1. Introduction
In the discipline of New Testament studies there are particular reasons for critical vigilance: since many scholars in the discipline are Christians, and many work for institutions or faculties with an explicit alignment to some branch of Christianity, there is the perennial risk that the historical study of Christian origins will be skewed by convictions concerning the truth and value of Christianity, even its superiority to other forms of religion. Moreover, since the origins of the modern scholarly discipline lie in Western Europe, and its centres of power remain there and (increasingly) in the USA, there is also the risk – uncomfortable though it may be to acknowledge it – that historical reconstructions may be shaped by a sense of Western European racial, ethnic or cultural superiority. Nor should it be surprising if religion and race – or, put more critically, a sense of both religious and ethnic or racial superiority – are intertwined, albeit in complex and often unacknowledged ways.Footnote 1 Indeed, in a recent issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies focused on religion and racialisation, Nasar Meer argues not only for the importance of recognising this interconnection but also for an integration of ‘the contemporary study of antisemitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism’.Footnote 2 In the field of New Testament studies it is the depiction of Jews and Judaism in particular that risks being skewed by these facets of scholarship's location, since unpacking the complexities of Christianity's emergence within a Jewish matrix is one of the central preoccupations of our discipline. But the implications of constructions of this particular and historically tortured relationship may spread more widely.
I raise these broad issues at the outset in order to set a context for the more specific investigations that follow. As part of setting a wider disciplinary context I also want to sketch very briefly the contours of what seems to me a recurring and persistent depiction – namely a dichotomy between an ethnically particular Judaism and a trans-ethnic, inclusive, universal Christianity. Despite criticisms of this dichotomy, and despite changing methods, perspectives and phases of scholarship, its basic form and prominence seem to endure, up to the present day. I select just a few landmarks to illustrate my point.
Ferdinand Christian Baur, whose work continues to shape the contours of our discipline, famously interpreted the significance of Christianity in Hegelian terms, as the pivotal step in humanity's historical progress from legalism and servitude towards the true religion of spirit and freedom. For Baur, Paul was especially crucial in this development:
It was he who not only was the first to express explicitly and in definitive form the fundamental distinction between Christian universalism and Jewish particularism, but also from the beginning made this the task and guiding norm of his apostolic activity … he broke through the bounds of Judaism and lifted Jewish particularism up into the universal idea of Christianity.Footnote 3
It is by now a rather well-worn theme that early New Testament scholarship, often in critical dialogue with Baur, especially in Germany, tended to develop its portrait of emergent Christianity in terms of a contrast between a narrow, legalistic Judaism and a universalistic Christianity, where the spirit brings true freedom to all who believe. But the new phase of scholarship inaugurated by E. P. Sanders was intended to challenge such contrasts, and to treat Jewish religion on its own terms, with sympathetic understanding, and not as a problematic and flawed system awaiting its proper fulfilment in Christ. As has been pointed out, however, Sanders' depiction of Judaism – particularly his insistence that it ‘kept grace and works in the right balance’Footnote 4 – was more shaped by Protestant theological presuppositions than he perhaps intended.Footnote 5 Moreover, in the early work of the major proponents of what James Dunn famously labelled the ‘new perspective’ on Paul, the contrast between an ethnocentric Judaism and an inclusive Christianity seems as firm as ever. In his programmatic essay Dunn summarises what he sees as Paul's argument: ‘that the covenant should no longer be conceived in nationalistic or racial terms … Rather it is broadened out as God had originally intended – with the grace of God which it expressed separated from its national restriction and freely bestowed without respect to race or work.’Footnote 6 Or, as N. T. Wright puts it: ‘Monotheism and election served, in the Judaism of Paul's day … as boundary markers round the community, as symbols of national and racial solidarity.’Footnote 7 What Paul thus opposes is ‘a kind of meta-sin’ on Israel's part, ‘the attempt to confine grace to one race’.Footnote 8 Despite the significant changes, then, as Caroline Johnson Hodge has noted, this kind of new perspective continues to replicate what she concisely labels ‘the universal/ethnic dichotomy’.Footnote 9
Still more recently, in ongoing development of social-scientific approaches to New Testament interpretation, a series of works have drawn on studies of identity and ethnicity to show how various New Testament authors seek to construct a positive identity for groups of Christ-followers that is non-ethnic, or trans-ethnic, and, as such, offers a hopeful solution to the problems of inter-ethnic conflict, then and now.Footnote 10 For example, in his major study of Romans from 2003, Philip Esler argues that Paul is confronting a situation of ethnic tension between Jews (or ‘Judeans’) and Greeks, and seeks to resolve this tension not by erasing these ethnic differences but rather by creating a new, trans-ethnic, superordinate group-identity in Christ that ‘transcends’ this division.Footnote 11 Esler has made a similar case for the Gospels of Matthew and John, while Aaron Kuecker has done so for Luke-Acts.Footnote 12 Fundamental to such arguments, once again, is a clear distinction between an ethnic Judaism and a trans-ethnic or non-ethnic Christianity. Esler, for example, is insistent that Ἰουδαῖος should be translated Judean, since it (like Ἕλλην) denotes an ethnic form of identity, whereas the Christ-movement is a non-ethnic ‘socio-religious’ grouping;Footnote 13 thus, in his words, Judean and Christ-following identities are ‘as unlike as chalk and cheese’.Footnote 14 Likewise, though arguing from a very different perspective, Steve Mason concludes his arguments for understanding Ἰουδαῖος to denote an ethnic identity in the Greco-Roman world with the assertion: ‘It becomes increasingly clear being a “Judaean” and being a follower of Jesus were incommensurable categories, rather like being a Russian or a Rotarian, a Brazilian or a Bridge player. Scholars know this well …’Footnote 15 Without denying the differences of terminology and perspective, once again it seems that the essential shape of the ethnic/non-ethnic dichotomy – between Jewish ethnicity and Christian openness and voluntarism – is here reproduced.
Critically probing the legitimacy of this persistent dichotomy and its changing contexts and expressions would require a wide-ranging and extensive study. One key issue concerns the classification of Judaism as an ‘ethnic’ form of identity and Christianity as non-ethnic, or supra-ethnic, in character. Even assessing the legitimacy of this distinction would entail a broad range of considerations. But one important dimension of the issue, the focus of some recent research, is to consider how far, and in what ways, emerging Christian identity might itself be constructed and defined in ethnic or racial terms. In a ground-breaking and influential study, Denise Kimber Buell explores the deployment of what she calls ‘ethnic reasoning’ in early Christian texts from the second and third centuries.Footnote 16 For Buell, the rhetorical deployment of ethnic terminology – both to incorporate and to exclude – emerges as a strong and significant feature of early Christian discourse. In various ways, the major studies of Caroline Johnson Hodge, Love Sechrest and Bruce Hansen have turned this focus onto Paul, arguing that Paul deploys ethnic categories and creates a kind of ethnic identity for his communities of converts to Christ.Footnote 17
In these latter studies there is a particular focus on discourses about ancestry and descent, reflecting the prominence of these characteristics in social-scientific definitions of ethnicity, classically expressed by Max Weber, who defines ethnic groups as those ‘which cherish a belief in their common origins of such a kind that it provides a basis for the creation of a community’.Footnote 18 There is of course a large and diverse social-scientific literature on this subject, but a common theme is the conviction that ethnic and racial identities are constructed and believed, rather than real, in any physical or biological sense.Footnote 19 It is therefore through discourse and social practice that ethnic and racial identities are made and sustained.Footnote 20 A range of factors – which vary in their prominence and salience – can undergird and express such identities. Richard Schermerhorn, for example, offers a concise definition: an ethnic group is ‘a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood’.Footnote 21 Schermerhorn also adds that there must be ‘consciousness of kind among members of the group’,Footnote 22 what Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartman call the ‘criterion of self-consciousness. Ethnic groups are self-conscious populations; they see themselves as distinct.’Footnote 23 Particularly relevant to the study of earliest Christianity is their observation that, despite the prominence of notions of ancestry and shared history, ethnic groups can be newly made, in what Cornell and Hartman call ‘ethnicisation’. This, they explain,
is the making of an ethnic group. It is the process by which a group of persons comes to see itself as a distinct group linked by bonds of kinship or their equivalents, by a shared history, and by cultural symbols that represent … the ‘epitome’ of their peoplehood. It is a coming to consciousness of particular kinds of bonds: the making of a people.Footnote 24
Johnson Hodge and Sechrest, in their different ways, have drawn attention to the importance of narratives of ancestry and descent, as Paul constructs for his converts an ethnic group-identity as children of Abraham.Footnote 25 In the following study, I want to continue this exploration of the ethnic features of identity-construction in earliest Christianity, but through a smaller-scale focus on particular convictions and social practices crucial for making and maintaining such an identity – crucial, that is, for the process of ethnicisation – namely those related to marriage and family. There are two New Testament texts in particular that invite our attention in this regard, though they have not, to my knowledge, been considered in terms of their significance for our understanding of ethnicisation in early Christian discourse: 1 Corinthians 7 and 1 Peter 3,Footnote 26 the two New Testament texts that deal, among other things, with so-called ‘mixed marriage’.Footnote 27
2. Marriage, Children and the Passing on of Christian Identity: 1 Corinthians 7
In his response to the Corinthians’ written enquiry on such matters (1 Cor 7.1), the broad contours of Paul's instruction regarding marriage are clear: those who are married should maintain their sexual relationship and not divorce; those who are unmarried do best to remain unmarried, as long as their passions can be controlled. In a situation he deems one of distress (7.26)Footnote 28 and eschatological constraint (7.29–31), Paul understandably offers little instruction about whom one should or should not marry, and even less about rearing children; his own ascetic preference is simply to avoid marriage altogether (7.7, 27, 38). Yet there is at least one brief attempt to establish guidelines for permissible marriage: in a final piece of advice to widows, for whom death has severed the bond of their previous marriage (cf. Rom 7.2), Paul indicates that a widow is free to marry ‘whom she wishes’, with the proviso μόνον ἐν κυρίῳ (7.39). While this phrase may be understood in various ways, it seems most plausible – given parallel uses of ἐν κυρίῳ elsewhere in PaulFootnote 29 – to take this to mean something like ‘within the sphere of belonging to the Lord’; in other words, as most commentators have agreed, both parties to the marriage should be believers in Christ, members of the Christian community.Footnote 30 This understanding would seem to be reinforced by 2 Cor 6.14–7.1, with its instruction not to be ‘unequally yoked with unbelievers’ (6.14, ESV).Footnote 31 While this latter text is notoriously enigmatic, and does not directly mention marriage, it is unsurprising that it was taken to express a principle that applied to marriage, reinforcing the norm that marrying a non-Christian was forbidden.Footnote 32 In this, Paul and his early Christian interpreters were adapting Jewish custom, which – broadly, and with important variations – prohibited intermarriage, unless the Gentile partner converted.Footnote 33
By contrast, Paul's instructions earlier in the chapter to believers married to unbelievers (7.12–16) seem to be concerned not with rules about entering marriage but rather with the situation created within an existing marriage (εἶ τις ἔχει …) by the conversion of one partner.Footnote 34 Such instruction may also confront a sense on the part of some of those addressed – perhaps some of the women in particularFootnote 35 – that separation from an unbelieving spouse would be the best course of action.Footnote 36 Indeed, along with the stern rhetoric of 2 Cor 6.14–7.1, the arguments Paul deploys in the immediately preceding chapter against sex with prostitutes – that sex involves a bodily union incompatible with union with Christ (1 Cor 6.15) – could encourage and legitimate just such a conviction.Footnote 37
The basic shape of the instruction Paul gives concerning these ‘mixed marriages’ follows that which he gives to married members of the Christian community, and which he directly attributes to ‘the Lord’ (7.10–11): do not divorce or separate.Footnote 38 What has caused much more discussion is the reason he gives to support this teaching in the case of mixed marriages: that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified (ἡγίασται) by their believing partner, and that the children of such a union are holy (ἅγια).Footnote 39
The ‘sanctification’ of the unbelieving partner is conveyed by their Christian spouse. Rather than the unbeliever rendering the marital union impure or illicit, the effect is the other way around.Footnote 40 An illuminating perspective on this sanctification is presented by Yonder Moynihan Gillihan, who proposes a ‘halakhic interpretation’ of this verse based on comparisons with Jewish halakhot, particularly insofar as these refer to the act of betrothal as one of ‘sanctification’ which thus indicates that the marriage is licit.Footnote 41 By insisting that the believing partner ‘sanctifies’ the unbelieving spouse, Paul is effectively ruling ‘that mixed marriages are, in fact, licit’.Footnote 42 A key difference needs to be stressed, however: the Jewish parallels cited by Gillihan deal with betrothal and thus with the issue of marriages that may legitimately be initiated. Paul, by contrast, as Gillihan notes, is dealing with pre-existing marriages and whether they may legitimately be continued.Footnote 43 The unbeliever's status remains somewhat ambiguous: they are counted as holy but remain ἄπιστος; and their future salvation is uncertain though clearly a reasonable hope.Footnote 44 Essentially, the sanctifying effect of the believing partner on the unbeliever indicates that the marriage may legitimately continue, and should not on account of its ‘mixedness’ be regarded as πορνεία and dissolved.Footnote 45
Underlying this insistence on the sanctification of the unbelieving partner, however, is a prior and more fundamental conviction about the holiness of the children of such a marriage.Footnote 46 The unbelieving partner must in some way be sanctified, ‘for otherwise your children would be unclean’; but in reality they are, emphatically, holy: νῦν δὲ ἅγιά ἐστιν.Footnote 47 Moreover, if the children of such a marriage are holy, then, a fortiori, those of a marriage between believers are assumed to be so. It is highly unusual for Paul to devote even this much interest to children, and the passing reference serves only to support his arguments for maintaining existing mixed marriages. Yet his (apparently shared) presumption that the children are holy is of considerable significance.
Scholars have struggled to discern what sense we should give to this status as holy. Gerhard Delling's comment is indicative: ‘so viele Köpfe, so viele Sinne’.Footnote 48 Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, followed broadly by Anthony Thiselton, proposes an ethical interpretation: the unbelieving partner can be described as holy because they exhibit ‘a pattern of behaviour that is analogous to the conduct expected of the hagioi’, specifically by consenting to continue the marriage and thus avoid divorce.Footnote 49 Likewise for the children, this holy status is, according to Murphy-O'Connor, based on their behaviour: ‘Paul's basis here is the simple fact of experience that children assimilate the behaviour pattern of their parents.’Footnote 50 Yet this moralising interpretation is profoundly unconvincing: if the (ethical) holiness of the unbelieving spouse is specifically predicated on their maintaining a marriage and avoiding divorce, then this is clearly not a pattern of behaviour that can (yet) be copied by the children. Indeed, many of the attempted solutions are too much shaped by a desire to avoid finding in Paul a theology at odds with later church conviction, a status for children that, in John O'Neill's words, ‘seems to depend neither on belief nor on the sacrament of baptism’.Footnote 51 However, a simpler (even if theologically objectionable) solution does much more justice to the function of ἅγιος-language in Paul.
As is well known, ἅγιος is one of the most common Pauline designations for members of the assemblies, frequently used in the opening epistolary greetings (e.g. Rom 1.7; 1 Cor 1.2; 2 Cor 1.1; Phil 1.1).Footnote 52 As 1 Cor 6.1–2 makes clear, it draws the boundary between ‘in’ and ‘out’, or between church and world.Footnote 53 Ἅγιος functions as a designation of identity, and specifically in relation to this boundary issue: when the circle is drawn to determine in and out, those who are ἅγιος are within the community; they share the identity of insider. Notable here is the difference in Paul's description of the unbelieving spouse and the children:Footnote 54 the former is ‘sanctified’ (ἡγίασται) by the believer, despite remaining ἄπιστος, such that the union is licit (not immoral) as are its offspring. Only the children are emphatically and unambiguously described as ἅγιος.
Despite his eschatologically motivated preference for singleness and his lack of interest in what was often seen as the key purpose of marriage – to bear children – by setting down the presumption that the children of Christians are holy, Paul is in effect establishing a principle of heredity: children already belong within the Christian community. J. B. Lightfoot puts this clearly and concisely: ‘Plainly the children of mixed marriages were regarded as in some sense Christian children. We cannot say more or less than this.’Footnote 55 Christian identity is neither patrilineal nor matrilineal, but can be passed on by either parent, since, even in situations of mixed marriage, their holiness is the dominant characteristic.Footnote 56 This does not of course rule out the possibility that children may reject this affiliation and apostasise (something also possible for Jews),Footnote 57 but it does indicate that the default position, the starting point for their enculturation, is their sharing in the Christian identity of their parent(s) (cf. 2 Tim 1.5). Christians, then, according to Paul, not only share Abraham as their distant ancestor, and thus become fellow-kin in Christ, but also pass this identity on through family, and specifically through the rearing of children.Footnote 58 In other words, the broader discourse of sharing ancestry and kinship is here concretised and instantiated in the smaller-scale context of family life.Footnote 59
In this first generation situation, then, when the Christian movement is expanding primarily through conversion, and without this being either his focus or his intention, Paul expresses two principles and correlative social practices that contribute to the ethnicisation of group-identity: restricting marriage to within the group (endogamy)Footnote 60 and establishing Christianness as a form of identity that is passed on to the next generation through the family.
3. Household Codes and Mixed Marriage: Ancestry through Virtue and the Christian Way of Life in 1 Peter 3.1–6
The emergence of the household codes in the later Pauline letters and in 1 Peter indicates an increasing focus upon the ‘Christian’ household as a social grouping, including children, that shares and thus reproduces Christian identity. This is particularly evident in the most complete and formulaic examples, the parallel codes in Col 3.18–4.1 and Eph 5.21–6.9. The direct vocative address to each of the household members – wives, husbands, children, fathers, slaves, masters – presumes an adherence to the Christian faith on the part of all those addressed, not only in the very fact of the direct address but also in the explicitly Christian motivation given for each group's conduct.Footnote 61 Thus, children are to obey their parents because this is pleasing ἐν κυρίῳ (Col 3.20, expanded with a scriptural command and promise in Eph 6.1–3). In Ephesians the admonition to fathers is to raise their children ἐν παιδείᾳ καὶ νουθεσίᾳ κυρίου (Eph 6.4). Here in particular, as John Barclay has pointed out, we find a developing sense of the family as the place for ‘the Christian socialisation of children’ and ‘a key site for the practice of a distinctly Christian life-style’.Footnote 62
The household code in 1 Peter takes a distinctive form: only domestic slaves, wives and husbands are addressed, the last group comparatively briefly.Footnote 63 The exhortation to wives shares with 1 Cor 7.12–16 a particular concern with mixed marriages, and also a sense – more developed in 1 Peter – that such marriages are an opportunity for mission and conversion (1 Cor 7.16; 1 Pet 3.1–2).Footnote 64 There is none of Paul's concern with divorce and separation. Mixed marriages are by no means exclusively the author's focus, and his exhortation applies to all marriages;Footnote 65 but mixed marriages are of particular concern because in such cases there is a stronger risk that women will suffer hostility and abuse due to their following different religious customs to those of the paterfamilias (cf. 3.6).Footnote 66 The concern with suffering is central to 1 Peter as a whole.
Two features of the text are of particular interest: its focus on a ‘way of life’ (ἀναστροφή) and the connections drawn between conduct and ancestry. Twice in the opening two verses the wives’ manner of living is described as an ἀναστροφή. This term can bear a wide variety of meanings, but in its NT usage (confined to the epistles) it refers consistently to behaviour, conduct or way of life.Footnote 67 In the undisputed Pauline letters it appears only once, significantly, where Paul describes his former ‘way of life’ in Judaism: τὴν ἐμὴν ἀναστροφήν ποτε ἐν τῷ Ἰουδαϊσμῷ (Gal 1.13). In the LXX it appears only three times, two of which are in 2 Maccabees (5.8; 6.23). In one of these instances it also indicates, by implication, the Jewish way of life:Footnote 68 in 2 Macc 6.23 Eleazar's refusal to be compelled to eat pork is said to reflect a resolve worthy of his excellent ἀναστροφή from childhood (τῆς ἐκ παιδὸς καλλίστης ἀναστροφῆς). In the following verse he is said to insist on this, lest any of the young think he has gone over (μεταβεβηκέναι) εἰς ἀλλοφυλισμόν – which the NRSV translates ‘to an alien religion’,Footnote 69 but which clearly conveys a broader ethno-cultural sense, of going over to the customs and practices of a different people-group (cf. 2 Macc 4.13).Footnote 70
The word ἀναστροφή is a particular favourite of the author of 1 Peter: six of its thirteen NT uses are in this letter, where it denotes both a futile past way of life as ἔθνη, received from one's ancestors (1.18 (ἐκ τῆς ματαίας ὑμῶν ἀναστροφῆς πατροπαραδότου); cf. 4.2–3 (τὸ βούλημα τῶν ἐθνῶν); Eph 4.22) and, by contrast, the holy and good way of life that is required for the people of God (1.15; 2.12; 3.1–2). Of course, reference to an ἀναστροφή does not ipso facto denote an ethnic or racial group, though it does encapsulate one key feature of ethnic identity, namely what is perceived to be a ‘common culture’, usually including such things as ‘religion, customs, or language’.Footnote 71 But at the very least, if Paul and 2 Maccabees can speak of Judaism as an ἀναστροφή, from which one might conceivably turn, to the customs and way of life of another people (εἰς ἀλλοφυλισμόν), while 1 Peter can speak of his addressees as having turned from their ancestral ἀναστροφή to an ἀναστροφή ἐν Χριστῷ (3.16), then we might have cause to wonder whether the group-identities thus constructed are ‘as unlike as chalk and cheese’ or whether they in fact share significant characteristics, rooted in the sense of a people's way of life. We might see 1 Peter's stress on the adoption of this ἀναστροφή ἐν Χριστῷ as another contribution to the ethnicisation process: the construction of a sense of being a people who share a common set of customs and practices.
The ἀναστροφή to which the wives are summoned is also linked in a positive way with claims to ancestry. Just as the old, worthless ἀναστροφή was inherited from ancestors (1.18), so the new ἀναστροφή is aligned with an ancestral lineage. In his attempt to legitimate the pattern of conduct demanded of the wives – especially their submission to husbands – the author appeals to ‘the holy women of old’, particularly Sarah (3.5–6). These women also submitted to their husbands, the author claims, though the specific assertion that ‘Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him κυρίος’ is very hard to derive from the text of Genesis (cf. Gen 16.2!).Footnote 72 Insofar as they do good and fear no terror – that is, follow the central demands of ἡ ἀγαθή ἐν Χριστῷ ἀναστροφή (3.16) – they show themselves to be Sarah's descendants (3.6). The aorist verb ἐγενήθητε may point to the event of conversion and/or of baptism/initiation, but the participial phrase – ἀγαθοποιοῦσαι καὶ μὴ φοβούμεναι μηδεμίαν πτόησιν (3.6) – also carries a sense of exhortation and conditionality: identity as Sarah's children is displayed by exhibiting a pattern of behaviour like hers, and, by implication, depends upon continuing to do so.Footnote 73 Furthermore, while the specific focus here is clearly upon the wives within the Christian community, the generic designation τέκνα, not θυγατέρες (despite many translations),Footnote 74 allows the possibility that all the addressees, insofar as they follow the approved pattern of conduct, may be regarded as Sarah's descendants (cf. Gal 4.26–31). This is particularly so given that the pattern of conduct here demanded of wives is to a considerable degree demanded also of the whole community in 3.13–17; the wives, like the domestic slaves, are in a sense paradigmatic.Footnote 75
The conviction exhibited in nuce here – that a form of (ethnic) identity based on ancestry and descent might be determined by patterns of conduct and way of life – is closely paralleled in antiquity, not least in Jewish texts. Isocrates’ statement from around 380 bce famously redefines Hellenicity/Greekness in terms of shared culture rather than shared origin: ‘the name “Greek” (τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα) seems no longer to connote the race (μηκέτι τοῦ γένους) but the mental attitude (ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας), and people are called “Greeks” who share our culture (τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας) rather than our common origin (τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως)’ (Isocrates, Panegyricus 50).Footnote 76 Denise Eileen McCoskey, for example, sees this as one indication that ‘cultural practice gained increasing authority in defining racial categories’, though she also notes the ‘tensions and uncertainties that continued to accompany this shift, producing enduring concern over the relative roles of essence and practice’.Footnote 77
Also emphasising cultural practice and way of life as crucial for establishing relationship and affinity is Josephus's remark in Contra Apionem: ‘To all who desire to come and live under the same laws with us, he [sc. our legislator, Moses] gives a gracious welcome, holding that it is not race alone (οὐ τῷ γένει μόνον) which constitutes relationship (οἰκειότης) but also the deliberate choice of a way of life (ἀλλὰ καὶ τῇ προαιρέσει τοῦ βιοῦ)’ (C. Ap. 2.210).Footnote 78 Philo, with his focus on the importance of virtue, comes even closer to 1 Peter in his stress on ancestral identity as defined and, indeed, gained or lost through the practice of virtue: in De virtutibus he remarks, on the one hand, on those among ‘the founders of the [Jewish] race’ who did not profit from ‘the virtues of their ancestors (αἱ τῶν προγόνων ἀρεταί)’ and, by failing to reproduce these virtues, were ‘denied any part in the grandeur of their noble birth (εὐγενεία)’ (Virt. 206–7). On the other hand, he depicts Abraham, the founder of the Jewish people, as leaving behind the vices of his ancestors – indeed, leaving his race (γενεά) itself – to attain true virtue (Virt. 211–16). Thus he can enunciate the principle that ‘kinship is not measured only by blood, but by similarity of conduct and pursuit of the same objects’ (τὸ συγγενὲς οὐχ αἵματι μετρεῖται μόνον … ἀλλὰ πράξεων ὁμοιότητι καὶ θήρᾳ τῶν αὐτῶν, Virt. 195 (Colson, LCL)).
In these sources too there is an unstable combination of blood and practice in defining identity; both remain of significance, though how exactly they relate remains unclear. In the context of the earliest Christian movement, it is understandable that the discourse of ancestry focuses heavily on notions of adoption, practice and shared faith; but the move we saw already in Paul to define the children of Christians as ‘holy’ means that blood and flesh can soon enough start to play a part in the conception and transmission of Christianness.
4. Conclusions and Critical Reflections
A study of just two particular texts focused on issues relating to marriage and family can, of course, make only a small contribution to our understanding of the character of emergent Christian identity, and of how it compares with Jewish identities in the period. I have not paid much attention to the broader themes of ancestry and peoplehood, evident, for example, in Paul's insistence that all in Christ are Abraham's seed (Gal 3.29), or in 1 Peter's emphatic declaration that Christians are now a chosen race, a holy nation, God's own people (1 Pet 2.9–10).Footnote 79 But by attending to texts which deal with the ‘small-scale’ contexts of family and household, I have sought to add insights into the development of norms and social practices which contribute crucially to the ethnicisation of Christian identity. In 1 Corinthians 7 we find two particularly significant points: that the norm of practice is endogamy, marriage within the group, and that Christianness is in effect a group-identity into which children are born. The later household codes reinforce this construction of a Christian household, where children are reared in the faith. In 1 Peter 3.1–6 we find one indication that conversion to the Christ-group entails the adoption of a new way of life and bequeaths a certain ancestry which is, however, dependent on displaying a particular pattern of conduct. Moreover, the idea that identity – even ethnic identity – is intrinsically and contingently bound up with the adoption and practice of a way of life is evident in other sources and traditions from the period, not least in Judaism.
We should not, however, hastily and simplistically conclude that early Christian identity ‘is’ therefore ‘ethnic’, or that the early Christian groups were ‘ethnic groups’; such box-like categorisation is unlikely to be either cogent or illuminating.Footnote 80 Indeed, as my opening remarks suggested, it is much more likely that the categories are fuzzy and overlapping: ethnic, religious, cultural and social facets of group-identity intersect in complex ways.Footnote 81 What is more relevant is the conclusion that in both discursive and practical ways, the texts we have examined indicate how ethnic categories and features are deployed in the construction of Christian group-identity and that it is apposite to speak of this identity-construction as in some respects a form of ethnicisation, ‘the making of a people’.Footnote 82 Given the constraints of time and space I have done very little to develop the comparisons and differences with the various constructions of Jewish identity in the period. But without in any way denying the significant differences, even these brief case studies are, I hope, enough to suggest that – in terms of the sense of being a people, rooted in certain ancestral figures and passed on through the family, defined by commitment to a certain way of life, in which both proselytism and apostasy are possible – it is highly questionable, however exactly we classify them, to regard Jewish and Christian identities as simply incommensurable, as categorically distinct as those of Brazilians and Bridge-players.
If this category distinction – and the broader dichotomy between Jewish ethnicity and Christian inclusivity – is open to serious question, then it remains, finally, to return briefly to the broader issues with which the paper began and to ask why it is that such a distinction is so enduring and attractive to scholars of the New Testament. I can make only brief and tentative suggestions here. One clear implication of distinguishing Judaism as ethnic and Christianity as trans-ethnic is that the latter can then be depicted as providing an overarching, inclusive, tolerant supra-ethnic basis for belonging, within which other identities can nest and continue. This places Christianity in a literally ‘superior’ category, ‘above’ Judaism: Christianity can provide a framework for inclusion, co-existence and tolerance of diversity in ways that an ethnically particular Judaism (supposedly) cannot. Moreover, this very formulation of the Christian achievement is strikingly similar to the goals of the Western liberal-democratic project to create societies in which there is tolerant space for a diversity of cultural and religious identities peacefully to co-exist (beneath an overarching umbrella represented by the values of democracy and freedom). Indeed, depictions of the early Christian vision share with presentations of the modern liberal vision a tendency to downplay the ‘intolerant’ and inflexible requirements for belonging that apply in both cases.Footnote 83 Might it be the case, then, that the tendency to paint a categorical contrast between (ethnic) Judaism and (trans-ethnic) Christianity and to depict the achievements and potential of the latter in terms of open and tolerant inclusion – a picture of early Christianity that approximates to a kind of ‘United Nations’ visionFootnote 84 – reflects the dominant location of New Testament scholarship in the traditionally Christian countries of the Western world?Footnote 85 Let me turn the question around and ask: Is it not likely, inevitable even, that our scholarship does reflect its contexts of production, albeit in ways we scarcely recognise or intend? In other words, the social vision of the early Christian achievement produced in New Testament scholarship is – and is intrinsically likely to be – one that reflects both its religious and its ethnic or racial contexts of origin. Religion and race thus continue to be entwined. By finding in earliest Christianity the paradigm of supposedly trans-ethnic inclusion, such scholarship, against its explicitly tolerant and ecumenical intentions, may both reflect and legitimate the assumed superiority of a Christian model of ‘tolerant’ social inclusion promoted in secularised form – and often with ‘intolerant’ force – by the globally powerful countries of the white Christian West.
