Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine: The Nations, the Parting of the Ways, and Roman Imperial Ideology

By Terence L. Donaldson

Originally an ascribed identity that cast non-Jewish Christ-believers as an ethnic other, “gentile” soon evolved into a much more complex aspect of early Christian identity. Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine is a full historical account of this trajectory, showing how, in the context of “the parting of the ways,” the early church increasingly identified itself as a distinctly gentile and anti-Judaic entity, even as it also crafted itself as an alternative to the cosmopolitan project of the Roman Empire. This process of identity construction shaped Christianity’s legacy, paradoxically establishing it as both a counter-empire and a mimicker of Rome’s imperial ideology. 

Drawing on social identity theory and ethnography, Terence Donaldson offers an analysis of gentile Christianity that is thorough and highly relevant to today’s discourses surrounding identity, ethnicity, and Christian-Jewish relations. As Donaldson shows, a full understanding of the term “gentile” is key to understanding the modern Western world and the church as we know it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781467459556

Terence L. Donaldson

Terence L. Donaldson is Lord and Lady Coggan Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at Wycliffe College in Toronto. He is also the author of Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament and Paul and the Gentiles.

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Preface

One of the things that precipitated this book project was a seemingly idle question that came to me once while I was reading Romans 11 and arrived at verse 13: I am speaking to you gentiles. What, I wondered, would Paul’s non-Jewish readers have made of this term? People are not naturally inclined to think of themselves as the other to someone else’s us. It is unlikely that barbarians would have found anything appealing in a term being foisted on them by self-congratulatory Greeks; one would expect that non-Jews who were attracted to Christ would have found this Jewish term for the non-Jewish other to be similarly unappealing. Its probable lack of appeal notwithstanding, many gentiles were indeed attracted to the movement; once they had come to identify with Christ, they found themselves in an environment where this identity term was one that they could hardly avoid or ignore. What then did they make of it?

My initial probing of the material suggested that, while the term was not very significant for the most part in the earliest gentile Christian literature, a different picture emerged from the writings of Justin Martyr and other early apologists. Since student days I had been interested in (and frequently appalled by) the adversus Judaeos tradition of the early gentile church, and so I had some awareness of the place of the term ethnē—gentiles, (members of) the non-Jewish nations—in these arguments against the Jews. Coming at the material again from this particular angle, however, I was struck by both the sheer frequency of the term and its evident importance for the apologetic enterprise—not only for the troublesome question of how the gentile church might position itself with respect to Israel, the Jews, and Judaism, but also for their attempts to address Greco-Roman opinion makers more generally. These initial impressions led me to believe that a more thoroughgoing investigation was in order.

While this project built on my earlier work in a number of ways, it also led me into a number of areas where I could claim no special expertise (including ethnicity, social identity theory, postcolonialism, Greco-Roman ethnography, Roman imperial ideology, and ante-Nicene Christian literature to a certain extent). In an early conversation about the project with a respected senior scholar, I expressed some apprehension about the challenges it presented. His response stuck with me: Don’t be afraid of heading into less familiar territory, he told me; that’s how you learn things.

In the time since then, I have certainly learned a great deal. To be sure, specialists in these various areas will readily recognize the limits to my knowledge. In addition, since the parameters of the study encompass a broad array of ancient literature (Jewish, Greco-Roman, Christian), I have not been able to engage with the correspondingly broad array of pertinent secondary literature to the extent that would have been possible in a more circumscribed study. Nevertheless, despite these limits and constraints, I feel that because of the specific focus of the project—ethnē as an identity term—and because of the work I have already done in related areas, this book has some contribution to make to our understanding. Of course, it will fall to others to assess its value.

During the years in which I was engaged in this project, I had various opportunities to present aspects of my work in academic settings: in papers presented at the annual meetings of scholarly societies (Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Society of Biblical Literature, Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas); in invited lectures or papers at several institutions (Barnard College, University of Toronto, McMaster University, Baylor University); and, during a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, in papers presented in established seminars (New Testament Seminar; Hebrew, Jewish, Early Christian Studies Seminar). I am grateful to the organizers and conveners of these various sessions for the opportunity to share aspects of my research in progress. I also want to express my appreciation for the critical interaction that took place in these sessions and for those whose questions, comments, and learned critique helped to sharpen my own thinking in significant ways. Closer to home, students in my graduate seminar Early Christian Self-Definition have had the opportunity to read several chapters of the book, along with related papers, and have made their own contributions to the book in its final form.

My early thinking about this project was facilitated by a sabbatical cum administrative leave in 2011–12, eight months of which were spent at the University of Cambridge. The completion of this project provides me with another opportunity to express my thanks to Wycliffe College and the Toronto School of Theology for granting me this period of sustained research and reflection. I am also grateful to the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge for granting me a visiting fellowship, and especially to James Carleton Paget, Judith Lieu, and William Horbury for their assistance, hospitality, and various kindnesses. Thanks are also due to Clare Hall—a wonderful institution for visiting scholars—for accommodation and the chance to interact with a diverse and stimulating group of scholars and graduate students from around the world.

During this period, my work on this project was also supported and enhanced by two research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2009–13 and 2015–19), for which I am also grateful. Among other things, this funding allowed me to hire several research assistants—Adam Panacci, David Ney, Mari Leesment, and Bruce Worthington—who provided invaluable help, especially by carrying out preliminary surveys of primary literature. Bruce also checked all the primary and secondary references in chapters 1 through 6, thus relieving me of a lot of tedious work and saving me from a number of errors in the process. Any that remain, of course, need to be added to my account.

In addition, I want to express my appreciation to the staff at Eerdmans for their fine work at every stage of the process: to Michael Thomson, who sought me out when the project was in its early stages and provided continuing support in his regular visits to Toronto; to Trevor Thompson, who succeeded Michael as senior acquisitions editor and who accepted a manuscript that was considerably longer and somewhat later than was first envisioned; to Linda Bieze, who as project editor has guided the manuscript through the editorial and production stages with a sure hand; to Justin Howell, who as copy editor has helped me identify some imperfections and thus produce a more polished final version; and to Laura Hubers, who has overseen the design of the cover (with its effective use of the Peutinger Map) and the marketing material.

For support of a quite different kind, I am deeply grateful to my immediate family: to Lois first of all, my wife and life partner, for her unfailing wisdom, resourcefulness, support, and love; to our adult children Meredith (with her husband David) and Graeme (with his wife Amanda), for the many ways in which they enrich our lives; and to our grandchildren, Iver, Florence, and Elsie, for reawakening us to the joys of discovery and the wonder of the world.

Finally, I am dedicating this book to two of my early mentors, Larry Hurtado (in memoriam) and Richard Longenecker. Larry supervised my first piece of sustained research—a master’s thesis on Matthew’s Gospel and anti-Judaism—and taught me a great deal about Christian origins and the nature of research in the process. Dick, my doctoral supervisor, stimulated my interest in Second Temple Judaism and introduced me to ways of looking at early Christianity with Jewish questions in view. In different ways I learned a great deal from both of them and both continued to represent important models for me as I followed my own scholarly career.

Small portions drawn from the following articles and chapters have been adapted for reuse in the present work:

"‘We Gentiles’: Ethnicity and Identity in Justin’s Dialogue," Early Christianity 4 (2013): 216–41. Incorporated material appears in chapters 1 and 7.

‘Gentile Christianity’ as a Category in the Study of Christian Origins, in Harvard Theological Review 106 (2013), 433–58. Incorporated material appears in chapter 3.

Paul, Abraham’s Gentile ‘Offspring’ and the Torah, in Torah Ethics and Early Christian Identity, ed. David M. Miller and Susan Wendel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 135–50. Incorporated material appears in chapter 3.

‘Nations,’ ‘Non-Jewish Nations’ or ‘Non-Jewish Individuals’: Matt 28:19 Revisited, in Matthew within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel, ed. Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner, Early Christianity and Its Literature (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 169–94. Incorporated material appears in chapters 3 and 4.

This material has been reused with the permission of the respective publishers, for which I am grateful.

CHAPTER 1

Three Orations and a Question

Eusebius, Aelius Aristides, and Paul were disparate personages—a fourth-century bishop of Caesarea Maritima, a well-to-do second-century sophist and orator from Mysia in the Roman province of Asia, an itinerant first-century Jewish apostle of Christ to the gentiles. One thing they had in common, however, was an oration addressed in one way or another to the Roman Empire (self-composed in the case of Eusebius and Aristides, composed by a later chronicler in the case of Paul). Taken together, these three orations focus our attention on a significant question about the construction of early gentile Christian identity.

EUSEBIUS’S ON THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

In 335 CE, in the context of an ecclesiastical gathering in Jerusalem to mark the dedication of the recently completed Church of the Holy Sepulchre—a project initiated by Constantine shortly after his defeat of Licinius eleven years earlier and his consequent emergence as sole ruler of the Roman Empire—a remarkable oration was delivered by Eusebius, the bishop of nearby Caesarea, in praise of the emperor and his accomplishments. After a brief description of the lofty and noble structures that Constantine had built to commemorate and honor the site of the Savior’s death and resurrection, Eusebius observed that some had questioned why so much effort and energy was devoted to the project. Apologist that he was, he saw these objections as providing him with an opportunity to proclaim in words what (he believed, and not without reason) Constantine was intending to proclaim in the imperial language of edifice and architecture (In Praise of Constantine 18.3). And so, addressing himself to the emperor, he set himself the task of proclaiming to everyone the reasons and motives of your God-loving works (11.7).

The address that follows—commonly referred to as On the Holy Sepulchre—is a kind of theological ethnography carried out within the framework of an encomium on the emperor and his accomplishments.¹ Eusebius lays out an apologia for the religion of the emperor in which the history of redemption is intertwined with the history of the nations. His argument contains a number of connected themes: the multiplicity of nations itself as the locus of the malady for which the Savior offers his heavenly cure;² the mission of the disciples to all the nations as the means by which this cure is made available; the Roman Empire, which established peace among the nations of the world, as an important element in the success of this mission; and the emergence of a unified empire under Constantine as the visible manifestation of the divine plan to overcome the division of the nations and to gather them into a harmonious unity, thus fulfilling the prophetic promise that Christ shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth (In Praise of Constantine 16.7).

While Eusebius does not portray the existence of multiple nations as inherently negative, he nevertheless establishes a close association between ethnic diversity and the various "evils which of old afflicted the whole human race [to pan tōn anthrōpōn genos]" (In Praise of Constantine 13.8). The root of the problem, as he portrays it, is "the polytheistic error of the nations [tōn ethnōn] (15.8), an error that had two stages of development. The initial part of the problem had to do with the inability of human beings to recognize the Creator of the world, which led each race [genos]" (13.5) to devise a multiplicity of other deities, variously identified with heavenly bodies, human passions, deified mortals, and even animals (13.1–6). Here Eusebius goes into considerable detail, listing a broad array of nations by name and describing their various religious practices.

The problem, however, went beyond mere human follies and fancies. Evil demons took advantage of the situation, using polytheistic worship as a means of insinuating themselves into human affairs (In Praise of Constantine 13.4–6) and thus infecting the whole human race (13.14) with a malady that first came to expression in human sacrifice (13.7–8) and then manifested itself in a variety of other noxious symptoms (13.9–14). Political disputes, open conflict and warfare, plunder and highway robbery, incest and other forms of sexual deviance, treachery and murder, brutality and dissolution—such was the hopeless situation of division, conflict, and vile immorality that "the nations of the whole world [ta kath’ holēs tēs oikoumenēs ethnē], both Greek and barbarian, driven mad by demonic forces" (13.9), had created for themselves.

While this list of vices and evils is commonplace for the most part, one item stands out—political disputes or, more precisely, "fierce contention over laws and forms of government [nomois te kai politeiais]" (In Praise of Constantine 13.9). One might wonder what place there could be in a list such as this for disputes over politeia, especially a place at the head of the list. But it is a measure of its significance that Eusebius returns to it a little later, when he is speaking of the positive benefits that have resulted from the death and resurrection of the Word of God. Here it appears not simply at the head of the list, but as the (penultimate) cause of the others. What has produced wars, atrocities, and suffering of every kind is the fact that "all the nations of old upon the earth [panta ta palai epi gēs ethnē], the entire human race [genos], were cut up into provincial, national, and local governments, tyrannies and many kinds of rule" (16.2). However, the multiplicity of nations, with their various forms of government, was not the ultimate cause of human evil, strife, and misery. For Eusebius, a nation’s politeia—its form of government or corporate way of life—was an essential element of its character as a nation, and the politeia of every nation of the world was founded on the delusion of polytheistic error (16.3). Thus the ultimate cause of the various evils plaguing humankind was the polytheistic (and thus demonic) foundation on which ethnic diversity was constructed.

This, then, was the inveterate malady which had asserted its dominion over the whole human race (In Praise of Constantine 13.14) and which, Eusebius goes on to proclaim, Christ had come to remediate. To be sure, the remedy had already been available to some extent through the words of the prophets, together with the example of those few men of old who had been able to discern the truth about God. But the tyranny of the ruthless and soul-destroying demons and spirits had progressed to such an extent that a superior form of help was needed (13.15).

Christ’s work, in part, was to reveal himself as the Word of God and thus to reveal the nature of the true God and creator of all things. Revelation, however, was not sufficient in itself; the power of the demons needed to be broken. This is precisely what was accomplished through the death and resurrection of the Savior:

For as soon as the one holy and mighty sacrifice, the sacred body of our Savior, had been slain on behalf of the human race, to be as a ransom for all nations [pantōn ethnōn] heretofore involved in the guilt of impious superstition, thenceforward the power of impure and unholy daemons was utterly abolished, and every earth-born and delusive error was at once weakened and destroyed. (In Praise of Constantine 15.11)

If Eusebius here locates the site of the victory in Christ’s death, he can also link it with the resurrection. When he picks up the theme in the next chapter, he declares that when Christ was raised, as a trophy of victory over the ancient demons and as a means of averting evil, the works of these demons were at once destroyed (16.3). Either way, however, the defeat of the demons was the goal and outcome of the divine operation.

Given that the demons’ sphere of operation was the nations themselves, it is not surprising that the next step in Eusebius’s history of redemption is the worldwide mission to the nations. Indeed, it is the defeat of the demons that opens the way for the one God [to be] proclaimed to all (In Praise of Constantine 16.3). This mission is carried out by the disciples, "who were destined … to communicate to all humankind that knowledge of God which he before ordained for all the nations [pasi tois ethnesi] (15.7). It was a sign of Christ’s own power that he was able to take obscure and unlettered men and turn them into the legislators and instructors of the human race, composing writings of such authority that they were translated into every language of Greeks and barbarians, and were read and pondered by all the nations [pasi tois ethnesi] (17.9). Thus not only did Christ promise that his gospel must be preached in all the world as a testimony to all the nations [pasi tois ethnesin]; through the mission of his disciples he fulfilled it as well, for within a little time the whole world [hē sympasa oikoumenē] was filled with his doctrine" (16.8).

The disciples, however, were not the sole agents of the worldwide success of the gospel. God was also at work through a second channel—the Roman Empire itself, which had its own role to play in overcoming the ethnic fractiousness of the human race. Eusebius attaches considerable significance to the fact that the emergence of the doctrine of Christ coincided with the emergence of the empire under Augustus: so at the self-same period, the entire dominion of the Roman empire being nested in a single sovereign, profound peace reigned throughout the world (In Praise of Constantine 16.4). Coincided, yes; but coincidence, no. For Eusebius, it was precisely by the express appointment of the same God that these two roots of blessing, the Roman empire, and the doctrine of Christian piety, sprang up together for the benefit of humankind (16.4). Working together, they were able to address the twin causes of the human malady—the division of the human race into hostile, warring nations; and the demonic forces at work in the polytheistic structures of the nations themselves:

But two mighty powers, starting from the same point, the Roman empire, which henceforth was swayed by a single sovereign, and the teaching of Christ, subdued and reconciled these contending elements. Our Savior’s mighty power destroyed at once the many governments and the many gods of the demons, and proclaimed to all humankind [pasin anthrōpois], both Greek and barbarian, to the extremities of the earth, the sole sovereignty of God himself. Meantime the Roman empire, the causes of multiplied governments being thus removed, effected an easy conquest of those which yet remained; its object being to unite all nations [pantoiōn ethnōn] in one harmonious whole; an object in great measure already secured, and destined to be still more perfectly attained, even to the final conquest of the ends of the habitable world [tēs oikoumenēs], by means of the salutary doctrine, and through the aid of that Divine power which facilitates and smooths its way. (16.5–6)

Even so, the two roots of blessing are not placed on a completely equal footing. Rome’s ability to unite the nations under one sovereign was dependent on the prior victory of the Savior, whose defeat of the demons effectively removed the underlying causes of multiplied governments.

While Eusebius may acknowledge that the divine purposes have not yet been perfectly attained, he nevertheless places the emphasis on the great measure to which these purposes have been already secured. The worship of the one God has spread throughout the inhabited world: the ears and tongue of all humankind on earth [have been filled] with the praises of his name (In Praise of Constantine 16.8); "spiritual and rational sacrifices are offered as a sacred service by all the nations [hapantōn tōn ethnōn] to the One Supreme God (16.10); in every region of the world of humankind, Christ is acknowledged by all the nations [tōn ethnōn hapantōn] as the only Son of God (17.13). Accompanying the spread of true worship, people from every walk of life and every nation have been converted to piety, virtue, and peaceable relations with others: multitudes from multitudes of nations" (myria myriōn ethnōn) have been instructed to live a just and virtuous life (17.6); the whole human race, subdued by the controlling power of peace and concord, received one another as brethren, and responded to the feelings of their common nature (16.7). Such transformation took place not only among individuals but among the nations as well: "the inveterate strife and mutual hatred of the nations [tōn ethnōn] was a thing of the past (16.7); people could travel freely from West to East, and from East to West, as if the whole world was their own native country [patridas] (16.7); indeed, with the one God as their Father, and true religion as their common mother, … the whole world [tēn sympasan oikoumenēn] appeared like one well-ordered and united family" (16.7).³ And all of this, Eusebius declares, is a fulfillment of the prophetic promises, especially those "which speak as follows concerning the saving Word. ‘He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.’ And again, ‘In his days shall righteousness spring up; and abundance of peace.’ ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into sickles: and nation shall not take up sword against nation [ethnos ep’ ethnos], neither shall they learn to war any more’"⁴ (16.7).

It was, then, a remarkable oration, striking alike for its context as well as its content. Speaking in Jerusalem, that city from which as from a fountain-head the Savior Word has issued forth to all humankind (In Praise of Constantine 11.2), Eusebius addresses himself to the sole emperor of the Roman world, as he stands within a magnificent new edifice constructed by the emperor himself in honor of that Savior Word, whose devotee and subject he has now become. In vivid terms, Eusebius presents us with a vision in which the mission of the disciples and the empire of Rome function as divinely intended partners in a grand project, one in which all the nations of the inhabited world are gathered into a single unified dominion. What may have appeared at the outset to have been two distinct or even oppositional projects—the mission of the disciples to preach the gospel "to all nations [panta ta ethnē] (16.8) and the campaign of the Roman Empire to unite all nations [pantoiōn ethnōn] (16.5)—turn out in the end to have been a single enterprise directed by the one God of all the nations, each of them dependent in its own way on the prior victory of Christ over the baleful influence of the demons. Two mighty powers—the teaching of Christ and the Roman empire (16.5)—one spreading outward from Jerusalem and the other from Rome, have joined forces, with the result that the kingdom [basileia] of God (16.6) and the kingdom [basileia] of the Romans" (16.4) have merged into a single kingdom, at once earthly and divine, thus bringing to (almost complete) fulfillment the prophetic promises of an age of peace and righteousness among the nations of the world.

Although this remarkable vision was presented in the context of an oration for a very specific occasion, it drew on themes that were deeply embedded in Eusebius’s work as a whole.⁵ To be sure, in this oration, they are presented in accents that were missing in works written while the Eastern Empire was still ruled by Licinius, a time when Christians were at best tolerated and at worst (toward the end of his rule) persecuted once again. Nevertheless, Eusebius’s vision of the church as a universal people drawn from all the nations of the inhabited world, together with his belief in the providential role played by the Roman Empire, were by no means simple rhetorical flourishes worked up for the needs of the moment. To be sure, the historical moment was a fleeting one; had Eusebius lived to see the internecine conflicts among Constantine’s successors during the next quarter century, he might have been more inclined to put clearer theological daylight between the dominion of the Christ and the dominion of the Caesar.⁶ Still, despite the ironies that are all too painfully apparent from the standpoint of our own historical moment, it remains a remarkable oration.

AELIUS ARISTIDES’S REGARDING ROME

We will return to Eusebius a little later. For now, however, let us shift the scene and consider an earlier oration, also in praise of the Roman Empire and the accomplishments of its emperor, this one delivered in the imperial court in Rome. The speaker on this occasion was Aelius Aristides, the highly learned orator and writer from Mysia, a member of a wealthy family with citizenship in Smyrna as well, and a leading figure in the Second Sophistic. He delivered the oration, Regarding Rome, on one of his two visits to Rome (144 or 155 CE), during the reign of Antoninus Pius.⁷

Following the conventions of the genre, Aristides begins his encomium by describing the difficulties facing any orator who would aspire to find words of praise commensurate with the glories of the city being praised (Regarding Rome 2–5). After touching on the geographical extent of the empire (6–13)—the course of the sun from its rising to its setting is always in your land (10)—he proceeds by way of comparison, setting the Roman Empire alongside the empires which have gone before (13), first the Persian (15–23) and then the Greek (24–57).⁸ The remainder of the oration consists of a more topical treatment of Roman superiority, dealing severally with civic and imperial administration, justice, military organization, benefaction, political constitution, and the like (57–106). He ends with a brief but elegant acclamation of the emperor and a prayer to the gods that this empire and this city bloom forever (107–9).

The dominant image that emerges from Regarding Rome is of the empire as an ideal, universal realm of peace, harmony, and good government, a common fatherland encompassing all races and nations, and thus a realization of the Greek philosophical and political vision of a single, civilized world (oikoumenē). Of particular interest here is the way in which this image is conveyed by means of the language of nation (ethnos), race (genos), and related terminology.⁹

In his comparison of Rome with the empires that went before, Aristides begins with the most readily apparent difference, its extent. If one starts at the westernmost boundary of the Persian Empire, he says, and measures from that point, what remains of the Roman Empire to the west is larger in itself than the whole of the Persian Empire. Nothing lies outside the Roman grasp, "neither city, nor nation [ethnos], nor harbor, nor land, unless, he adds, it was useless to begin with. What for previous rulers were the ends of the earth are for Rome just the fence around the courtyard. Rome has not only discovered and explored the ocean, but (and here modern readers are permitted a smile) has even conquered the island" that it contains (i.e., Britain).¹⁰

More impressive than the circumference of its boundaries, however, is the surpassing quality of its governance (Regarding Rome 29). Alexander may have conquered a lot of territory (24), but it was the Romans who discovered how to govern (51, 58). Earlier empires simply did not know how to rule (23). Despotic rule might work in a household, but when Rome’s predecessors attempted to extend it "to cities and nations [eis poleis te kai ethnē] (23), the result was simply hatred and plotting on the part of those who were treated in this way, together with revolts, civil war, continual strife and unceasing contention (20). Rome, however, has discovered an ideal form of government [politeian]," one that did not exist before (91).¹¹ Under the efficient administration of "the rulers who are sent to the cities and the nations [eis tas poleis te kai ta ethnē], everything is accomplished by edict and by a sign of assent more easily than one would strike the chord of a lyre (31). The governors consider their subjects not as foreigners" (allotriōn), but as members of their own household (oikeiōn) (65). Likewise with the army, although it contains soldiers drawn from many races (genōn), everything is arrayed in an orderly fashion under "one man, whose authority is all pervasive and who oversees everything—nations [ethnē], cities, legions, the generals themselves," and so on down the line to the individual soldier (88).

A particular aspect of Rome’s good government is its generosity in benefaction. While other rulers and empires "ruled over, as it were, only the naked bodies of their nations [tōn ethnōn], … you have filled your whole empire with cities and adornments" (Regarding Rome 92). With former sources of strife and conflict now a thing of the past, the only contention among races (genōn; 95) and cities (97) involves civic pride: every city is full of gymnasiums, fountains, gateways, temples, handicrafts, and schools (97).

Consequently, the empire is a worldwide domain of peace and security. Just a few "cohorts and cavalry troops are sufficient to guard whole nations [ethnōn holōn], and not even many of these are quartered throughout the cities of the races [tōn genōn]; as a result, many of the nations [polla tōn ethnōn]" do not even know where the nearest military garrison is located (Regarding Rome 67). In place of the disorder, strife, and bloodshed of the past, total security, universal and clear to all, has been given to the earth itself and those who inhabit it (104). Now it is possible for both Greek and barbarian to travel freely from one end of the empire to the other, just as if he were going from one country of his to another (100). It is no wonder, then, that "the whole inhabited world [hapasa hē oikoumenē] speaks in greater harmony than a chorus, praying that this empire last for all time" (29).

Although individual races and nations continue to exist, Aristides declares that they have been gathered up into a new form of shared identity. Rome governs as if the whole inhabited world were a single city, with each nation being a free citizen of this universal polis (Regarding Rome 36). Again, what a city is to its boundaries and its territories, so this city is to the whole inhabited world (61). Rome has turned into reality "that well-known saying, that the earth is the mother and the common fatherland [patris] of all (100). It is now possible for people everywhere to become citizens of Rome; no one is a foreigner [xenos] who deserves to hold office or to be trusted" (60). By giving others a share in the empire, Rome has even brought a new kind of race into being:

You used the word Roman to belong not to a city, but to be the name of a sort of common race [genous onoma koinou tinos], this not being one among the others but a balance to all the remaining ones. You do not now divide the races [ta genē] into Greeks and barbarians, … but you have divided people into Romans and non-Romans. So far have you extended the use of the city’s name. (63)

This new race can even be described as the "golden race [genous]" envisaged by Hesiod, for if Hesiod could have foreseen the empire of Rome, he would have placed the golden race not at the beginning of human generations but at the end (106).

In comparing the Roman Empire with what went before, Aristides uses the metaphor of illness and healing: it can be said in medical terms that the inhabited world was, as it were, ill at the start and has now recovered (Regarding Rome 97). A more striking comparison, however, is with the role of Zeus among the pantheon. Before the rule of Zeus was established, everything was filled with faction, uproar and disorder, but when Zeus came to rule, the Titans were banished to the deepest corners of the earth, and everything was put in order. Likewise with the Roman Empire, before, there was confusion and factionalism; after, there entered in universal order and a glorious light (103).

This comparison, though, leads Aristides to an additional point: it seems that the gods, watching from above, in their benevolence join with you in making your empire successful and that they confirm your possession of it (Regarding Rome 104). The gods themselves take great pleasure in the establishment of universal order—indeed, they actively support the enterprise—not least because Rome has put an end to a state of cultic disorder that involved even child sacrifice and has reestablished the altars of the gods (103–4). Beginning with Zeus, who approves of their "care for the inhabited world [tēs oikoumenēs] that he had made, Aristides provides a roll call of the pantheon—Hera; Athena and Hephaestus; Dionysus and Demeter; Poseidon; Apollo, Artemis, and the Muses; Hermes; Aphrodite; Asclepius and the Egyptian gods; Ares—each with his or her own reasons for approval and support. Even the Sun, who watches over all things, has seen under you no act of violence or of injustice nor things of the sort which were frequent in former times" (105).

Just before bringing his encomium to an end with a prayer to the gods, Aristides turns to the emperor and makes one final comparison. The present ruler stands head and shoulders above his predecessors, precisely because of the degree to which he has given outsiders a place within the household of the empire: "he has treated as equals his partners in the administration of the empire, whom he regards as kinsfolk [oikeious], and … he has more of them than any of his predecessors" (Regarding Rome 107).

As should be readily apparent, there are striking points of connection between this oration and the one delivered by Eusebius almost two centuries later. Before turning our attention to these, however, let us shift the scene one more time and consider a third oration, this one even earlier.

PAUL’S SPEECH IN ACTS 25:23–26:32

Toward the end of the Acts of the Apostles (25:23–26:32), we are presented with an account of a speech delivered by the apostle Paul in the city of Caesarea, to an audience consisting of Porcius Festus (the Roman governor of Judea, 60–62 CE), Agrippa II (client-king of territories east of the Jordan, with additional authority over the temple in Jerusalem), his sister (and, it was rumored, consort) Bernice, together with the military tribunes and the prominent men of the city (25:23). When Festus took up his office, Paul had already spent two years in Roman custody because of charges brought against him by the chief priests and the elders of the Jews (25:15). The charges arose from controversies having to do with Paul’s preaching among the gentiles (literally, "the nations [ethnē]"),¹² which were precipitated in part by a visit of Paul to the temple in Jerusalem. Wanting to move the case forward, Festus arranged a hearing, at the end of which Paul, objecting to a suggestion that his case be decided by a tribunal in Jerusalem, appealed instead to Caesar, a request readily granted by Festus (25:6–12). Not long afterward, when Agrippa and Bernice came to Caesarea to pay their respects, Festus described both the case and his own bewilderment: instead of the sorts of charges he was expecting, what were brought forward were "points of disagreement about their own religion [deisidaimonias, modes of fearing the gods] and about a certain Jesus, who had died but whom Paul asserted to be alive (25:19). In response to Agrippa’s expression of interest in meeting Paul, Festus invited him to a hearing that he had arranged for the purpose of getting a better sense of what report he might forward to the emperor’s tribunal—for it seems to me unreasonable to send a prisoner without indicating the charges against him" (25:27). This is the gathering in which Paul’s speech is delivered.

We encounter this speech in the context of a third-party narrative, and thus it differs in character from those of Eusebius and Aristides, which come to us as the compositions of the orators themselves. We will not concern ourselves here with questions of history, asking about Luke’s possible sources, trying to reconstruct events that might lie behind the account or asking how closely the content of the speech might reflect Paul’s own lines of thought. For present purposes, it is sufficient to take the speech as it stands, as Luke’s own narrative reconstruction of what, in his perception of things, Paul might have said in such a situation.¹³ Further, instead of an encomium on the Roman Empire and its ruler, Paul’s speech is a defense (cf. apologeisthai [Acts 26:2]) against the charges facing him. In addition, the defense is addressed not to the emperor but to Agrippa and Festus.¹⁴ Nevertheless, given that both Agrippa and Festus were agents of Rome and that Paul has appealed to Caesar, the oration is addressed indirectly to the emperor as well.

Paul’s defense unfolds as a narrative of his own conversion, call, and subsequent activity as a preacher to the gentiles. His accusers (he says) are well aware of his story. He was raised "among my own nation [tō ethnei mou] and in Jerusalem (Acts 26:4). He lived as a Pharisee, the strictest of the Jewish groups (v. 5). As a member of this group, he was convinced that he needed to oppose those associated with the name of Jesus of Nazareth (v. 9) and so persecuted them ferociously, not only in Jerusalem but in foreign cities as well. In the course of this activity, while he was on his way to Damascus, he was accosted by a light from heaven, brighter than the sun" (v. 13), and heard a voice, which turned out to be that of the risen Jesus himself. After briefly acknowledging the matter of the persecution, Jesus announced to Paul that he was appointing him as a servant and witness, and sending him to the gentiles [tōn ethnōn], to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God and thus be forgiven of their sins and granted a place among the holy ones (v. 18). From that day to this, says Paul, he has carried out this commission, preaching a message that is nothing other than what Moses and the prophets had foretold: "that the Messiah must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to the people [of Israel] and to the Gentiles [tō te laō kai tois ethnesin] (v. 23). Thus, as he says at the outset of the speech, what he was really on trial for was his commitment to the promise made by God to our ancestors" (v. 6).

As Paul’s speech comes to an end, what had been an account of his preaching activity quickly switches into another instance of it. In response to Festus’s bemused interjection—You are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning is driving you insane! (Acts 26:24)—he changes from defendant to witness (in the evangelistic rather than the juridical sense of the term), attempting to convince Festus and all his hearers to become Christians. While his attempt met with no apparent success, it did at least lead Festus and Agrippa to conclude that he was doing nothing to deserve death or imprisonment, and that, if he had not appealed to Caesar, he could have been set free (vv. 31–32). Whether Paul ever had the opportunity to present his defense in the context of an imperial tribunal in Rome is something about which Luke is silent.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENTILE CHRISTIAN IDENTITY

These three orations span more than two centuries, take place in quite different urban locales (Caesarea, Rome, Jerusalem), and are written by authors with significantly diverse background, training, and conviction. The diversity would be even greater if we were to include Paul directly, and not just through later Lukan reflection—for example, if we were also to consider his letter to the church in Rome and the defense of his preaching to the gentiles that we find there. Brought into juxtaposition with each other, these orations crackle with sparks of interaction—points of connection, striking similarities and contrasts, unexpected ironies, provocative implied questions, and the like.

The most striking contrast, of course, has to do with the composition and context of the Christian movement as reflected in the Acts narrative, at one end of the period, and in Eusebius’s oration at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the other. At the outset—at the time of Paul’s Damascus experience, say—what eventually came to be called Christianity consisted of a cluster of renewal movements located within the boundaries of the Jewish world. This world itself was a variegated phenomenon, and the groups of Jewish Christ-believers both reflected and added to the variety. The membership of the movement was almost entirely Jewish, and although non-Jews began to be included, the terms of their inclusion was a matter of considerable controversy. Indeed, variegation within the movement was largely generated by disagreements about the inclusion of gentiles, together with differing stances toward the wider non-Jewish world more generally. Judea was subject to Rome, of course, and so the movement from the very beginning stood in an implicit relationship to the Roman Empire. Still, the most obvious aspect of this relationship was the fact that its founder had suffered an ignominious Roman execution.

By the time of Eusebius, Christianity (now a standard term) had spread throughout the Mediterranean world and had become sufficiently well established among the general population that,¹⁵ not only was it adopted by the emperor himself, but Constantine felt sufficiently confident of popular support that he could embark on an active policy of advancing the status and interests of the church in the empire as a whole.¹⁶ One who had been executed by Rome as a troublemaker in a dusty outpost of the empire had now become a deity worshiped by the emperor himself and a substantial proportion of his subjects. While Eusebius was prone to exaggeration, still it is not without significance that he could, without hesitation or fear of ridicule, challenge anyone to refute his claim "that whole myriads in crowds together of women, and children, slaves and free, obscure and illustrious, barbarians and Greeks alike, in every place and city and district in all the nations [pasi tois … ethnesi] under the sun," had wholeheartedly embraced the Christian teaching (Preparation for the Gospel 1.4.11). Needless to say, the population of the movement with which Eusebius identified was now almost entirely gentile. Of course, few Christians from all the nations under the sun would have thought of themselves as ethnē in the specifically Jewish sense of the term—that is, as members of non-Jewish nations or gentiles. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say that the population of the movement included very few Jews. While forms of (what is usually described as) Jewish Christianity continued to exist,¹⁷ for a member of the orthodox mainstream such as Eusebius, they were now a marginal oddity.¹⁸ To be sure, the continuing existence of a recognizable Jewish Christianity serves as a reminder that diversity was a feature of the movement in Eusebius’s day no less than in Paul’s. At this later stage of development, however, diversity was driven by substantially different issues, and the days were long past when division would have taken place over the question whether gentile believers would need to become full torah-observers in order to be admitted. At this stage, for an orthodox Christian like Eusebius, the issue would have been turned on its head: it would have been controversial—even heretical—to suggest that Jews could be admitted to the church while continuing to be full torah-observers.

It is a dizzying experience to move from the world of Acts 26 to that of Eusebius’s On the Holy Sepulchre, and from the Caesarea of Paul’s day to the Caesarea of its bishop, Eusebius, during the reign of Constantine.¹⁹ Or at least it should be. Given the Christian foundations of Western culture, however, the natural tendency of those whose perceptions have been shaped by this culture is to take this transition for granted, to see the Christianization of the Roman world as the natural outcome of an inevitable process. For many in the Western world, it takes a prodigious act of imagination to extricate ourselves from this inherited context and to put ourselves into a position where we can perceive the sheer improbability of it all.

Once the inevitable has become the improbable, of course, questions of causality and explanation immediately present themselves. As Rodney Stark has put it:

Finally, all questions concerning the rise of Christianity are one: How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization?²⁰

Stark is just one of the latest in a long line of scholars who have attempted to answer the question, a line that begins with Eusebius himself and continues on through Gibbon, Voltaire, Harnack, Nock, Lietzmann, Frend, MacMullen, and many others.²¹ It is certainly not my intention here to make any attempt to append myself to this list; I will leave this to those with the expertise and qualifications necessary for the task. Rather, I want to make a small contribution by picking up and examining one thread that is present throughout the whole process.

We begin, again, with Eusebius. As we have seen, he places great emphasis on what might be called the transethnic character of the Christian movement. As Johnson has observed, the idea of the church from the nations plays a significant role in Eusebius’s agenda.²² For him it is an essential characteristic of the Christian movement that its members have been drawn from all the nations, that it has established itself among all the nations, and so on. In fact, Eusebius goes beyond such partitive expressions (from, among) to speak of nations apparently in their entirety: the Son of God has been recognized by all the nations (In Praise of Constantine 17.12); Christian worship is offered by all the nations (16.10); the writings of the apostles are accepted as the oracles of God by all the nations (17.8; panta ta ethnē in each case). The language is hyperbolic but nevertheless revealing. There is an irreducible ethnic—and transethnic—element in Eusebius’s ecclesiastical demographic; the nations represent a fundamental building block in the construction of Christianismos as he understands it.²³

Further, this aspect of Christian reality is embedded in a larger construction—a theological ethnography, as I have called it—that undergirds much of Eusebius’s work and is visible in condensed form in On the Holy Sepulchre, even if some aspects of it are left largely in the shadows and need to be filled in from his other writings. Tracing the history of the nations in their political, moral, and religious characteristics, he lays a foundation both for his account of the history of redemption and for his work in redrawing the internal boundaries within the whole human race, a boundary-making project that enables him to position Christianity favorably with respect to other pertinent demographic categories (Romans, Greeks, barbarians, and Jews).

Placing Eusebius alongside Paul, however, brings another ethnic boundary into view. The message of Christ, Paul says, is one to be proclaimed both to the people—that is, the people of Israel, the Jews—and to the Gentiles (Acts 26:23). Further, he himself was imprisoned because of Jewish perceptions that he had violated the boundary between Jews and gentiles. Gentiles, of course, renders ethnē, the same term that runs through Eusebius’s theological ethnography, normally rendered as nations. The transition reflected by the contrast between Acts 26 and Eusebius’s On the Holy Sepulchre, then, is one in which a mission to the gentiles (ethnē) carried out by Paul and other Jewish Christ-believers (which the Roman governor dismisses as irrelevant madness) develops into a transethnic "church from all the nations [ethnē]" (which the Roman emperor adopts as his own and promotes with enthusiasm). Before reflecting further on this transition, however, a brief digression is necessary to consider this Jewish use of ethnē as a way of marking the boundary between us and them, and on the limitations of the English term.²⁴

This boundary language first appears in the Hebrew Scriptures, where it functioned solely in corporate terms—to speak of "the people [hā‘ām] of Israel in contrast to the (other) nations" (haggôyîm). When the Scriptures were translated into Greek, these terms were rendered as ho laos and ta ethnē, respectively. In the later Hellenistic period, however, ethnē came to be used not only with reference to nations but also to (non-Jewish) individuals. In such instances, of course, nations is a quite inappropriate rendering of ethnē. To take a pertinent example from Paul’s letters (Gal 2:12), when Paul says that Peter used to eat "with the ethnē," he was describing a situation in which Peter’s table companions were individual non-Jews, not nations. The usefulness of the term gentiles, which derives from the Latin adjective gentilis and came into English (and other languages) via the Vulgate, is that it denotes non-Jewish individuals.

Its usefulness comes with an attendant cost, however. The cost is highest in passages such as Acts 26:23, where ta ethnē clearly refers to nations (since it is paired with ho laos) rather than individuals: the message preached by Paul pertains both to the people Israel and to the non-Jewish nations. But even in a passage such as Gal 2:12, to say that Peter used to eat with the gentiles serves to obscure or even eliminate the corporate-ethnic overtones that usually hover about the term ethnē. The issue at play in Galatians is that Peter had at one point been willing to cross the boundary that separated the Jewish people from their ethnic other, the non-Jewish nations. In passages such as these, it would be more accurate to speak of non-Jewish nations (where ethnic entities are in view) or members of non-Jewish nations (when the reference is to individuals). Such phrases, however, are probably too cumbersome to serve as fully acceptable substitutes, and so I will not attempt to avoid gentile and gentiles in what follows. Nevertheless, where clarity is necessary, I will use more accurate formulations; where the common terms appear, they should be seen as convenient shorthand for more complex realities.²⁵

To return to Paul and Eusebius, Eusebius is well aware of the special use of ethnē as a way of referring to non-Jewish nations and individuals. The usage does not appear in his On the Holy Sepulchre; although he mentions the Jewish race (genos) or nation (ethnos) on two occasions (16.5; 17.8), he does not set it in explicit contrast with the ethnē.²⁶ Elsewhere, however, he frequently uses ethnē in contexts where the term is explicitly set over against the Jews or the Jewish nation. In most of these instances, the term appears with reference to Christian preaching to non-Jews and the emergence of gentile Christianity.²⁷ The prophets foretold "that the advent of Christ and the falling away of the Jews would be followed by the call of the Gentiles [tōn ethnōn]" (Preparation for the Gospel 1.3.14). Until that falling away had fully manifested itself, the earliest apostles were not yet in a position "to transmit the word of faith to Gentiles [ethnesin], and so they announced it only to Jews" (Ecclesiastical History 2.1.8). Subsequently, however, while Peter continued to preach to those of the circumcision, Paul, "in his preaching to those from the Gentiles [tois ex ethnōn], laid the foundations of the churches from Jerusalem round about unto Illyricum" (Ecclesiastical History 3.4.1). The usage is frequently encountered, and the point is not controversial.²⁸

It is clear, then, that Eusebius would see the church from the nations of his own day as the culmination of the mission to the gentiles that was foretold by the prophets, commanded by Christ and initiated by Paul and other Jewish preachers. Indeed, in one passage, he explicitly connects the two in a very personal way. Responding to questions about why (non-Jewish) Christians should use and venerate Jewish Scriptures, he says that we have accepted and loved as belonging to ourselves the sacred books of the Hebrews precisely because of these prophecies "relating to us Gentiles [hēmōn tōn ethnōn]" (Demonstration of the Gospel 1.4.1). He continues by quoting not only a number of these prophecies (Pss 9:20; 96:3–8, 10; 98:1–3; Isa 2:3) but also Jesus’s command to the disciples that they go and "make disciples of all the ethnē (Matt 28:19–20). In this context, then, his use of the first-person plural (us Gentiles") thus serves both to characterize the church in his own day as a gentile entity and to identify this church with the early Christian mission to the gentiles.

Thus, although Eusebius does not make an explicit contrast between Jews and gentiles in On the Holy Sepulchre, we are certainly justified to see a connection between the story that unfolds in his oration and Paul’s narrative in Acts 26 concerning his call to proclaim Christ among the non-Jewish ethnē, the gentiles. In this regard, other points of connection immediately present themselves. Like Eusebius, Paul understands the mission to the gentiles to be a fulfillment of prophetic promises—precisely what the prophets and Moses said would take place (v. 22). Further, Eusebius’s emphasis on the power of the demons has a certain counterpart in Paul’s address—the gentiles are under "the power [exousias] of Satan and need to have their eyes opened so that they may turn from darkness to light" (v. 18). Also, as we have noted, Paul’s address is placed within a Roman imperial framework, with the emperor himself being called on to render a decision about the degree of tolerance to be given to Paul’s mission.

Of course, there are differences as well, both the obvious differences in the composition and status of the Christian movement between the first and fourth centuries (not to mention the ethnic identities of Paul and Eusebius), and more specific differences in detail. In Paul’s address, for example, more latitude is given to a mission to the Jews: the message of light pertains both to the people [of Israel] and to the Gentiles (v. 23); Paul proclaimed his message throughout Judea and also to the Gentiles (v. 20).²⁹

While it is not my purpose at this juncture to carry out a detailed comparison, it will aid our initial reflections if we fill in some gaps by looking at the place of the Jews in Eusebius’s theological ethnography as it appears in other works. Central to this is a distinction he makes between the Hebrews and the Jews, though to describe this we need to look again at the larger picture.

In much of his work, Eusebius is concerned to construct an identity for the Christian movement by locating it with respect to the various nations and ethnic groupings that constitute what he frequently refers to as the human race. Nations are characterized by their way of life (politeia), which, in turn, is founded on their mode of religion (tropos theosebeias or tropos eusebeias).³⁰ While each nation has its own specific character, he argues that there are three broad types (Demonstration of the Gospel 1.2.8–16). The most widespread type, fully in view in On the Holy Sepulchre, is found among all those nations that are fully enslaved to the demons. As we have seen, this mode of religion developed in two stages. At the outset, it involved simply the worship of created entities as gods. In On the Holy Sepulchre, Eusebius attributes the development of this mode of worship simply to the nations’ inability to perceive and recognize the creator of all (In Praise of Constantine 13.5). Elsewhere, however, the picture is a little more detailed. The worship of things seen in the heavens, the sun and moon and stars, he says, was something allowed to the nations as a kind of accommodation to human weakness, either by God directly (citing Deut 4:19) or by the angelic guardians assigned to the nations (citing Deut 32:8).³¹ Even so, this divine accommodation did not extend to the worship of other created beings, including divinized humans, animals, and other named gods. In the second stage, the demons took advantage of this situation of divine accommodation corrupted by human weakness. Infiltrating polytheistic worship, they soon had brought all nations under their sway. Outside On the Holy Sepulchre, this story is repeated and elaborated, as Eusebius describes the rebellion of Lucifer/Satan and the fall of his band of renegade angels (Preparation for the Gospel 7.16.8; Demonstration of the Gospel 4.9.1–12).

From earliest times, however, there was one nation that followed the opposite course (Preparation for the Gospel 7.3.1), that of the Hebrews. Observing the visible world, they were able to perceive the Maker and Creator of the universe who stood behind it and whom they worshiped as the only God. Beginning with the appearance of the Word "to one or two of the God-fearing [theophilōn] men of old, the Hebrews eventually became a whole nation [ethnos]" (Ecclesiastical History 1.2.21, 22). Living fully in accordance with nature and in freedom from the tyranny of the passions, they "enjoyed a free and unfettered mode of religion [eusebeias], so that they had no need of laws to rule them" (Preparation for the Gospel 7.6.4). With the implication in this statement that a life ruled by laws is an inferior mode of religion, one begins to see the sort of distinction Eusebius will make between the Hebrews and the Jews. Indeed, the Hebrew nation consists essentially of the Genesis patriarchs, though the line continues with Moses, the prophets, and some others, as we will see.

Although the nation of the Jews takes its name from Judah (Preparation for the Gospel 7.6.2), it comes into being only with the giving of the law by Moses. It is only when the system of Moses’ Law had … been brought into being that one can begin to speak of Jews and Judaism; the Hebrews who lived before this, therefore, were not Jews (Demonstration of the Gospel 1.2.4, 5). The law of Moses, which brought the Jewish nation into being, was necessitated by the debilitating effects of the sojourn in Egypt. After the death of Joseph, the noble example of their Hebrew forebears gradually faded under the corrosive influence of the Egyptian way of life, so that they came round in their modes of living to customs similar to those of the Egyptians and eventually were virtually indistinguishable in character from them (Preparation for the Gospel 7.8.37). So it was that when Moses arrived on the scene, he found them unable through moral weakness to emulate the virtue of their fathers, inasmuch as they were enslaved by passions and sick in soul (Preparation for the Gospel 7.8.38). The law, then, is to be seen as a remedial—rather than ideal—mode of religion and way of life. It is medicine to heal a race worn away by the terrible disease of Egypt (Demonstration of the Gospel 1.6.31), a "polity [politeia] that corresponded to their condition" (Preparation for the Gospel 7.8.39), and thus