2. Γένος, ἔθνος and λαός in Classical and Jewish Literature

In Classical Greek both ἔθνος and γένος have a fairly wide range of meanings and uses. Ἔθνος was commonly employed to denote groups of people, but could also be used to designate ‘a class of beings who share a common identification’, human or animal.Footnote ⁶ It could also be used to describe ‘people groups foreign to a specific people group’, a use that becomes especially prominent in biblical Greek.Footnote ⁷

Γένος likewise was applied to both human and non-human groups, to sorts and kinds of things as well as to what we might call ethnic or racial groups.Footnote ⁸ As Jonathan Hall notes, it has a somewhat ‘more specialised meaning’ than ἔθνος, ‘with its focus on the notion (however fictive) of shared descent’.Footnote ⁹ Love Sechrest, in a recent monograph on the subject, finds that ‘kinship’ ideas are most frequently associated with uses of γένος in the non-Jewish authors she studies.Footnote ¹⁰ While γένος can be used as ‘a subdivision of ἔθνος’Footnote ¹¹ it need not be so, and the two terms can be used as synonyms.Footnote ¹² Λαός seems always to refer to groups of people, sometimes with the specific sense of the ‘common’ people in distinction from the leaders.Footnote ¹³

More relevant for our specific purposes are the uses of these terms in pre-Christian Jewish literature, especially in the LXX, the biblical tradition on which the author of 1 Peter seems to have drawn. In contrast to non-biblical Greek literature, where the term is relatively infrequent, λαός is a common term in the LXX, with over 2,000 occurrences generally rendering the Hebrew עם, particularly when it applies to Israel, while ἔθνος tends to be used—though not consistently—when עם refers to other people-groups.

Septuagintal usage of γένος also reflects the term's established range of meanings; hence it can be used to denote different kinds of things, plants, animals, and so on (Gen 1.11–12, 21, 24–25; Wis 19.11); specific kin- or tribal groups, or lines of descent (Lev 20.17–18; 21.13–14, 17; 1 Macc 5.2; 12.21; 2 Macc 5.22); or people in general as one (human) ‘race’ (Gen 11.6; 2 Macc 7.28).Footnote ¹⁴ But by far the most frequent use, and one that becomes especially prominent in writings of the first two centuries BCE, is to denote the people of Israel.Footnote ¹⁵ As Judith Lieu puts it: ‘The sense of being a race or people is one proudly held in Jewish literature from the Maccabaean period, often in a context of suffering and persecution… γένος joins the more widespread and older λαός in proclaiming a sense of identity in the midst of hostility and attempted annihilation…’.Footnote ¹⁶ In the book of Judith, for example, γένος is used around twelve times to refer to the people of Israel; 2 and 3 Maccabees also have a significant number of such occurrences.Footnote ¹⁷ The use of γένος in this way is also prominent in Josephus and Philo.Footnote ¹⁸

By contrast, ἔθνος is frequently used in the opposite way, to denote outsiders as distinct from ‘the people’. Just as λαός and γένος are standard terms for the people of Israel, often translating עם in the Hebrew, so ἔθνη is a common designation of ‘the nations’, Gentiles, often (but by no means always) rendering גוים (e.g., Exod 34.24; Lev 18.24).Footnote ¹⁹ In Exod 1.9, Pharoah speaks τῷ ἔθνει αὐτοῦ (Heb. עמו) concerning τὸ γένος τῶν υἱῶν Ισραήλ (Heb. עם בני ישראל). Deuteronomy 7.6–7, an important text to which we shall return, describes Israel as a people (λαός; Heb. עם) holy, chosen, and special to God, set among the nations (ἔθνη; Heb. עמים). This is by no means a consistent picture though, and ἔθνος can also be used of the people of Israel, not least among later writings.Footnote ²⁰

While λαός is thus the most common and established designation for the people of Israel in the LXX, γένος also becomes a standard term, especially in the last two centuries BCE, and ἔθνος can be used similarly, as is the case in Josephus and Philo. The emerging prominence of γένος is particularly noteworthy, since, with its focus on the idea of shared descent, it corresponds most closely to what we would term an ethnic or racial designation and, as we shall see, highlights what is central to modern definitions of ethnic groups.

In a study of the maintenance of identity through distinction (Abgrenzung), focused particularly on the book of Jubilees, Eberhard Schwarz identifies three fundamental identity-forming designations (Identitätsgründende Aussagen) of Israel: Israel as ‘holy people’, Israel as ‘chosen people’, and Israel as a people who belong to God, God's special possession (Eigentumsvolk).Footnote ²¹ It is striking that all three of these designations are repeated in 1 Pet 2.9, a text that falls quite outside the purview of Schwarz's study. Schwarz regards Deut 7.6 as a crucial text in this regard, but a similar and also important declaration is found in Exod 19.5–6:

This, of course, is the text that the author of 1 Peter echoes in his rich declaration of the identity of the new people of God (cf. 2.10), specifically in the phrases βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα and ἔθνος ἅγιον. Also woven into 1 Pet 2.9 is a phrase from Isa 43.20 describing Israel as ‘my chosen people’, where the LXX has τὸ γένος μου τὸ ἐκλεκτόν. Further reflecting the influence of Isaiah is the phrasing of the description of 1 Peter's addressees as a people for God's special possession. The author of 1 Peter also draws on Isa 43.21 in describing the vocation of this chosen race, ‘to proclaim the virtues (τὰς ἀρετάς) of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’. Finally, in v. 10, drawing on Hosea 1–2, the author declares that the addressees, once ‘no people’ (οὐ λαός) are now the λαὸς θεοῦ.

What is immediately striking is how, compressed into just half a verse, not only are the three key terms, γένος, ἔθνος, and λαός, all used to denote the communities of Christians in Asia Minor but also these ethnic-identity terms are linked with central Jewish identifications: chosen or elect, holy, and God's own or special possession. How significant this description is can be seen when we set this verse in the context of the NT writings more generally, and consider the influence of 1 Pet 2.9a in subsequent Christian writing.

3. Γένος, ἔθνος and λαός in the New Testament

Γένος appears relatively infrequently in the NT (20×) with the usual lexical range. The notion of ancestral or ethnic descent is clearly prominent in the five occurrences where the term refers to the Jewish people (Acts 7.19; 13.26; 2 Cor 11.26; Gal 1.14; Phil 3.5). What is striking is that there is only one place where the word γένος is used to denote members of the Christian assemblies: 1 Pet 2.9.Footnote ²²

Ἔθνος is considerably more common (162×), though with a narrower lexical range. Continuing the established Septuagintal pattern the large majority of references, including two in 1 Peter (2.12 and 4.3), use the plural form to denote the nations, that is, Gentiles, as distinct from Jews.Footnote ²³ In both Luke–Acts and John there are also a number of uses of ἔθνος to refer to the Jewish nation.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, all of the five uses of ἔθνος in the Gospel of John have this referent (John 11.48, 50–52; 18.35).Footnote ²⁵ Again what is striking is that the term is almost never used to denote Christians as a people, with just two exceptions: the clearest and most direct example in 1 Pet 2.9 and one other in Matt 21.43, at the conclusion to the parable of the tenants of the vineyard.

Λαός is also quite common in the NT (142×), with a particular concentration in Luke–Acts (83×). Generally, and particularly in Luke–Acts, the predominant use, almost always in the singular form, is in reference to the people of Israel, again following established Septuagintal custom.Footnote ²⁶ Some occurrences, especially in the book of Revelation, have a more general, or potentially more general, reference.Footnote ²⁷ There are also some texts where λαός clearly, or at least potentially, refers to the ‘people’ who now constitute the members of the Christian movement (Acts 15.14; 18.10; Rom 9.25–26; Tit 2.14; Rev 18.4; 21.3), notably in Hebrews, where the scriptural language descriptive of Israel is applied to the faithful followers of Christ (Heb 2.17; 4.9; 7.27; 13.12).

This brief overview gives us something of a perspective from which to assess the significance of 1 Pet 2.9a in terms of establishing the idea that Christian identity is specifically an ethnic or ethnoracial identity, that is, identity as a ‘people’, a ‘nation’, or a ‘race’. Several points are noteworthy. First, this is the only NT text in which all three ‘people’ words, γένος, ἔθνος, λαός, occur together, and the occurrence of all three here suggests an almost deliberate attempt to pack the verse with ethnic identity labels.Footnote ²⁸ Second, aside from Matt 21.43, a less direct and developed reference to the identity of the Christians, 1 Pet 2.9, is the only NT text that describes members of the churches as an ἔθνος, and the only one to repeat the concise scriptural designation ‘holy people’.Footnote ²⁹ Third, this is the only NT text in which the term γένος—an influential label for the people of Israel, especially in literature near to the NT period—is applied to the Church.Footnote ³⁰ This is highly significant: while λαός is somewhat more widely used, it is the loosest of the ‘people’ terms, insofar as it can be used to describe various kinds of assembled groups—such as an assembled crowd—whereas γένος most clearly implies a specifically ‘ethnic’ type of identity, with its focus on the idea of shared descent.Footnote ³¹

This is not of course to claim that 1 Peter is alone in constructing Christian identity in ethnic terms. Moves to engender precisely this kind of Christian identity are prominent elsewhere in the NT, especially in Paul.Footnote ³² In particular, Paul spends considerable energy developing the notion that Christians share a common line of descent, as Abraham's offspring (Rom 4.1–25; Gal 3.6–29). His most frequent label for members of the churches is ἀδελϕοί, a designation that depicts them as members of a common family, with a shared status as God's adopted sons (Rom 8.14–17; Gal 4.5–7), with Jesus as eldest brother (Rom 8.29) and Jerusalem as mother (Gal 4.26).Footnote ³³ This already gets to the heart of a key aspect of the term γένος, namely that of shared descent, but without using the word as such. Yet it is only in 1 Pet 2.9 that this essentially Jewish form of ethnic identity is clearly and forcefully named as such, and applied to Christians, in a way that no reader can miss. Members of this ‘brotherhood’ (ἀδελϕότης, 2.17; 5.9) are a chosen race, a holy nation, and a special people; they are the people of God (2.10).

4. 1 Peter 2.9 and the Language of Race in Early Christian Literature

The significance of this can be further assessed by considering two features of early Christian discourse subsequent to 1 Peter: first, citations of 1 Pet 2.9 and second, descriptions of Christians as a ‘race’ (γένος).Footnote ³⁴

Among the earliest citations of 1 Pet 2.9 relevant to our purpose—i.e., those where some aspect of the γένος/ἔθνος/λαός phrasing is taken upFootnote ³⁵—most interesting are a number in Clement of Alexandria which indicate that the particular description of the Church as a γένος ἐκλεκτόν is for Clement especially significant. For example, in his Adumbrationes on 1 Peter (extant only in Latin), Clement quotes part of 2.9—‘But you are a chosen race (genus electum), a royal priesthood’—and comments, significantly, as follows: ‘That we are a chosen race by the election of God is abundantly clear’ (Quoniam electum genus sumus dei electione, abunde clarum est).Footnote ³⁶

In Clement's own contributions to the extracts from Theodotus, the Transfiguration is described as an occasion when the Lord showed himself, ‘not for his own sake, but for the sake of the church, which is the chosen race (τὸ γένος τὸ ἐκλεκτόν)’ (Exc. ex Theod. 4.1).Footnote ³⁷ Here γένος ἐκλεκτόν seems to have become a concise way to describe and define the Church. And Clement's reference to the one, singular, Church is both emphatic and polemical.Footnote ³⁸

Overall, it is significant that of the seven or eight allusions to 1 Pet 2.9 in Clement's works,Footnote ³⁹ five contain some focus on the word γένος, four of which pick up from the verse the key phrase γένος ἐκλεκτόν.Footnote ⁴⁰ This would seem to be for Clement a key designation of the Church in 1 Pet 2.9, as his comment in the Adumbrationes makes clear. This is also confirmed, as we shall see, by Clement's use elsewhere of the language of ‘race’ (γένος) to describe the identity of Christians (see below). Another citation uses the phrase λαὸς ἅγιος, closely equivalent to ἔθνος ἅγιον;Footnote ⁴¹ and the most extensive quotation of 2.9–10 focuses entirely on the various identity-defining labels for the people of God.Footnote ⁴²

Given that 1 Pet 2.9 is the only NT text to apply the term γένος to the Christian movement, and given the extent to which Clement focuses especially on the phrase γένος ἐκλεκτόν, using it as a designation of the Church, it is also relevant to consider other places where γένος language came to be applied to Christians. Whether or not these reflect the direct influence of 1 Pet 2.9, they certainly continue a mode of description initiated by 1 Peter.

During the second century, talk of Christians as a ‘race’ (γένος) seems to have become established (e.g., Mart. Pol. 3.2; 14.1; 17.1; Hermas Sim. 9.17.5; Ep. Diog. 1).Footnote ⁴³ Clement of Alexandria not infrequently uses ‘race’ language to talk specifically of the way in which those from among both Greeks and Jews have been brought together into what he calls ‘the one race of the saved’ (τὸ ἓν γένος τοῦ σῳζομένου) (Strom. 6.5.42.2; cf. Strom. 3.10.70.1–2; 6.13.106.4). Here, as Denise Kimber Buell has shown, using Jonathan Hall's terminology, Clement uses one particular kind of ethnic reasoning, an ‘aggregative’ or universalizing strategy, suggesting that all can be incorporated into this new people of God.Footnote ⁴⁴ A second, and contrasting, strategy is an ‘oppositional’ one, which uses ethnic language to distinguish the in-group from others, and this is evident in Aristides (Apol. 2), the Kerygma Petrou (apud Clem. Alex. Strom. 6.5.41.6–7), as well as elsewhere in Clement of Alexandria.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Clement, for example (Strom. 5.14.98.4), this ‘race’ language is used in the context of a threefold classification, Greeks, Jews, and Christians, a classification already found in Paul, though without the language of ‘race’ or the specific designation ‘Christians’ (1 Cor 10.32).

Particularly in this latter type of use, the notion of Christians as a third race, alongside Jews and Greeks, is at least implicitly present, and represents a positive and self-defining Christian claim, as it does in the somewhat later pseudo-Cyprianic work De Pascha computus, dated to 243 CE, where Christians (‘we’) are positively identified as ‘the third race of humankind’ (tertium genus hominum) (De Pascha comp. 17). By contrast, the idea of Christians as a third race is one which Tertullian, at the end of the second century, depicts as a negative designation used by outsiders and indeed one he treats at times with some scorn. ‘We are called the third race’ (Plane, tertium genus dicimur) (Ad. Nat. 8), he reports, while ridiculing the idea that Christians are somehow a different species: ‘Have Christians teeth of a different sort from others? Have they more ample jaws? I don't think so (non opinor)!’ (Ad. Nat. 7). Yet elsewhere, rather less polemically, he describes Christians as a third race (genus tertium), in contrast to synagogues of the Jews (synagogas Iudaeorum) and peoples of the nations (populos nationum), from whom comes the cry to be rid of ‘the third race’ (genus tertium; Scorp. 10.10). He also finds a parallel to the logic of Christians existing as a third race in the existence of what he calls ‘a third race in sex’—that is, eunuchs, alongside male and female (Ad. Nat. 1.20.4).Footnote ⁴⁶ These latter examples suggest that the description of Christians as the third race was not necessarily something Tertullian rejected, though the example of eunuchs, a destabilizing ‘third’ category that threatens the clear distinction between the two sexes, suggests that the notion retains an unsettling edge. Indeed, there is perhaps a tacit indication in Tertullian of the tension implicit in describing Christians as members of a genus—in one sense this is ridiculous and in another sense not—something that perhaps hints at a deeper and more general tension between the apparent fixity yet real fluidity of ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ categorizations.

As Adolf von Harnack observed in his classic treatment of this subject, the description of Christians as a third race thus seems to exist both as an internal self-description and as a label apparently used by opponents. The description of Christians as a genus by Suetonius (Nero 16.2) might reflect an early use of this terminology on the part of outsiders, though the language may reflect the perspective of the time of composition (early second century) rather than the period being described (60s CE). Harnack thought it unlikely that the opponents borrowed the phrase from Christian literature and concluded that ‘the term rose as spontaneously to the lips of Christians as of their opponents’, noting the ‘chronological succession of its occurrences’ in the Preaching of Peter (early second century),Footnote ⁴⁷ Tertullian (197 CE), and Pseudo-Cyprian (243CE).Footnote ⁴⁸ ‘Christians’, Harnack comments, ‘held themselves to be the new People and the third race of mankind’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Unlike the label Χριστιανός, which seems to have arisen as an outsiders' label, gradually claimed as an insiders' self-designation, the description of Christians as a γένος seems to have arisen as a facet of Christian self-definition, even if similar language also came to be used by outsiders. Indeed, it is possible—though no more than this—that the process is the reverse of that which took place with the label Χριστιανός:Footnote ⁵⁰ Christian self-description in ethnic terms, drawing of course on Jewish identity discourse, and reinforced by the kinds of exclusivism that led to hostile criticism (Tacitus Ann. 15.44), shaped outsiders' perceptions and descriptions.

It would be rash to propose that 1 Pet 2.9 is somehow the direct source for all talk of Christians as a γένος.Footnote ⁵¹ Nonetheless, whatever the extent of its direct influence, it is clearly the first application of the term to Christians, in the context of a clear and extensive description of the members of the churches as an ethnic or racial group. Moreover, as we have seen, 1 Pet 2.9 exerts some notable influence on later descriptions of Christians as a γένος ἐκλεκτόν, a designation of the Church that both highlights the fundamental theme of election and also makes an essentially ‘ethnic’ term central to this self-description. As such, it represents a rather crucial step in the making of Christian identity. Descriptions of Christians as the third race are one further derivation from this development. Even though, as we have noted, the idea of Christians as a third grouping alongside Jews and Greeks is present in nuce as early as 1 Corinthians, it is only later linked specifically with the language of race. And 1 Pet 2.9 marks an early and crucial step in defining Christian identity in this way, with its uniquely emphatic description of members of the Church as a race, a nation, and a people.

5. 1 Peter 2.9 and the Construction of an Ethnoracial Form of Christian Identity

The crucial question, of course, is what we should make of all this information, and how we should understand the rhetorical move made by the author of 1 Peter. An important set of questions relates to the implications of the way in which 1 Peter appropriates Jewish identity labels for the Church. It is notable that 1 Peter is simply silent about the continued existence of what Paul elsewhere called ὁ Ἰσραὴλ κατὰ σάρκα (1 Cor 10.18), unlike many other early Christian texts which explicitly draw the contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ and suggest that the former is obsolete (e.g., Heb 7.18–19; 8.6–13; 9.11–15; Barn. 16.5–8; Melito Peri Pascha, 43). As Ramsey Michaels puts it:

The Church, it seems, has simply become the chosen race, the holy nation; thus Paul Achtemeier speaks of ‘the language and hence the reality of Israel’ passing ‘without remainder’ into that of ‘the new people of God’.Footnote ⁵³

But our focus in this paper is on the ethnic terms themselves—also drawn from Jewish tradition, of course—that are deployed to denote the members of the Church in 1 Pet 2.9. As we have seen, this is the most explicitly ethnoracial description of Christian identity in the whole NT, and one that initiates an influential discourse about ethnicity and ‘race’ in early Christian writing. These ethnic terms are, as we have also seen, taken over from the language of Jewish self-identity, such that they acquire a particular resonance in early Christian literature; and this raises the further question about whether, and in what ways, Christian identity itself should be seen as ethnic or ethnoracial in character.

Despite the prominence of ethnic terminology, the established tendency in scholarship, as Denise Kimber Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge have pointed out, has been to depict Christianity ‘as a “universal” religion, one that transcends ethnic and familial particularities’. Jewish ethnic particularism is contrasted with non-ethnic universal Christianity, with Paul especially seen as ‘the transition point between an old, exclusive, ethnic Judaism and a new, inclusive, universal Christianity’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Insofar as early Christianity adopts terms of ethnic or kinship-based identity, these tend to be described as ‘fictive’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Charles Cosgrove, for example, insists that Paul's ‘spiritual’ redefinition of Jewish identity to constitute being Christian ‘is expressly not a notion of ethnic identity’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Recent discussions of the subject of ethnicity, however, may lead us to question this contrast between ‘real’ ethnicities and the self-evidently ‘fictive’ kind of quasi-ethnic language used in early Christian discourse. For a start, much recent social-science scholarship has stressed the ways in which ethnicity, and other concepts such as ‘race’ and ‘nation’, are essentially ‘social constructions, the product of specific historical and geographical forces, rather than biologically given ideas whose meaning is dictated by nature’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This modern emphasis may in fact cohere well with ancient notions in our period of what we now call ethnic identity, in which there was not only a sense of stability and continuity through descent, but also—in dialectical tension with it—some sense of mutability and possibility: one could become, or cease to be, Greek, Roman, or Jewish depending on one's connections (including adoption) and conduct, which generally included religious dimensions. Thus Tim Whitmarsh speaks of ‘a deep self-consciousness about the fluidity of identity construction’ among elite Greeks under the Roman empire, suggesting that ‘what happened to Greeks in the Roman period involved a similar kind of denaturalization of identity to that experienced in the modern global village’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Regarding Judaism, Shaye Cohen argues that ‘in the second century B.C.E., the metaphoric boundary separating Judaeans from non-Judaeans became more and more permeable. Outsiders could become insiders’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Unfortunately, since he regards ethnicity as ‘closed, immutable, an ascribed characteristic based on birth’, Cohen depicts this development as a shift from ethnic to cultural-religious identity.Footnote ⁶⁰ John Barclay is more convincing, it seems to me, in depicting Judaism in the period as ‘primarily an ethnic tradition’, though one which proselytes could join so as ‘to acquire in effect a new “ethnicity” in kinship and custom’.Footnote ⁶¹ Or, as Sechrest puts it, Jewish notions of ethnicity and race in the period of the first centuries BCE and CE make ‘religion’ the central ‘criterion of identity’ (though kinship and other factors remain significant) such that Jewish ethnicity is most prominently a religio-cultural concept.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, one of the valuable things this constructionist perspective brings to light is that there is a wide range of factors that could potentially be used as signifiers of ethnic identity, only some of which are salient in any given discursive or social contexts.

This socially constructed characteristic applies also to the language of race, despite that term's use to convey what is often perceived as a more ‘biological’ and thus immutable description of identity. There is no clear distinction between ethnic and racial identity, between the discourses of ethnicity and of race, or between ethno-politics and the politics of race.Footnote ⁶³ Because of the tainted history of the language of race, some maintain that it is better to abandon that language altogether.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is certainly valuable to be reminded that there is no objective, fixed meaning to terms like nation and race, and that we must beware of importing modern and debatable assumptions—about the biological essentialism of race, or the nation-state as the obvious locus of sovereignty—into our studies of early Christianity and our translations of ancient texts. Yet others insist—rightly in my view—that it is better to continue to use the language of race, alongside that of ethnicity, while making clear that race, like ethnicity, refers to a facet of identity that is constructed rather than given. As Buell comments, ‘we need to keep the term active so as to be able to interrogate the ways that our interpretive models encode, and thus perpetuate, particular notions about “race”’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The concepts of both ethnicity and race remain relevant to the study of early Christianity, contrary to a view that would see these—and especially ‘race’—as intrinsically irrelevant to describe ‘a historical movement constituted by means of joining’.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Buell puts it:

Indeed, one of the reasons why Buell finds Hall's work so valuable is in his insistence that ethnic identity ‘is ultimately constructed through written and spoken discourse’; ‘ethnicity is not a primordial given, but is instead repeatedly and actively structured through discursive strategies’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Modern sociological definitions of ethnic groups, like the term γένος, often emphasize belief in common origins or shared descent, as in Max Weber's classic definition: ‘human groups (other than kinship groups) which cherish a belief in their common origins of such a kind that it provides a basis for the creation of a community’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Weber's definition highlights the importance of beliefs rather than ‘any objective features of group membership… It is this sense of common ancestry that is vital, but the identification with shared origins is largely, if not wholly, fictitious’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The same goes for the notion of race, which Benjamin Isaac defines as ‘a group of people who are believed to share imagined common characteristics, physical and mental or moral, which cannot be changed by human will, because they are thought to be determined by unalterable, stable physical factors: hereditary, or external, such as climate or geography’. It is belief in the reality of race that is crucial, even if, for Isaac, such beliefs are inevitably false.Footnote ⁷¹

In the light of such perspectives, it is interesting to set out a more expansive, modern, social-scientific definition of an ethnic group, and to consider how early Christianity in general—and 1 Peter in particular—includes all aspects in some form or other:

1. 1. A common proper name, to identify and express the ‘essence’ of the community;

2. 2. A myth of common ancestry, a myth rather than a fact, a myth that includes the idea of a common origin in time and place and that gives an ethnie a sense of fictive kinship, what Horowitz terms a ‘super-family’…;

3. 3. Shared historical memories, or better, shared memories of a common past or pasts, including heroes, events and their commemoration;

4. 4. One or more elements of common culture, which need not be specified but normally include religion, customs, or language;

5. 5. A link with a homeland, not necessarily its physical occupation by the ethnie, only its symbolic attachment to the ancestral land, as with diaspora peoples;

6. 6. A sense of solidarity on the part of at least some sections of the ethnie's population.Footnote ⁷²

Anthony Smith, from whose work this definition comes, does not pretend that every element is evident and identifiable in all ethnic groups. Moreover, different facets of ethnoracial identity may be prominent or salient in different contexts, ancient and modern. All this makes what is already a somewhat broad, even loose, definition seem even more fuzzy. Yet this perhaps goes to show—contrary to popular preconceptions that we know exactly what we are talking about when we use the categories of ‘race’, or ‘ethnic origin’—how malleable, how essentially constructed, such group-identities are.

Drawing on this broad definition, it would not be far fetched to claim that the making of early Christianity, drawing heavily, of course, on Jewish discourse and tradition, constitutes precisely the creation of these facets of an ethnic group's identity. In particular, 1 Peter could be shown to make interesting and significant contributions to most of these elements:Footnote ⁷³ 1 Peter takes a particularly crucial first step towards the claiming of Χριστιανός as the insiders' common proper name, and, as we have seen, makes a fundamental contribution to the construction of Christian identity in ethnic terms by the brute fact of its application to the Church of ethnic or racial descriptors. Moreover, with its stress upon the addressees' new birth, from imperishable seed with God as father, the letter constructs a particular sense of common (divine) ancestry (cf. 1.2–3, 17, 23; 2.2). The shared historical memories focus on the ‘heroic’ figure of Christ, whose sufferings and subsequent glory indicate a paradigmatic path for his followers (2.21–25; cf. 1.3–12); and a certain pattern of living—‘doing good’—is constitutive of the believers' (kin-based) identity (3.6).Footnote ⁷⁴ The idea of a homeland is also implied in the use of diaspora and Babylon imagery (1.1; 5.13), even though this homeland appears symbolic (‘an inheritance…kept in heaven’, 1.4) rather than earthly. And the sense of solidarity, evident in a number of ways in the letter, is perhaps best epitomised in the kinship language of 2.17 and 5.9 (ἀδελφότηs), the positive counterpart to the dislocation and alienation indicated by the addressees' description as πάροικοι καὶ παρεπίδημοι (2.11; cf. 1.1, 17).Footnote ⁷⁵

This is not to suggest, of course, that early Christian identity is entirely or uncomplicatedly to be described as an ethnic or ethnoracial form of identity. The movement also bears close similarities with voluntary associations, or with modern conversionist sects.Footnote ⁷⁶ The idea of incorporating people from a diversity of ethnic backgrounds is strongly embedded in early Christian discourse, especially in the Pauline letters (Gal 3.28; Col 3.11), and people remained conscious of their former ‘ethnic’ identity, which could still identify and distinguish them from other Christians, as again Paul makes clear (Gal 2.15; Rom 9.3).Footnote ⁷⁷ But none of this contradicts the fact that the early Christians, and the author of 1 Peter in particular, used ethnoracial language to describe and construct ‘Christian’ identity. And once we see ethnic identity as socially constructed through discourse, as something believed more than objective or factual, then early Christian identity is as ‘really’ ethnic as are other forms of ethnic identity in the ancient and indeed the modern world.Footnote ⁷⁸

One might also question whether such constructionist definitions of ethnic identity imply that any religious group might be defined as an ethnic group, if it exhibits all or most of the above characteristics. I think the answer to this would be affirmative, at least potentially. But it is especially clear if that religious group uses ethnoracial terminology of itself, such that it explicitly identifies and regards itself as such a group—which is partly why 1 Peter marks such a crucial step in the history of the making of Christian identity. In drawing on the specific traditions of Judaism—a form of ethnic identity with religio-cultural practices at its heart—the author of 1 Peter, along with other early Christian writers, was able to construct just such a form of identity, without a focus on specific (geophysical) territorial attachment or biological (human) kinship links. In short, as Buell and Lieu in their different ways have shown, it suited early Christians to claim and describe their identity in ethnic terms, to use ‘ethnic reasoning’ as one discursive means to articulate that identity.

It remains to ask, finally, what kind of rhetorical strategy, what form of ethnic reasoning, is evident in 1 Pet 2.9 and the letter more broadly, and how this relates to the context and aims of this text.

It is relevant to recall here Lieu's observation that γένος comes to prominence in Jewish self-identity discourse precisely in a context of ‘hostility and attempted annihilation’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Similarly, 1 Peter's use of γένος language, and the rich depictions of Christian identity in the passage in which it appears, comes in a context of evident hostility and suffering. The letter's overall strategy, in which the identity-designations of 2.9 play an important role, is—put in terms of social identity theory—to develop a positive sense of in-group identity, of the status and honour that acrue to membership of the community, in the face of negative evaluation and stigmatization on the part of outsiders. The adoption of ethnic-identity language, along with the honorific and highly valued designations of Israel's special identity, represents a strategy of ‘social creativity’, that is, where group members ‘seek positive distinctiveness for the in-group by redefining or altering the elements of the comparative situation’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Despite the shame which their accusers seek to bring upon them, the readers of the letter are assured of their special status and ineradicable bonds, as members of God's γένος ἐκλεκτόν.

In this sense, 1 Peter's mode of ethnic reasoning is ‘oppositional’. The addressees may be surrounded by people (τὰ ἔθνη!), who malign them as evildoers (1 Pet 2.12), and by immorality and licentious excess (4.2–4), but they are a chosen race and a holy nation, dwelling as aliens and strangers scattered in a hostile world (1.1, 17; 2.11). Yet in another sense, 1 Peter's discursive strategy is strikingly non-oppositional. Unlike plenty of other early Christian texts, there is no direct claim here—though it might be implied—that the Church appropriates an identity which is at the same time denied to Israel.

Indeed, some aspects of 1 Peter's strategy of ethnic reasoning might be seen as ‘aggregative’, where ‘ethnicity is established through connections more than by distinctions’, as in Clement of Alexandria's universalizing rhetoric about the drawing of Jews and Greeks, or Greeks and Barbarians, into the one race of the saved.Footnote ⁸¹ To begin with the language of 2.9, drawn from Isaiah 43, the vocation of the chosen race is to ‘proclaim the virtues of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’. As many commentators point out, this vocation is one both of worship and of proclamation, an act which ‘declares’ (ἐξαγγέλλω) God's excellence in and to the world.Footnote ⁸² This missionary dimension is more explicit still in 2.12, where the motivation to ‘conduct yourselves honourably among the Gentiles’ is so that, seeing the Christians' good works, these non-believers may glorify God on the day of visitation (cf. Rom 15.9–10). This suggests the possibility of conversion, a possibility more clearly expressed as a motivation for the good conduct asked of wives (3.1). In other words, even those who are presently hostile or cruel towards the γένος ἐκλεκτόν are regarded as potentially members of it.

This subtle and complex mix of oppositional and aggregative strategies bears out Buell's point that these are not exclusive alternatives but can coexist in varied and flexible ways.Footnote ⁸³ In the end, though, the significance of 1 Pet 2.9 for the use of ethnic categories in constructing Christian identity may lie primarily in the simple fact of its having taken the terms γένος, ἔθνος, and λαός, and, drawing on established Jewish traditions, applied them to the Church. Just as 1 Peter represents the first attempt to claim what came to be the identity label par excellence— Χριστιανός—as a positive badge of self-identity,Footnote ⁸⁴ so too it represents the first move to designate Christians explicitly as a γένος, a move that was of considerable significance in the evolution of Christian identity discourse.