship, and does not connote ethnicity or corporate peoplehood. While I agree that the use of genos in the dative case makes the translation "in a third way" more plausible than "as a third 'race,' " the rhetorical effect of the statement still construes Christians as a people (comparable to Jews and Greeks) distinguished precisely by how they worship (so also Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996] 107).
43. As Lieu notes, religious integrity in early Christian texts is often elaborated with reference to eusebeia or theosebeia, which she translates as piety and god-fearing (other related terms also come into play); eusebeia is one of the central Greek terms for religiosity and theosebeia is used in Jewish literature. Because these terms are concretely related to how one lives and what one does, these cannot be interpreted as only pertaining to belief or faith. See Judith Lieu, "Race of God-Fearers," 487-90, 493-97.
44. See also Frances Young,"Greek Apologists of the Second Century," in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (ed. Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman and Simon Price, in association with Christopher Rowland; Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999); she writes with reference to Athenagoras's work, "to legitimize their position, Christians claimed to be a people or a race, alongside others to whom rights were given" (103).
45. For a discussion of the significance of Christian refusal to sacrifice, see Stanley K. Stowers, "Greeks Who Sacrifice and Those Who Do Not: Toward an Anthropology of Greek Religion," in The Social World of the First Christians: Studies in Honor of Wayne Meeks (ed. L. Michael White and O. Larry Yarborough; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995) 293-333.
46. Judith Lieu, Image and Reality, 177.
47. Steven J. Friesen, Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family (Leiden: Brill, 1993) 154.
48. Friesen, Twice Neokoros, 154.
49. See also discussion in Denise Kimber Buell, "Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond," RelSRev 26 (July 2000) 246-47.
50. That is, the boundaries between animals, humans, and gods, those between slave and free, and those between male and female were all seen to be breachable. See, e.g., Leonard Barkin, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986);
51. Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
52. Natalie B. Kampen, "Gender Theory in Art," in I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (ed. Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson; New Haven: Yale University Press Art Gallery, 1996; distributed by the University of Texas Press, Austin) 14-25.
53. and Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
54. For the most fundamental studies of this process, see both Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989)
55. and Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (trans. Janet Lloyd; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
56. Rachana Kamtekar, "Distinction without a Difference? Race and Genos in Plato," in Traditional Philosophers on Race (ed. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott; London: Blackwell, forthcoming).
57. In 2 Maccabees and in Judith; see Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Hellenistic Culture and Society 31; Berkeley, 1999) 129-30.
58. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness, 127.
59. Naomi Janowitz also criticizes Cohen for drawing an overly sharp break in the definition and understanding of loudaios in the second century B.C.E. that turns on what he sees as a new possibility for people to convert to Judaism. See Janowitz, "Rethinking Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity," in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (ed. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatex; London: Duckworth and The Classical Press of Wales, 2000) 207-09.
60. So David Konstan argues in "To Hellēnikon ethnos: Ethnicity and the Construction of Ancient Greek Identity," in Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity" (ed. Irad Malkin; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) 29-50.
61. See also Buell, "Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond," 243-49,
62. and Janowitz, "Rethinking Jewish Identity," 214.
63. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 263-307.
64. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 70.
65. Tessa Rajak, "Talking at Trypho: Christian Apologetic as Anti-Judaism in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew" in Apologetics in the Roman Empire, 68-80.
66. See also the important programmatic essay by Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig, "Drawing Large and Startling Figures: Reimagining Christian Origins by Painting like Picasso," in Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack (ed. Castelli and Taussig; Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1996) 3-20.
67. and Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 23.
68. For an important exception, see Michael A. Williams, The Immovable Race: A Gnostic Designation and the Theme of Stability in Late Antiquity (NHS 29; Leiden: Brill, 1985) esp. 158-85.
69. Karen King ("Mackinations on Myth and Origins," in Reimagining Christian Origins, 166);
70. Vincent Wimbush ("Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scripture," in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures [ed. Wimbush, with the assistance of Rosamond C. Rodman; New York: Continuum, 2000] 9-10, 13-14, 19);
71. Avery Gordon (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997] esp. 137-90, 196, 206-08);
72. and Michel de Certeau (The Writing of History [trans. Tom Conley; French original 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988] esp. 1-2, 35-49, 99-102).
73. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 48.
74. Richard J. Hernnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). As has been well publicized, the U.S. Census for the year 2000 offered for the first time the category of "mixed race," which still presupposes that race is an inherited, biological characteristic, but nonetheless tries to account for the way that individuals do not conform to clearly demarcated racial classifications.
75. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
76. and especially Patricia Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York: Noonday Press, 1998).