Ethnic Reasoning and Anti-Judaean Rhetoric in Early Christianity

• Main Author: Kok, Michael
• Other Authors: Braun, Willi (Religious Studies)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Ethnicity; Identity; Israel; Centrist; Anti-Judaism
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10048/842

There was no abstract conception of religion in antiquity, but religious beliefs and praxis were closely intertwined with ethnicity in the Greco-Roman period. Building on the groundbreaking studies by Denise Kimber Buell, this thesis investigates the use of ethnic reasoning in centrist Christian identity formation in the second century CE. Specifically, I closely examine four different Christian texts (1 Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyrs Dialogue with Trypho the Judaean and the Epistle to Diognetus) to show how the centrist Christian elites utilized ethnic reasoning to construct a distinct Christian ethnic identity and to manufacture sharp differences between Christians and Judaeans. In order to defend the idea of a homogenous Christian ethnic identity with pure origins,centrist Christian intellectuals re-appropriated the legacy of Israel and represented the Judaeans as an adversarial foil. This rhetorical strategy of othering characterizes the Christian Adversus Ioudaios literature.