The broad question lingering in the background of this study is how a group that began as a small messianic movement on the fringes of the Roman Empire eventually made its way to the centre of imperial power, displacing traditional Greco-Roman piety with Christianity as the dominant religious culture of the empire. To be clear, Donaldson is not interested in formulating anything like a comprehensive explanation of this improbable development (pp. 16, 33–4). His aim, rather, is to elucidate one important aspect of it. ‘Christian success in the empire’, Donaldson argues, ‘would not have been possible without the emergence and development of a distinctively gentile Christianity’ (p. 33).
Understanding the full force of this point requires recognition of the two distinct senses in which this book uses the term ‘gentile Christianity’. On one hand, it serves as a sort of analytical shorthand for the bare sociological fact of non-Jewish involvement in what Donaldson calls Christ-groups (see pp. 161–4, cf. p. 312, ‘what has traditionally been called “gentile Christianity”’). His point about a distinctively Gentile Christianity, however, alludes more specifically to a particular form of self-identity that developed among some such non-Jews: ‘a sense among Christians that they belonged to a distinctive new people drawn from all the nations’ (p. 33). As its title suggests, the book's primary concern is this latter question of a self-consciously Gentile Christian identity. Its central focus, accordingly, is ‘the term ethnē as it was used and understood by Gentile Christians, from the time of the earlier non-Jewish Christ-believers to the emergence of a sense among Gentile Christians that they were a community drawn from, or somehow representative of, “all the nations”’ (p. 34).
This dual usage of ‘Gentile Christian’ reflects both the ambiguity of the Greek term ethnē and Donaldson's own historical thesis regarding its developing use among non-Jewish Christ-groups. While sometimes used in its generic sense of ‘nations’, ethnē of course is also frequently used in Jewish texts in a way that is more usefully translated ‘Gentiles’: an ethnocentric designation, broadly analogous to the Greek notion of barbaroi, of the collectivity of those peoples deemed ‘not us’ from a Jewish perspective (pp. 17–18; further ch. iii). The interesting and insightful question at the heart of this study, accordingly, is how non-Jewish Christ-groups came to actively embrace a Judeo-centric designation of ‘others’ as a term of self-identity. Finding a crucial shift in this direction beginning with Justin Martyr, Donaldson argues that the Christian adoption of ethnē as a term of self-identification was not a straightforward consequence of the Jewish origins of the Jesus movement, but a function more specifically of second-century Christian engagement with the competitive ethnography of the Greco-Roman world. While obviously drawing on the scriptural distinction between Israel and ‘the nations’, the apologists of Justin's era and later also ‘appropriated the vocabulary and rhetoric of the empire, constructing and projecting an identity for themselves as an empire-like, transethnic people drawn from all the (non-Jewish) nations’ (p. 471).
The first two chapters of the book serve as an extensive introduction. Chapter i juxtaposes addresses to the Roman Empire by Eusebius, Aelius Aristides and Luke's Paul to highlight active interest in ‘the nations’ not only as a dimension of Christian discourse but of Roman imperial rhetoric, and thus to raise the broad question that would guide the study. Chapter ii presents critical surveys of literature relevant to three subjects that impinge upon the question: the so-called ‘parting of the ways’ (pp. 37–54); social-scientific theories regarding the social construction of ethnicity and identity, especially in imperial contexts (pp. 54–69); and the complex dynamics surrounding the negotiation of identities by both ruler and ruled in the Roman Empire in particular (pp. 69–102).
Together with the last section of chapter ii, chapters iii–v analyse the ancient texts that Donaldson will use to contextualise the ‘Gentile Christian’ use of the term ethnē. Chapter ii closes with an examination of how Rome ‘inscribe[d] a place for itself and its growing empire’ within the traditional Greek distinction between Greeks and Barbarians (p. 103), and how their Greek subjects responded. Chapter iii then turns to the ways Rome's Jewish subjects defined their own place vis-à-vis these Greco-Roman ethnographies, with special attention to the use of ethnē as an identity ascribed to non-Jews, conceptualised essentially as ‘the reflex’ of a Jewish identity defined with reference to values like monotheism, election, Torah and eschatology (p. 129). Chapter iv narrows the analysis to the use of ethnē by ‘Jewish Christ-believers’, particularly as applied to non-Jewish group members (helpfully summarised in chapter vi, pp. 314–17). Chapter v, finally, examines the role played by ‘the nations’ (gentes, nationes) in Roman imperial rhetoric.
Chapters vi–vii turn to the real heart of the study: the use of the term ethnē by ‘Gentile Christians’ themselves. The analysis is organised chronologically into three eras defined by the Jewish revolts against Rome. Chapter vi examines evidence for the period prior to 70 ce (Paul's letters and ‘the traditional material in Acts’ [p. 323]) and that between 70 and 135 ce (Luke-Acts, 1–2 Timothy, 1–2 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, Apology of Aristides). Chapter vii, finally, analyses the era after the Bar Kokhba rebellion, with special emphasis on Justin Martyr. Donaldson's central finding is a correlation (not necessarily causal) between this periodisation and ‘Gentile Christian’ interest in the term ethnē. While theorising that the earliest non-Jewish converts would likely have accepted this ascribed designation as part of their acculturation into the Christ-group (p. 318, cf. p. 326), Donaldson finds that texts actually produced by such Gentiles prior to the Bar Kochba rebellion – with the notable exception of Luke-Acts (pp. 377–83) – show comparatively little interest in the concept. Where it is used (again excepting Acts), it serves primarily as a designation for ‘outsiders’ rather than as a term of self-identity. Donaldson observes a significant shift, however, beginning with Justin, whose writings represent ‘a wholehearted and consistent adoption of ethnē as a term of Gentile Christian self-identification’ (p. 417). While a key part of Justin's effort to differentiate Christians from Jews, this by no means was done, Donaldson argues, with an eye only to the Jewish people. ‘It was important for Justin in his apologetic engagement with the wider Greco-Roman world that he present himself and those like him as a new transethnic people, distinct from the Jews and drawn “from all the ethnē”’ (p. 388) – as a new, universal ethnos not unlike Aelius Aristides's vision of Rome (cf. p. 10, cf p. 471, ‘a counterempire’). The effective result was ‘a new stage in the process of gentile Christian self-definition’ (p. 393, cf. p. 418) and ‘the first thoroughgoing instance of a Christian pattern of competitive ethnography’: an attempt ‘to negotiate a place for Christians within the currently prevailing ethnographic maps of the Greco-Roman world’ (p. 388), complete with the universalistic tropes typical of the genre. The chapter traces this new development from Justin up to its full expression in the triumphalist rhetoric of Eusebius in the era of Constantine. An afterword offers reflections on the enduring implications of this development for Christian understanding of Jews and, more generally, of Christianity's subsequent intersection with imperial power.
This is an important study. While much has been done in recent decades on matters of early Christian identity, not least in connection with the so-called ‘parting of the ways’, comparatively little attention has been given to the concept of ethnē apart from Donaldson's own earlier publications. The extensive analysis presented in this book represents a significant contribution, and its carefully nuanced discussion of the evidence will provide a useful starting point for future research (if not always, of course, universally accepted interpretive decisions). My chief regret is that the book was not edited to be more user-friendly. Sections of winding, complex analysis run as long as thirty or forty pages without subheadings, and with rather less in the way of introductions and conclusions to summarise basic findings than one might wish. This is unfortunate in a book that will undoubtedly repay careful re-reading. Ease of use aside, the book provides a valuable reminder that the development of a distinctly Christian identity ‘involve[d] not just two entities (Jews and Christians) but the wider world of the nations within which both exist’ (p. 53). Its effective complication of the classic modern trope of Christian universalism (for example, p. 35) not only sheds new light on the self-understanding of Christians ex ethnōn, but, at least for this reader, inevitably raises further questions about Jesus and his early Jewish followers as well. If the later idea of a transethnic ethnos was not simply or even primarily a response to ‘Jewish particularism’, but a mimicry of Roman imperialism, to what extent might the same be said already of its more foundational notions of an eschatological kingdom or a messiah?
