Studies on Ephesians have long tried to explain why its most important ecclesiological concept, that of ‘the body of Christ’, is described in the language of ethnicity and racial difference. The modern form of the debate goes back to Adolf von Harnack, whose brief comments gave rise to identifying the church as a ‘third race’ (and borrowed the patristic Latin formulation, genus tertium, made famous by Tertullian).Footnote 1 In his massive commentary, for example, Markus Barth denied that the epistle envisions the church as a new race, or genus tertium, different from either Gentiles or Jews.Footnote 2 On this view, the description of the church as ‘one new humanity out of two’ (Eph 2.15) does not entail an erasure of Gentile ethnicity but merely advances Paul's own vision of the incorporation of the nations into historical Israel. Although Barth's commentary in general has proven unpersuasive to a consensus of scholars working on Ephesians,Footnote 3 this particular line of interpretation has found some favour in recent scholarship.Footnote 4 Countering this line of exegesis, other scholars argue that Eph 2.11–22, especially its language of ethnic ‘reconciliation’ (ἀποκαταλλάξῃ τοὺς ἀμφοτέρους ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι, Eph 2.16), describes an ecclesiology in terms quite similar to a new ethnicity, a genus tertium other than historical Israel.Footnote 5 Much of the scholarship on each side of this debate, however, proceeds as if the meaning of the terms ethnicity and race were obvious and self-explanatory.
The present essay rethinks the question in light of current research in ethnic studies. The concept of ‘one new humanity’ in Ephesians provides evidence of the author's ethnic reasoning, which participated in ancient cultural affirmations of the essential fluidity and changeability of all ethnicity.Footnote 6 As Wayne Meeks has shown, the original terms of the ‘new humanity’ in Ephesians belong to early Christian rituals of baptism, in which a unification formula (Gal 3.28; 1 Cor 12.13) evoked the myth of a created but lost humanity (Adam in Gen 1.27). In some early Christian groups, the performative utterance of this symbolisation (‘making the two one’) inculcated an attitude in believers that embraced celibacy and related ascetic practices as the Christian ideal – a trajectory culminating in late ancient ‘Encratite’ theologies of the μοναχός (single one, ‘monk’).Footnote 7 In Ephesians, however, this symbolisation has the opposite goal of admonishing marriage as the Christian norm and the ancient household as the model of the church. By making the myth fit an ordinary Greco-Roman household economy, the author of Ephesians domesticates the baptismal language in ways beyond the lead of his main source (Col 3.11), which already tried to discipline the potentially autonomous ascetic tendencies of the unification baptismal formula within the household economy described by an Aristotelian topos (περὶ οἰκονομίας).Footnote 8 To an extent greater than Colossians, baptism in Ephesians evokes not a sublime myth (the recreated Adam) but a conventional morality (the ordinary structures of Greco-Roman household order).Footnote 9 Union with Christ, in this perspective, does not liberate one from ‘the world’ or mystically abolish the difference between male and female (allegedly enacted through sexual renunciation), but binds one into marriage, family life and a household economy. Ephesians thus presents its most important ecclesiological concept, that of ‘the body of Christ’, as a unity that is more moral than mythic.
In this essay, I develop the relationship between the ethnic reasoning that shapes the ecclesiology in the letter's opening chapters and the domestic hierarchy prescribed for the new ‘body of Christ’ in its final chapters. An ethnic approach moves the exegesis of the domestic codes and its subsequent battle imagery in the second half of Ephesians to the wider frame of the entire work; and it goes beyond the limited hermeneutical framework of the ‘origins’ of the reconciliation language in Ephesians, to the more productive examination of its function in the text.
1. Methodological Considerations: Current Ethnic Studies
Exegetical debates over the meaning of ‘ethnic reconciliation’ in Ephesians occur in part because scholars bring conflicting suppositions about ethnic identity and race to the interpretation of the text. Examining the ancient evidence, therefore, first requires evaluating the differing theories of ethnicity in the history of scholarship. The term ethnicity is a neologism coined first in the field of anthropology during the 1940s as an academic substitute for older terms such as ‘race’ and ‘tribe’, which fell into disfavour because of their embarrassing history as pejorative language supporting the horrific ideologies and institutions of modern racism made abundantly clear in the Second World War.Footnote 10 Reaching its height in the 1970s, this ‘ethnic turn’ in anthropology accompanied broader shifts in theories of culture in the social sciences and the humanities away from a prevailing idea rooted in the aristocratic celebration of the stable and high ideals of civilisation, as found in the products of ‘high culture’, and towards an understanding that culture describes an entire way of life and a human universal. In other words, whereas older claims had presumed that not everyone displays ‘culture’ (as in German Kultur, Bildung; and French civilité, politesse), the new approach to the question held that all people have culture but not all have the same kind.Footnote 11 Avoiding the older, class-specific sense of ‘high culture’, a new generation of anthropologists thus expanded the term ethnicity from minority, marginalised local populations to include the whole complex of behavioural values and characteristics that identify a group of any sort. This expansion refuted the normative idea that an elite population is not ‘ethnic’, or does not even have ‘ethnicity’. Most important in shaping this new conceptual model was its key innovation: boundaries of ethnic groups are socially constructed rather than biologically self-perpetuating.Footnote 12
1.1. The Old Debate
A number of social scientists objected, however, not least because of the apparent evidence that ethnic conflicts arise from ties deeply rooted in ‘blood’. Theorists typically explain the subsequent debate, most active in the 1970s and 80s, in terms of two rival camps dubbed ‘primordialism’ and ‘constructivism’. Primordialism broadly holds three basic propositions: (1) individuals have a single ethnicity; (2) this ethnicity is by its nature fixed and stable; and (3) this ethnicity is exogenous to outside events (not a product of human societies). In refutation of this position, three shared counterpropositions unite constructivist arguments: (1) individuals have a repertoire of multiple ethnic identities; (2) these ethnicities can be fluid; and (3) these ethnicities can change due to endogenous variables (social, political and economic events external to human biology).Footnote 13 The decades of scholarship mentioned above are important to note, however. To characterise the debate exclusively by appeal to these two camps is now outdated. Current consensus holds that constructivist theories have long won the day in ethnicity and nationalism studies. As Jonathan Hall writes:
Current research tends to grant at least an intersubjective reality to ethnic identity, though it differs from pre-war scholarship on a number of important points. Firstly, it stresses that the ethnic group is not a biological group but a social group, distinguished from other collectivities by its subscription to a putative myth of shared descent and kinship and by its association with a ‘primordial territory’. Secondly, it rejects the nineteenth-century view of ethnic groups as static, monolithic categories with impermeable boundaries for a less restrictive model which recognizes the dynamic, negotiable and situationally constructed nature of ethnicity. Finally, it questions the notion that ethnic identity is primarily constituted by either genetic traits, language, religion or even common cultural forms. While all of these attributes may act as important symbols of ethnic identity, they really only serve to bolster an identity that is ultimately constructed through written and spoken discourse.Footnote 14
And, as another leader in the field puts the status quaestionis, ‘Primordialism per se is untenable, since it assumes what is to be explained: why human beings are so widely differentiated by ethnic origin and culture. It fails to explain why particular ethnic communities emerge, change, and dissolve, or why so many people choose to emigrate and assimilate to other [ethnicities].’Footnote 15 Indeed, research seems to have come full circle, back to Émile Durkheim's essential insight, from his 1912 study of totemism among the Aborigines of Australia, that kinship is never ‘natural’ but always is (as Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us) a ‘social taxonomy’.Footnote 16 The association of ‘fixity’ with ethnicity has come under the most extensive criticism, which is relevant to an interpretation of Ephesians because, I argue, its language about Gentiles (ἔθνη) participated in ancient discursive strategies of articulating ethnic fluidity. A constructivist approach to the issues of identity and difference in Ephesians challenges unexamined presuppositions, born of primordialism, which overlook the very idea of ethnic fluidity (because it is unthinkable and a biological impossibility).
Invoking ethnicity as a critical term of historical analysis for Ephesians admittedly raises a further methodological question of anachronism. Is ethnicity, especially in its constructivist sense, just too modern (or post-modern) a concept to apply to ancient phenomena?Footnote 17 The method becomes even more problematic, one might add, on the fact that no single ancient word equates to ‘our’ term. Though the modern neologism ‘ethnicity’ is derived from ἔθνος (plural ἔθνη), ἔθνος simply designates a population group any of kind: herds of cattle, flocks of birds, hives of bees, swarms of flies, companies of warriors, bands of boys or girls, and even whole nations (i.e. ‘Gentiles’), and the ranks of the dead.Footnote 18 A term closer to our modern sense of ethnicity might be λαός (people, ‘nation’), but it does not occur in Ephesians, which some commentators find significant evidence from silence that the author of Ephesians does not designate the church as a ‘people’.Footnote 19 To be sure, an exegesis built upon a term not actually in the text (such as ‘ethnicity’) appears at first glance to be bad methodology.
In reply to these potential objections, let me clarify my theoretical assumptions. I take as an axiom of historical research that the helpfulness of the category of ethnicity, as in any critical term of analysis, is best measured by how it explains the evidence, not by the extent to which people in the past expressed an equivalent term in their language, or otherwise would have recognised the category as one of their own. In this regard, I agree with the historian of religions Robert Campany, who has explained this axiom for the comparable term religions in the field of religious studies generally. That classical antiquity lacked a word for ‘ethnicity’ does not, prima facie, constitute an argument against modern scholars employing the term:
It would do so only if the sole legitimate task of historical scholarship on religion is to recover and repeat, in the language of the original documents, ancient people's claims – an assumption Jonathan Z. Smith has summarized as a ‘morality of regard for local interpretations’. Even if such a project were desirable, it would be impossible for many reasons, including the fact that the language of research is not the same as the language of the sources, necessitating translation – hence interpretation – at every turn (a responsibility abnegated by the fantasy that we might somehow present the texts pristine and whole to our readers), as well as the fact that, at least until time travel becomes possible, the agendas driving the questions asked and the materials selected must derive from knowledge communities contemporaneous to the scholar.Footnote 20
It is not sufficient to adhere only to the explicit terms of an author, as if critical exegesis were nothing more than literalistic word studies. We must also examine synonyms and cognates, modes of argument, motifs, themes, topoi and ideas in order to recognise how ancient authors could talk ‘around’ concepts in the fundamentally oral culture of the ancient Mediterranean. Ancient Greeks, for instance, may have lacked our exact term, but they nonetheless were capable of talking around the concept of ‘ethnicity’ in a number of telling ways: by attributing the social cohesion of an ἔθνος to γένος (birth) and συγγένεια (kinship); by characterising distinctive peoples by their δίαιτα (daily way of life), ἔθεα (customary habits) and νόμοι (regulated norms); and by describing how a πολιτεία (citizen body) inculcates a particular διάνοια (set of mental values) and bodily cohesion through παιδεία (education). Ethnicity was, therefore, discursively constructed in classical antiquity, that is, constituted by the language of the participants themselves.Footnote 21 All these ancient discursive practices are relevant for the investigation of Ephesians, particularly the language of πολιτεία (Eph 2.12), διάνοια (2.3; 4.18), σύσσωμος (3.6) and παιδεία (6.4).
Claiming an ethnic meaning for these terms is controversial, however. Consequently, I raise an overarching methodological question, returning to the very idea of ‘religions’. The question is whether such terms as πολιτεία in fact described an ethnicity or, rather, emphasised citizenship in the redefinition of Hellenistic communities like the Jews (and the early Christians) from ‘ethnic’ groups to ‘religious’ ones; in other words, did Mediterranean people distinguish between ethnicity and religion? This question lies at the centre of a new debate more current and more relevant to biblical studies than the older one between ‘primordialism’ and ‘constructivism’ widely acknowledged as outdated.
1.2. The New Debate
The question divides scholars along two broad lines. On one side of this new debate (the ethnic-reasoning position), scholars such as Paula Fredriksen and Denise Kimber Buell argue, in different ways, for the equivalence of what we call ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’ in ancient Mediterranean societies; any separation of the two terms brings an anachronism (the modern idea of religion as a ‘faith’) that deserves a mandatory retirement from early Christian studies.Footnote 22 ‘Put more concisely’, writes Fredriksen, ‘ancient “religion” was inherited. It characterized ethnic groups. In antiquity, gods ran in the blood’Footnote 23; indeed, ‘cult defined ethnicity and ethnicity defined cult’.Footnote 24 Buell even argues that we should use ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ interchangeably.Footnote 25
On the other side (the non-ethnic–reasoning position), various scholars for different reasons contend that ancient identity did not depend on ethnicity or ‘race’. Erich Gruen, for example, raises the question of whether ‘ethnicity’ is a concept applicable to ancient phenomena. He thus challenges his fellow historians not to overemphasise the role of race and ethnic differences in the investigation of ancient perceptions of identity. Though accepting the constructivist position (which virtually all current critical theorists on ethnic studies now hold), Gruen applies the term ‘ethnicity’ in the consistent sense of a shared lineage (the bloodline) for heuristic purposes, to argue that the ancients did not normally rest their identities on it. Expanding the term to encompass much more than genealogy, in his view, runs the risk of making ‘ethnicity’ a much fuzzier concept and so less useful for interpretation.Footnote 26 In contrast to Gruen, Shaye J. D. Cohen emphasises the rise of a new ‘religious’ identity displacing ethnicity during the formative period of Judaism and Christianity. Cohen's argument, particularly influential on New Testament studies, is that Ἰουδαῖος lost much of its ethnic meaning in the Hasmonean policies of the Second Temple era, which rendered Jewish society capable of being redefined as a Hellenistic πολιτεία, thus separating citizenship from ethnicity.Footnote 27
For the question of whether ethnicity was significant for ancient identities, I find the arguments of Fredriksen and Buell, respectively, to be largely persuasive. Although their positions differ in important ways – Buell foregrounds ‘race’ and comparative ethnic theory, while Fredriksen favours the term ‘ethnicity’ in a method more traditionally historical – both take seriously the significance of ethnic fluidity in discursive constructions of identity and difference. Buell, for example, responds to Cohen this way:
While Shaye Cohen has persuasively argued that Jewish authors adapted ‘Greek political thinking’ to reformulate Judaeanness ‘as a way of life and as a citizenship’ that one can join, he views this way of thinking – for both Greeks and Judaeans – as a(n) indication of the ‘removal of the ethnicity from the concept of “Hellene” and Ioudaios’. In Cohen's view, any sign of mutability marks the absence of true ethnicity ... For Cohen, religiosity is a cultural category and contrasts with ethnicity because it is an achieved or voluntary status rather than an ascribed one. But this interpretation is problematic both because it presupposes intactness and givenness to ethnicity that is not demonstrable in ancient sources, and because it insists upon such a sharp distinction between ethnicity and religious affiliation. It is better to say that terms such as Ioudaios and Hellēn remain concepts culturally intelligible as ethnicities but that what constitutes a Ioudaios or Hellēn changes over time.Footnote 28
Yet, in a more fine-grained analysis of our respective views, my position is closer to that of Fredriksen than that of Buell. The difference is Fredriksen's more historical analysis of cult as an ancient ethnic designation:
Some of these pagans did, weirdly, ‘become’ Ioudaioi, in effect changing ethnic groups, an act that went against a commonsense construal of ‘blood’. What moderns designate ‘conversion’, given ancient divinity's ethnic embeddedness, hardly made sense. The closest Roman analogues were adoption and marriage, both of which ritually created a bond of (legal but fictive) kinship, obligating the adoptee, or the wife, to new deities, rituals, and ancestors. While a pagan's worshiping the gods of other peoples had no necessary effect on his relationships with his own gods, and while a pagan's decision to honor the god of Israel along with his own gods was an available option, a pagan's ‘becoming’ a Jew was tantamount to changing his own past, reconfiguring his ancestry, deserting his own pantheon, family, and patria. For these reasons, hostile pagan witnesses considered what we call ‘conversion’ an act of cultural treason, and they criticized pagan Judaizing or ‘god-fearing’ as the beginning of this slippery slope (again, see Juvenal Sat. 14).Footnote 29
The section below grounds this theory exegetically in Ephesians by examining its language's participation in ancient discursive strategies that constructed early Christian difference (a single new humanity) through Graeco-Roman norms of ethnic reasoning. In this way, I propose a new approach to the problem of why and how the author of Ephesians attempted to construct a distinct ecclesiology.
2. Discursive Constructions of Ethnic Fixity and Fluidity in Ephesians
The early Christian author of Ephesians deploys two very different modes of ethnicity: a fixed mode and a fluid mode. Each of these modes operates with a distinct set of constructions and topoi, and each also has a distinct way of envisioning identity and difference in the world. The fixed mode identifies difference as stable, essential properties created by cosmic fate and divine determinism even ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1.4). As commentators have noted, this dualism of insiders (‘children of light’) and outsiders (children of ‘darkness’, ‘disobedience’, and ‘the wrath of God’) (5.3–15), in which believers are exhorted never to become ‘partakers’ (συμμέτοχοι) with outsiders (5.7) and are called up for battle defending the community's holy borders (6.10–17), strongly parallels the particular Jewish sectarianism of the Qumran community.Footnote 30
The second mode, which I call ‘fluidity’, identifies native differences as merely temporary and utterly malleable: an instability requiring constant moral exhortation (training in paideia), which occupies the letter's second half (Eph 4.1–6.23) and is the letter's stated backstory (baptism changed the person ‘in which you [pl.] once lived’).Footnote 31 The author of Ephesians reminds his invited audience that its former Gentile identity has been transformed from ‘alien’ into a single new humanity (ἄνθρωπος) (2.11–22).Footnote 32 The rhetoric of alienation functions not to valorise otherness and ‘alien’ status as the Christian ideal, but to disavow alien identity entirely as a legitimate means of thinking about the unity of the church (in striking contrast to the strong valorisations of ‘alien’ status for Christian self-definition in 1 Peter and Hebrews).Footnote 33 Because they are ‘no longer strangers and sojourners’ (Eph 2.19) as they once were in their native identity, believers must now live by the ‘good works’ of their ascribed identity (2.10), which resocialises them back into Greco-Roman society (an important difference between Ephesians and the Qumran literature). In other words, this alien rhetoric belongs to the letter's overarching discursive project to persuade its invited readers that, by their baptism (4.5; 5.26), they have disposed of their previous ethnicity and alienation.Footnote 34
Ephesians oscillates between fixed and fluid modes of ethnicity. Though the author's attempt to have it both ways may seem odd, if not downright contradictory, the comparative analysis of ethnic discourse shows that such reasoning frequently exhibits some combination of appeal to both fixity and fluidity. These two modes function in tandem to construct discursively a ‘regime of truth’ that gives the appearance of permanence even while negotiating change and transformation.Footnote 35 We understand this dynamic oscillation better by relocating the issue of ethnic identity in Ephesians away from the question of whether ethnicity is a fixed or mutable thing (the old primordialist/constructivist debate) to analyses of ethnic reasoning as a discourse of both fixity and fluidity, whose persuasive force lies precisely in the stereoscopy (double-edged vision) that it embraces.Footnote 36
The language of Ephesians advances this stereoscopy by exploiting commonly held assumptions in antiquity about the ritual power of sacrifice to authorise a new patrilineal descent. The blessings of the opening eulogy praise God at length as the ‘father’ (πατήρ) (Eph 1.3; see also 1.2) who, prior to the foundation of the cosmos, chose ‘us’ (Gentiles and Jews collectively) ‘in Christ’ to be ‘holy and blameless before him [God] (ἁγίους καὶ ἀμώμους κατενώπιον αὐτοῦ)’ (1.4), and who ‘predetermined us for sonship (εἰς υἱοθεσίαν)’ through Jesus Christ (1.5; see also 1.11, 14), in whom ‘we have redemption through his blood’ (ἔχομεν τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ, 1.7). The terms ἅγιος and ἄμωμος (1.4) point to the cultic terminology of blood sacrifice, about victims being acceptable only if pure and unblemished.Footnote 37 With the explicit vocabulary of sacrifice, the author explains how the reconciliation of Gentiles and Jews occurred – through Christ's ‘blood’ (1.7; see also 2.13).Footnote 38 The author picks up this same motif again in the letter's paraenetic section to exhort his audience towards virtues (4.25–32) in imitation of Christ as ‘a sweet-smelling offering and sacrifice to God’ (προσφορὰν καὶ θυσίαν τῷ θεῷ εἰς ὀσμὴν εὐωδίας, 5.2). All this cultic language would have readily evoked in ancient audiences normative assumptions about the constant need to rewrite ancestries paternally through the αἷμα of sacrifice.Footnote 39 My point is that ‘blood’ (an apparent ‘fixity’) turns out to be sacrificial, and ‘sonship’ turns out to be adoptive – an ethnic discourse in the fluid mode. In short, ‘blood’ changes with adoption.Footnote 40
Recent cross-cultural studies on the widespread connection of sacrificial blood and paternal lineage illuminate the authoritative assumptions in which the language of Ephesians participates.Footnote 41 In this cultural logic, men sacrifice in order to mimic symbolically and so to usurp maternal ties of biological birth. The need for sacrificial blood to create paternity comes from the blunt reality that maternity needs no such social constructs; childbirth is directly observable. Because fatherhood (especially in antiquity, lacking the technology of DNA testing) must be socially constructed through cult, sacrifice functions as the male counterpart to childbirth and is, as Nancy Jay neatly puts it, ‘a remedy of having been born of woman’.Footnote 42
Sacrifice does not only carry gendered implications but also creates all kinds of new social relations, including kinship and ethnicity.Footnote 43 Indeed, religious ritual and ethnicity are interrelated. The ritual power of sacrifice to create a new ethnic relation did not, however, compromise ancient claims that blood ties are immutable and ‘natural’. The language of Ephesians thus keeps within the logic of ancient sacrifice by rewriting the bloodline of believing Gentiles while simultaneously asserting it to have a permanent stability (‘for the fullness of time’, Eph 1.10). The language of ethnic reconciliation in Ephesians has both essentialist (fixed) and constructivist (fluid) properties. If the properties of such a cultural logic seem paradoxical, they nonetheless have a long history in classical antiquity.
2.1. Gods Ran in the ‘Blood’ – Spilt by Cult
The idea that ‘blood’ (genealogical ties) can be changed by cult goes back to the first systematic definition of Greek self-identity (τὸ Ἑλληνικόν) as an ethnicity, a discursive construction of Panhellenic kinship that Herodotus ascribed to the Athenians during the Persian War (480–479 bce). In this passage, the locus classicus of modern academic studies on ancient ethnicity, Herodotus has the Athenian envoys say the following in answer to the Spartans, who fear that the Athenians would make a separate peace with the Persians:
There are many important factors that would prevent us [Athenians] from doing this [making an agreement with Persia], even if we wanted to. First and foremost are the statues of the gods and the temples which have been burned and destroyed; it is necessary for us to avenge this to the best of our ability rather than come to an agreement with him who did it. Secondly, there are the common blood (ὅμαιμον) and tongue (ὁμόγλωσσον) that we Greeks share, together with the common cult places (θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινά), the sacrifices (θυσίαι) and the similar customs (ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα); it would not be noble for the Athenians to betray all this.
(Herodotus 8.144.2; trans. Hall, Ethnic Identity, 44)The evocation of ‘common blood’ alludes to the patrilineal genealogies of kinship that had come down from the Archaic age, which sacrifice continued to dramatise in daily ritual. This idea of ‘blood’, however, receives little attention in the overarching scheme of Herodotus's Histories (constructing the ‘barbarian’ and the ‘Greek’ as oppositional ethnic binaries). Indeed, the passage belongs to a particular narrative context (Books 6–8), in which the Athenians pledge they will not ‘go Persian’ when various Greek states are questioning whether or not to ‘Medise’ (μηδίζειν), that is, to desert their folk and join the Persians (Herodotus 7.138). This context shows Herodotus's ethnic reasoning to have been more fluid than fixed. In place of a genealogical model of ἔθνος (descent), Herodotus redefines ethnic consanguinity (ὅμαιμον) in terms more explicitly ritualistic and cultural: common sacrifices (θυσίαι), shrines (θεῶν ἱδρύματα), language (ὁμόγλωσσον) and customs (ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα). Through praxis, one could acquire Hellenicity, or lose it (i.e. μηδίζειν). As with the gods, so also with ethnicity: they ran in the blood – spilt by cult.Footnote 44
The Romans adapted this ethnic reasoning into a diplomatic discourse of empire that has special relevance for Asia Minor. Frequently in peace negotiations, such a language of ‘reconciliation’ denoted a change from hostility to friendship that focused on work of mediating ambassadors.Footnote 45 Diplomats typically asserted the ‘rediscovery’ of an ancient kinship between the Romans and their previous foes, a renewed συγγένεια involving Troy (Ilium) as a shared ancestral home. This claim mapped Rome onto the Hellenistic East as neither Greek nor barbarian but a kind of mediating (transnational), third ethnicity.Footnote 46 Leading Roman families, the so-called Troianae gentes, packaged their authority in pedigrees of genealogical succession going back directly to Aeneas and his companions, for example. And, indeed, a blended body politic defined Romanness generally, from foundation legends (the rape of the Sabine women; the marriage alliance of Aeneas and Lavinia) to an expansive notion of citizenship, unusual in the ancient Mediterranean world, which regularly enfranchised deserving foreigners and formally manumitted slaves. As it became an imperial ideology, the legend of Roman ethnic mixture fostered the development of new, more inclusive forms of cultic and administrative protocols among provincial populations that variously opened the boundary between citizen and alien on the local level.Footnote 47 The ecclesiology of Ephesians – the church as ‘one new humanity’ of Jews and Gentiles (2.15) reconciled already at baptism (4.5; 5.26) and maintained by conventional household duty codes (5.21–6.9) – is not just ‘parallel’ to this development of a Roman ethnic discourse among provincial populations, but an instance of it. As ancient diplomatic correspondence presented Romanness as a new, blended (transnational) ethnicity in which former foes became reconciled in a peace mediated by the work of designated ambassadors, so too the author of Ephesians presented the universal ἐκκλησία as a new, blended (transnational) ethnicity in which the former foes of Jews and Gentiles became reconciled in a ‘peace’ (εἰρήνη, Eph 2.17) proclaimed by Paul's appointed ‘ambassadorial work’ as the designated apostle of the entire church (πρεσβεύω, Eph 6.20).Footnote 48
The Roman discourse of reconciliation was not just ‘political’: it was also ‘religious’. The prescribed ritual of animal sacrifice always sealed the peace negotiations, which reconciled both parties to a deity. For example, concerning the peace treaty between Rome and the Latin city of Alba Longa, Livy explains the cultic process of kinship diplomacy:
The Fetial priest was Marcus Valerius; he made Spurius Fusius pater patratus, touching his head and hair with the sacred sprig. The pater patratus is appointed to pronounce the oath, that is, to solemnise the pact; and this he accomplishes with many words, expressed in a long metrical formula, which it is not worthwhile to quote. The conditions being then recited, he shouts, ‘Hear, O Jupiter; hear, pater patratus of the Alban People; hear ye, people of Alba: from these terms, as they have been publicly rehearsed from beginning to end, without fraud, from these tablets, or this wax, and as they have been this day clearly understood, the Roman People will not be the first to depart. If it shall first depart from them, by general consent, with malice, aforethought, then on that day do you, great Father of the gods (Diespiter), so smite the Roman People as I shall here today smite this piglet: and so much the harder smite them as your power and your strength are greater.’ When Spurius had said these words, he struck the piglet with a flint. In like manner the Albans pronounced their own forms and their own oath, by the mouth of their own dictator and priests. (Livy 1.24.6–9; trans. Foster, LCL, adapted)
The essential ritual moments of the Alban treaty invoke divine witnesses and the slaughter of an animal victim, which execute by analogy the ritual power of the gods against oath violators. The smiting of the piglet with a flint knife represents Jupiter's lightning, an instrument believed to punish perjurers. Livy's scene is stylised. It resembles designs on Roman coins showing two figures taking an oath by touching their swords upon a piglet.Footnote 49 The killing of a piglet bound the Albans into an alliance with Rome, a reconcilation of former enemies into friends that, in turn, also reconciled the one newly (re)created people to Jupiter.Footnote 50 Indeed, Livy constructs the Alban war with Rome as a bellum civile between people of the same ethnicity – ‘Trojan ancestry’ – ‘since Lavinium had been planted from Troy, Alba from Lavinium, and from the line of the Alban kings had come the Romans’ (1.23.1–2).
2.2. Analogous Ethnic Reasoning in Ephesians
The ecclesiology of Ephesians constructs τὰ ἔθνη along lines similar to ethnic reasoning found in wider Greco-Roman culture. The author applied the same kind of logic as the Athenian envoys and especially the Roman ambassadors because their ethnic reasoning of kinship diplomacy helped him to remind his invited Gentile readers that, despite their former alienation from God and Israel's πολιτεία, they have now been made one with Jews in the universal ἐκκλησία produced by Paul's Gospel and his ambassadorial work. The author's turn to categories of ethnicity might seem odd, but only if we think of τὰ ἔθνη and οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι as merely religious categories (in the modern, Protestant, sense of ‘unbelievers’ and ‘believers’) rather than as the ethnic categories they already are in the letter's rhetorical situation.Footnote 51 ‘Religion’ cannot justifiably be separated from ‘ethnicity’ in the letter's ancient context.
The undisputed Pauline letters describe the unity of τὰ ἔθνη and οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι into one new creation as an eschatological event distinctly in the future, at the Parousia of Christ, the timing of which remains an on-going controversy in Paul's mission. Ephesians, however, depicts that unity as no longer a controversy, but as an already achieved reality in the present.Footnote 52 In ways analogous to Roman kinship diplomacy, the letter thus exhorts the invited audience of τὰ ἔθνη not to valorise their alleged ‘stranger’ (‘alien’) status but, rather, to remember and so to celebrate their new heritage and bloodline:
Remember, therefore, that you [pl.] were once Gentiles according to the flesh, called the Foreskin by the so-called Circumcision that is wrought on the flesh, and therefore at that time you used to be without Christ, being alienated from the citizenship (πολιτεία) of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and being godless in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you [pl.] who were once far off have become near by the blood of Christ. (Eph 2.11–13)
Explicitly political diction exhorts the invited audience of the Gentiles to recall their new place within the geography of a new humanity whose main feature is a reconciled ‘peace’. Previously, the Gentiles were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, but now they are not. The term τὰ ἔθνη presupposes a Jewish vanishing point: without οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι there can be no τὰ ἔθνη. This language of new humanity is thus mapped onto the universal ἐκκλησία as a ‘new’ (‘true’) Israel, with no more of those pesky commandments, especially circumcision:
For he [Christ] is indeed our peace, who in his flesh made both of them [the Foreskin and the Circumcision] into one and destroyed the dividing wall of the fence, namely the hostility, having abolished the law with its commandments in decrees, so that he might create out of the two one new humanity in himself, thus making peace, and might through the Cross reconcile both to God in one body, having put the hostility to death in himself. And having come, he proclaimed peace to you who were far away and peace to the ones who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Eph 2.14–18)
Thoroughly emphasising the universal ἐκκλησία, the author looks back on the church's foundation – apostles and prophets (cf. 1 Cor 3.11) – and on the disposal of the converts’ identity as τὰ ἔθνη that was necessary to build this achieved unity into an architectural wonder:
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners but fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of God's household, built upon the foundation of the apostles and [Christian] prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the keystone, in whom the whole, framed-together edifice grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into God's dwelling place in the Spirit. (Eph 2.19–22)
The context of all this rhetoric is baptism, with its attendant moral exhortations, which brings ‘near’ those who were once ‘far’. The address to the Gentiles as those once ‘far away’ but now ‘near’ (Eph 2.13) follows a technical terminology about proselytes in ancient Jewish literature, which modern commentators have noted since the nineteenth century.Footnote 53 Exegetes often fret over the question of whether or not the language originally ‘comes from’ the Old Testament. We need to move beyond the limited hermeneutical framework of the ‘origins’ of the language, however, to the more productive examination of its function in the text. The language performs an act of injurious naming, what (following Judith Butler) we would label as ‘hate speech’. It calls the very category ‘Gentile’ into existence, deploys ‘alien’ rhetoric to fill that sobriquet with meaningful significance as a homogenous ‘other’ ethnicity, and then proclaims triumphantly that such ethnic identity is foreign, vile, ungodly, superfluous, and must be discarded (Eph 4.17).Footnote 54 The perspective is what moderns would call ethnic cultural stereotyping.Footnote 55
If the ethnic reasoning in Ephesians functions as hate speech, it also works in tandem with repeated assurances of ‘love’ (Eph 1.4; 3.19; 6.23). The double-edged function of this discourse aims to map the invited audience as above that of Jew and Gentile, as a new ethnicity in which baptism has already enthroned the ἐκκλησία ‘in the heavenly places’ (2.6) as One New Humanity – different from the historical Israel. This resocialisation into a heavenly Church based on love does not mean the erasure of all difference, however. Nor does it mean that the believers are already in the heavens (1.14).Footnote 56 The final chapters of Ephesians introduce the differences on earth that it will not erase, refashioning the myth of Adamic unity in early Christian baptismal imagery into the ordinary hierarchy of a household morality – away from ascetic teachings.Footnote 57
The morality tutors its audience in the practical wisdom of a ‘worthy life’ (Eph 4.1) after the didactic style of an ancient handbook: it promises comprehensiveness (3.4), employs direct imperatival expressions (5.15–18, 22, 25; 6.1, 4, 5, 9–17), and offers a technē that replaces irrational instinct and childish vulnerability to alternative, ‘erroneous’, doctrines (2.3; 4.14, 17–22).Footnote 58 The author infantilises the audience in order to build it back up as a new people, teaching that a specific ‘way of life’ (περιπατεῖν) can and must serve as an ethnic line of demarcation around the impermeable borders of the church. ‘This I say and testify in the Lord’, the author states, ‘that you [pl.] no longer walk as the Gentiles walk in their mental futility, being darkened in their thinking (διάνοια), alienated from God's life on account of the ignorance that is in them, on account of their hardness of heart, those who having become callous gave themselves up to debauchery towards every impure practice to the extreme’ (4.17–19). This rhetoric repeats ancient discursive constructions of ethnic flexibility by stressing the capacities of paideia to change native identity.
In this way, the author of Ephesians participates in ideologies of kinship diplomacy similar to those of the Romans, who insisted that their ethnicity was neither Greek nor Italian (barbarian) but a tertium quid (i.e. Trojan). The rhetoric of this transnational, ‘third’ ethnicity constructively used foreignness to distinguish various sorts of religious power and authority through the attributes of ethnic flexibility.Footnote 59 Such differentiation is analogous to the larger rhetorical project of Ephesians.
Precursors to this idea appear in Athenian assertions that Greek ethnicity is a matter of παίδευσις (education, nurture) rather than φύσις (nature), a question of διάνοια (mindset, character) rather than γένος (birth, descent).Footnote 60 Later Greek authors of the Second Sophistic – the context in which we ought to read Ephesians – developed this ethnic sense of paideia at great length, especially to fashion a common identity among aristocratic elites living under Roman rule.Footnote 61 As Aelius Aristides writes in his panegyric to Rome:
You have caused the word ‘Roman’ to belong not to a city, but to be the name of a common race (γένους ὄνομα κοινοῦ τινος), and this not one out of all the races, but a balance (ἀντίρροπος) to all the remaining ones. You do not now divide the race into Greeks and barbarians, nor have you made your distinction a foolish one in the eyes of mankind, since you present a city more populous than the whole Greek race, one might say.Footnote 62
The new, universal κοινὸς γένος of Roman ethnicity mediates (balances) the world: it is a peacemaker. This theme of peacemaker, who abolishes former laws and their ethnic divisions, appears also in Ephesians:
For he is indeed our peace, who in his flesh made both of them [the Foreskin and the Circumcision] into one and destroyed the dividing wall of the fence, namely the hostility, having abolished the law with its commandments in decrees, so that he might create out of the two one new humanity in himself, thus making peace, and might through the cross reconcile both to God in one body, having put the hostility to death in himself. (Eph 2.14–16)
Ephesians thus praises Christ as Aristides praises Rome: each ruler is a celebrated world benefactor who grants citizenships to foreigners.Footnote 63
Following this line of contextualisation, we find another parallel between Ephesians and Roman discourse. The prime example of imperial benefaction was the enfranchisement of soldiers into the Roman ethnos. The ideology of a strong unit cohesion in the Roman army encouraged soldiers from the ‘manifold peoples of the provinces’ (τὰ ἔθνη, in its specifically Roman geographic meaning) to dispose of their native ethnicities and become Roman (Aristides, Regarding Rome 26.75), even to adopt Latin names.Footnote 64 In the final analysis, therefore, I argue that these discursive constructions of ethnic fluidity, proverbial for Roman soldiers, offer the best interpretive context in which to read the battle language at the end of Ephesians (6.10–17) as well as the thoroughgoing imagery of strong unit cohesion (σύσσωμος) in the entire epistle (e.g. 3.6).
3. Conclusion
The deuteropauline letter ‘to the Ephesians’ celebrates its most important ecclesiological concept, that of the ‘body of Christ’, in the language of ethnicity and racial difference. Such an odd vision of the church has long puzzled, and has often embarrassed, many modern interpreters and especially those seeking to make Ephesians relevant for the hope of unity that ecumenical movements foster today.Footnote 65 In order to neutralise this moral conundrum, commentators have adopted the hermeneutics of avoidance and denial, by labelling ‘race’ a modern concept foreign to the ancient context of biblical authors.Footnote 66 On this view, Ephesians allegedly declares the erasure of all ethnic difference in a universal church.
In contrast to that widespread line of interpretation, this essay has argued that the ecclesiology of ‘one new humanity’ in Ephesians is an example of ethnic reasoning. The unity language in Ephesians participated in ancient discursive strategies that constructed early Christian difference through Greco-Roman norms of ethnic reasoning. Ephesians did so to contain Pauline traditions of baptism within the prosaic ethic of an ordinary household economy, turning the mythical language into a practical morality. This moral turn reacted against competing post-Pauline traditions identifying baptism with the myth of the Adamic ‘Androgyne’, whose mystical reunification of opposites symbolised the actual abolition of sexual difference and the rejection of family. The moralising ‘reconciliation’ language of Ephesians reflects particularly Roman kinship diplomacy whose celebratory rhetoric typically asserted a rediscovered συγγένεια between previous foes that was unknown to earlier generations. Such diplomacy understood the ritual power of sacrifice to rewrite bloodlines, and it exploited Hellenistic traditions (particularly prevalent in Asia Minor) that mapped Rome onto the Hellenistic East as neither Greek nor barbarian, but as a kind of mediating (transnational), third ethnicity.
The ecclesiology of Ephesians thus constructs τὰ ἔθνη along the lines of ethnic reasoning found elsewhere in Greco-Roman culture. This language of ethnic reconciliation has both essentialist (fixed) and constructivist (fluid) properties. The letter's sharp dualism of insiders and outsiders (Eph 5.3–15), in which believers are called up for battle defending the community's holy borders (6.10–17), exemplifies an ethnic fixity. Ethnic fluidity appears in the letter's reminders to its invited readers that their native identity has been transformed from its formerly ‘alien’ nature (2.11–22) but requires the constant maintenance of household duty codes (4.1–6.23). This apparently paradoxical oscillation between fixity and fluidity becomes intelligible if we relocate the ecclesiology of Ephesians away from the question of whether ethnicity is a fixed or mutable thing (the old primordialist/constructivist debate) to analyses of ethnic reasoning as a discourse. This interpretative approach brings a new understanding to the ecclesiology of Ephesians: it is an instance of analogous cultural affirmations about the essential fluidity and changeability of all ethnicity, which was common in classical culture and quite familiar to ancient audiences.
