‘No longer strangers’: The Use of Alien Rhetoric in Ephesians

Thus we come to the key passage for this inquiry: Eph 2:11–22. Here the deployment of alien rhetoric functions not to valorize the self as other but rather as a useful means for thinking about how cultural multiplicity becomes unity or even singularity. Furthermore, as I shall argue, it also works to make the basic rhetorical contours of Pauline theology translatable and compelling to a non-Jewish audience. But first, how does this deployment fit within the larger “space of possibles” (to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu)

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for discursively coding the concept of the alien or stranger during the early centuries of the Common Era? Given the relational and even parasitic nature of the category,¹⁹

we need to begin with the connotations of the term citizen (

), which functioned in antiquity as the insider term that gave the outsider term meaning. The character, politics, and boundaries of Roman citizenship varied according to time and place throughout the Empire. Yet regardless of these historical and geographical shifts, its function as a category remains clear: to denote ultimate insider status.

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Even after the Emperor Caracalla's edict of 212 C.E. granted citizenship to the entire free population, this connotation likely did not shift very much. While politically the “whole world” may have become citizens, the binary opposition of citizen versus foreigner-stranger would have nonetheless remained viable as a socio-rhetorical tool for making meaning and demarcating difference.

In this context, the basic coding of alien rhetoric constructs the profoundly negative realm of the “un-citizen.” As Dio Chrysostom (ca. 40–120 C.E.) tells us, “[t]o the disenfranchised, life seems with good reason not worth living, and many choose death rather than life after losing their citizenship.”²¹

Or as a treatise attributed to the second century C.E. satirist Lucian puts it bluntly, “Sojourning is a disgrace!”²² Lucian's treatise throughout draws a sharp contrast between true citizens and incoming strangers and characterizes the latter as bastards.²³ These and other examples²⁴ show clearly that the coding of alien rhetoric in the early Roman Empire allowed it to function as a powerful language of reproach for both literal and figurative purposes.

Yet this conclusion can be complexified by an examination of the ways in which the discourse of Roman citizenship and alien-status emerged and functioned within the context of imperial expansion, as well as practices of extending citizenship as the Empire grew. Through a complex historical process from the fourth to first centuries B.C.E., Rome expanded over the Italian peninsula and eventually united Italy politically as a Roman state.²⁵

Throughout this process, the question of multiple and competing citizenships looms large. As Roman citizenship becomes an option, or more often a necessity, for Italian cities, where should one's loyalties lie? We can see one attempt at an answer to this question (taking a particular political and ideological slant) in Cicero's De legibus. Here Cicero proclaims the unitary nature of the Roman citizenship in the first century B.C.E. He allows that a man may acknowledge his municipality as a homeland or patria, but ultimately, the patria of Rome always trumps all others.²⁶ Cicero's rhetoric thus tries to produce the impression of a political reality in which, whatever competing loyalties one may hold, only the citizenship of Rome matters.

The events of these centuries put in place a paradigm of gradual Romanization and acquisition of citizenship that the Romans would hold to throughout the rest of the Republic and into the first two centuries of the empire. Gradually a system emerged in which communities could move up a scale of status. Various grades existed along this scale (civitas, municipium, colonia, etc.), and the Romans could promote communities through petition or as a reward for military service.²⁷

This system continued through the first two centuries C.E.: as late as the reign of Septimius Severus (193–211 C.E.), communities were still applying to move up to a higher status. But be that as it may, for our purposes, the analytical payoff is this: what is important to note in this historical survey is the emergence of a particular kind of cultural logic—one in which political multiplicity could become a kind of privileged unity under the aegis of an expanding state. Once the possibility for moving from alien-status to citizenship was institutionally and discursively grounded, it provided a culturally compelling rhetorical option for articulating a way in which pluralistic difference could be transformed or disciplined into unity.

Thus the deutero-Pauline author of Ephesians appropriates the connotative possibilities of Roman citizen and alien discourse as a matrix in which to understand the Christ event. As he or she argues in 2:12–13,

Here Ephesians 2 understands Christian identity in terms of movement. As 2:19 avers, this is a movement from alien-status to citizenship with the saints and membership in the household of God brought about by the efficaciousness of Christ's death:

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But whereas alien status functions as a foundational category of Christian identity in texts like 1 Peter and Hebrews, one should not characterize the deployment of the topos in Ephesians as a simple inversion of this move. We cannot capture the complexity of the situation by simply arguing that in 1 Peter and Hebrews, the Christian as resident-alien constitutes the basic building block for identity, while in Ephesians, the Christian as “no longer resident alien” serves a similar purpose. Rather the situation is decidedly more complicated for two reasons: 1) Ephesians is working with all kinds of identity categories (i.e. saints, sinners, adopted children, children of wrath, to name only a few), and the disavowal of resident-alien identity is only one discursive strand in a very elaborate picture; 2) I would argue that, contra Hebrews and 1 Peter, the stranger-alien designation in Ephesians is not fundamental in and of itself, but rather important insofar as it works to explain and fill out the meaning of an even more basic identity marker—the designation ‘Gentiles'. This becomes clear when we read 2:12 in the context of verses 11 and 12 together:

Here the key category that we need to examine is not “strangers and aliens” but “Gentiles” (

). At the most basic semantic level, it simply means something like “groups of people who live together” or later “the nations,” but already in the Septuagint and in other pre-Christian works the term often functions with a sense of “nations other than one's own.”

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As Shaye Cohen points out somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not.”²⁹

Turning to the undisputed letters of Paul for a moment, we see clearly the struggle of someone who customarily divides the world up into Jews and Gentiles.³⁰

As such, Paul is wrestling with what the Christ-event means for this binary division. Indeed, as the scholarship of the so-called New Perspective has shown us (beginning primarily with Krister Stendahl and developed notably by E. P. Sanders, James Dunn and others), “the ramifications of the Messiah's arrival for the relation between Jews and Gentiles” is the key issue for Paul, not Christ as “the answer to the anguish of a plagued conscience.”³¹

As E. P. Sanders puts it, Thus letters like Galatians and Romans seek to work out the place of Gentiles in God's covenant plan, focusing on issues of theological and practical concern such as Jew-Gentile relations, circumcision and food laws.

This is what it is all about for Paul: how what happens in Christ overcomes the Jew/Gentile distinction that has historically excluded Gentiles from membership in the people of God (as well as what that means for the practical life of the church in terms of disputes over circumcision and table). But when we turn to Ephesians (deutero-Pauline and thus roughly 30–40 years later), we see none of this concrete concern with the lived practices of Jewish-Gentile integration. A number of scholars have noticed the lack of interest in these issues on the part of Ephesians. As Nils Dahl notes, highlighting the text's surprising lack of anti-Jewish sentiments or warnings about “Judaizing” customs, “the author of Ephesians had a keen interest in the Jewish roots and origin of the church but failed to show any concern for the relationship of his audience to contemporary Jews in or outside the church.”³³

With that being the case, my interest here is in the function of the designation “Gentiles” throughout the letter. Some scholars have argued that the usage of this term in Ephesians has an ethnically generic sense of “non-Christians” or “unbelievers”—a usage that replaces the Jewish “us” term, of the Jew/Gentile binary, with a Christian “us,” thereby making the Christian/Gentile contrast the key opposition.

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Those who hold to this interpretation for Ephesians generally concede that Eph 2: 11, “you Gentiles in the flesh,” indicates an exception, in which the addition of the phrase “in the flesh” (

) functions in this one case to mark the ethnically specific meaning of “non-Jews.” As Andrew Lincoln points out, however, verses such as Eph 3:1, “this is the reason that I Paul am a prisoner for the sake of you Gentiles”; Eph 3:6, “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel”; and Eph 3:8, “this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ,” all clearly seem to use the term

in a way that follows Paul's predominant usage as meaning “non-Jews.”

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Thus I follow Lincoln in choosing not to read

in Eph 2:11 as a special exception. Rather I would maintain that when Ephesians talks about Gentiles, it works with a Jew/non-Jew binary and does not make a distinction between Christians and unbelievers.

With that said, I want to note that only Ephesians, of all the letters in the New Testament, explicitly uses terms of direct address to designate its audience as Gentiles

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(with the exception of an aside to the implied audience, or at least a portion of it, in Romans).³⁷

What should we make of this? One standard scholarly hypothesis proposes that Ephesians addresses a congregation of Gentile Christians. This is probably correct, insofar as this form of direct address would not make for particularly compelling rhetoric to an audience full of people who self-identified as

, “Judaeans/Jews,” in one way or another. Many commentators go further. Andrew Lincoln, for instance, argues that an author who “ascribes to Gentiles [in v. 12] deficiencies they would not themselves have recognized, and yet who at the same time distances himself from these distinctions, is likely to have been a Jewish Christian disciple of Paul.”

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While this may or may not be the case, one can push the logic of Lincoln's point further, beyond the interests of drawing conclusions about the text's authorship. For it is noteworthy not just that Ephesians 2 “ascribes to Gentiles deficiencies they would not themselves have recognized,” but that it calls its audience “Gentiles” at all. On one level, this quite likely represents an allusion to the prophetic tradition of addressing the

as seen in the Septuagint.

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But the question still remains: why would a non-Jewish audience in late first century Asia Minor (or wherever) think of themselves as “Gentiles”?⁴⁰

I answer: they would not. Cultural and religious identity options abounded in antiquity, and one could think in multiple identity categories, oriented around geography, genealogy, cultic practice, philosophical commitments, etc., but from the standpoint of Ephesians' audience, especially given the text's lack of concern with practical issues of “real” Jews and Gentiles, the Jew/Gentile distinction does not constitute the obvious or necessary difference that makes a difference.⁴¹

Thus we can ask, what work does the category “Gentile” do? What is the significance of the exhortation in 2:11, “Remember that formerly you Gentiles?” Here I would argue that the direct address of the audience as Gentiles serves two main functions. First, it constitutes an implied audience, in all its potential unruly and chaotic diversity of possible identities, as a singular and unified group. Second, it pulls that audience into the discursive orbit of Pauline theology, wherein the categories of Jew and Gentile have such crucial importance.

So how does this work exactly? As a starting point, Louis Althusser's theoretical notion of interpellation or hailing proves helpful. In Althusser's famous formulation, “ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects.”⁴²

Judith Butler has developed and complexified this notion in her work on hate speech and has highlighted the constitutive power of naming, not simply in the action of particular voices (as in Althusser's paradigm), but as an “instrument and mechanism of discourses whose efficacy is irreducible to their moment of enunciation.”⁴³ As Butler compellingly argues, Virginia Burrus and Daniel Boyarin have recently utilized this Althusser/Butler framework to analyze how the use of injurious names such as “Jew,” “heretic,” or “pagan” in Christian discourse could actually serve to constitute or to call these respective subjects into existence.⁴⁵ But for our purposes, my concern lies not so much with this fascinating dimension of so-called “hate speech” as with the more general applicability of Butler's theory to the basic act of naming. Thus in Ephesians, hailing or interpellating the implied audience as “Gentiles” becomes a way for the text to categorize an imagined audience in all its diversity of possible identities as a unity. Or to put it another way, the designation “Gentiles” works to calls Ephesians' audience into being as a unified subject that the text can address as such. And in the process, the Jew/Gentile difference is mapped as the difference that really counts.

At the same time, Ephesians' act of interpellation has the effect of pulling the implied audience into a discourse in which the name “Gentile” functions meaningfully—in this case, the discourse of Pauline theology. As discussed earlier, this is a discourse that is concerned first and foremost in its earliest manifestations (i.e., the authentic Paulines) with how Jews and Gentiles can share in the covenant promises of God. But how is this theology meaningful in a cultural context that is not significantly determined by the identity categories of Judaism? It is here that Ephesians' use of stranger and alien language becomes so crucial. Indeed I would argue that the primary function of alien rhetoric in Ephesians is to help make sense of Pauline theology to an audience that is not (and never has been) wrestling with the issues that produced that theology in the first place—“saving Paul for the non-Jewish context,” if you will.

Thus the rhetoric of alien/stranger identity serves to fill out the sense of the designation “Gentile,” making it meaningful for Ephesians' implied audience. While the Jew-Gentile binary is not the difference that makes a difference except from a Jewish point of view, the alien/citizen distinction is a category that would resonate deeply across the Roman Empire. As we heard from Dio Chrysostom earlier, many would rather die than lose their citizenship. The connotations in play here are powerfully emotive, both socially and politically. And Ephesians marshals this potent sense of resonance to explain why its interpretation of Pauline theology matters—that is, it uses alien and citizen categories to imbue the overcoming of the Jew-Gentile divide with a connotative force meant to be vigorously life-giving.

The larger project here is the construction of Christian identity and the domesticating or disciplining of difference in a very specific way—one which has as its ultimate goal the production of a vision of unity embodied in the church. To this end, Ephesians 2 offers its narrative interpretation of the Christ event—one in which the difference that the text itself has called into being as the only significant difference is then subsequently erased. In other words, Ephesians first constitutes its audience as Gentiles, and then gives that designation meaningful significance using the language of alien status, in order to proclaim triumphantly that this status is no longer the case. As verses 13–15 tell us, Christ's blood has brought near the strangers who were far off (

). He has made both groups into one by breaking down the dividing wall (perhaps the Jewish law, or more generally the Jew-Gentile boundary).

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As v. 15 avers, abolishing the law has allowed an act of new creation, one new humanity out of two, and Ephesians, with all the weight of Pauline authority, characterizes this act of sacrificial abolishment (or violence, depending on your point of view) as

or “peace.” While Ephesians does not use explicitly the language of a third race that became prevalent in second and third century Christian discourse, the logic of the narrative moves in this direction.

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In the formulation of J. Z. Smith, “Christianity is neither this nor that, it is some ‘third thing.’ ”⁴⁸

Ephesians 2 thus presents the rhetorical disciplining of difference on two levels: first, the text draws boundaries that determine which difference matters (i.e., the Jew/Gentile difference) through an act of interpellation; then, it proclaims the erasure of that difference “in one body through the cross” (2:16) and thereby creates a platform to launch a specific vision of unity as embodied in the church. The result is the conclusion of Ephesians 2:19: these Gentiles are “no longer strangers and aliens but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (emphasis added). Stranger and alien identity has been replaced by citizenship—all three of these being culturally compelling categories in the late first century C.E. for framing Pauline theology as significant and meaningful in a non-Jewish context. With this replacement in place, the more specifically Pauline identity category of “Gentiles” also becomes superfluous. It has done its work, both to constitute the audience as a unified group and to bring that group into the discourse of Pauline theology. Therefore, having served its purpose, in the text's logic, it can and should be discarded. So 4:17 in fact exhorts the audience: you must “no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their mind” (

).

What remains in the wake of this disposal of identities? The rhetorical unity of the universal church remains, under the auspices of Pauline theological authority. As 3:10 aptly summarizes, the issue of crucial concern all along has been “that the diversified wisdom of God might now be made known through the church” (

). On the other side of this narrative of shifting identities articulated in Ephesians 2, the audience is no longer strangers, no longer resident-aliens, by 4:17 no longer even Gentiles. But they remain a unified subject to be addressed—only now the categorization of that subject has been shifted from “Gentiles” to “the church” or

, a rhetorical entity powerfully figured throughout the letter in terms of a singular body (see especially 4:4–16). The second half of the text will turn to filling out the shape and contours of this “vision of a unified universal Church,”

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a topic that unfortunately cannot be pursued here.⁵⁰

In closing, however, we should note that chapters 4–6 do in fact turn to issues of audience diversity and difference. Unity for Ephesians does not mean the ignoring or erasure of all difference but rather its organization and control. Therefore in chapters 4–6, the text introduces those differences that it will not erase, the differences that are in fact meant to make a difference—specific roles in the church, household code hierarchies of husbands over wives, parents over children, masters over slaves. There is much here that is deeply problematic, and as Clarice Martin has pointed out, much that has “exerted a malefic and far-reaching impact” historically.⁵¹

For our purposes, however, the crucial point remains that by the time one reaches chapters 4–6, the narrative of Ephesians 2 has done its work. Under the unifying umbrella of “the church,” the final chapters of Ephesians need only legitimate specific kinds of difference in the form of a carefully controlled program for community hierarchy and practice.⁵²