In this book, Terence Donaldson addresses the question of how the concept of ethnē (the nations) developed semantically within Roman imperial, Jewish, and Christian discourses of the early centuries of the Common Era. In the first chapter, Donaldson lays out the question that drives him by briefly examining speeches by Eusebius of Caesarea, Aristides, and Paul. He proposes to explore how a term that was deployed to designate various national entities within the Roman Empire and to denote non-Jews in Jewish contexts came to be the common descriptor for non-Jewish followers of Jesus. He shows the effect this had for both the separation of gentile Christianity from Judaism and for its relationship with the Roman Empire. This work is a valuable contribution to the ongoing study of how identity formation operated and developed within the early centuries of Christianity.
Donaldson deploys a three-pronged set of methodological approaches in the second chapter. First, he shows how an investigation of the development of gentile Christian identity via the category of ethnē can be informed by and contribute to the field of early Jewish-Christian relations, especially the much-contested “parting of the ways” paradigm. The second approach utilizes the study of identity formation, drawing on Fredrik Barth, Richard Jenkins, and Homi Bhabha, to gain a clearer understanding of the way the term ethnē was deployed across a wide range of sources. Finally, Donaldson uses studies on identity and ethnicity in the Roman Empire to identify shifting deployments of the concept of ethnē in Christian sources.
The overall task of Donaldson's book is to illustrate how gentile Christians utilized the category of ethnē as a self-descriptive term to differentiate themselves from their Jewish origins and from the surrounding Roman imperial context. This argument unfolds more or less chronologically across the five remaining chapters of the book. Chapter 3 lays out how Jewish sources described non-Jews. Donaldson highlights the double consciousness of these materials, given that dominant Greek and Roman cultures viewed the Jewish nation as either barbarous or just one nation among many, respectively. In this context, the Jewish concept of nations (goyim) was rendered in the Septuagint and elsewhere as ethnē. Moreover, it developed to include not just other nations but also smaller groupings and individuals who were non-Jewish. In chapter 4, Donaldson presents a typology of how Jewish followers of Jesus constructed three broad patterns of responding to the non-Jewish world and the terms by which gentile believers in Jesus might be included in their movements. Here he depends greatly on the Acts of the Apostles and the authentic letters of Paul, though other materials are also included. A mission that included both Jews and gentiles forced a reckoning of how the Jewish Jesus movement fit within the boundaries of broader Jewish identities. The way gentiles were incorporated into these typologies established trajectories for how later gentile Christian communities would understand their relationship with Judaism, considered broadly.
Chapter 5 serves as a transition point for Donaldson's argument. Here he explicates how the concept of the nations operated in Roman imperial discourse. Donaldson establishes that ethnographic discourses in Greek and Roman literature were a means for both categorizing the various ethnic/national groupings that existed in the empire and also revealed the fluidity of actual ethnic realities manifested in the empire. This movement between mappings and ambiguity of boundaries would be crucial for later Christian deployment of the category of ethnē. These deployments are the subject of the final two chapters. Chapter 6 concerns how the concept of ethnē appears in early gentile Christian literature prior to 135 CE. The year 135 serves as an important divider for Donaldson as it marks the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and the sharp distinction that gentile Christianity began to make between itself and Judaism. Exploring writings ranging from the Gospel of Luke to the Shepherd of Hermas, this material reveals that, in general, the term ethnē designated outsiders who did not believe in Jesus while at times holding other possible meanings, such as referring to all of humanity or the older sense of non-Jewish believers. Moreover, material from this time shows a growing movement away from identifying with the Jewish origins of the Jesus movement and an emerging distinction between the wider world and believers in Jesus. The concepts of ethnē develops further in the period after 135 CE up to the middle of the third century, as Donaldson shows in the final chapter. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho is the focal point of this chapter. Donaldson argues that Justin develops a new competitive ethnography in which ethnē is used to designate the gentile Christian church in distinction to both Judaism and the non-Christian Roman Empire. This contributes to the acceleration of Christian supersessionism, reflected not only in Justin but also in Tertullian and Cyprian, and the emergence of rhetoric presenting the gentile Christian church as a rival of, and even superior to, the Roman Empire itself. This claim for the special place of gentile Christian identity creates a third space between the Jewish self-understanding as a community uniquely chosen by God and the claims to divine sanction by the Roman Empire. This new articulation of gentile Christian identity establishes the conditions for the collaboration between church and empire typified by the relationship between Constantine and Eusebius with which the book begins.
This book is an important contribution to the study of early Jewish-Christian relations, Christian identity formation, and the relationship between the Christian and the Roman imperial world. While dense at times with detailed word study, careful attention to the shifting developments explicated by Donaldson yields rich rewards.
