westar institute fall 2016 meeting seminar papers...westar institute fall 2016 meeting seminar...

Westar Institute Fall 2016 Meeting Seminar Papers

Christianity Seminar

Maia Kotrosits, Devising Collectives: Losing the Nation in the Story of Judaism and Christianity 1

Peter N. McLellan, Decapolis Death Worlds: Necropolitics, Specters, and

Geresene Ethnicity among the Tombs 9 Nina E. Livesey, DifferenceandSimilarity:AReviewofDanielBoyarin’sA

RadicalJew:PaulandthePoliticsofIdentityandBorderLines:ThePartitionofJudaeo-Christianity 25

Hal Taussig, Hidden Transcripts of Violence and Partial Recovery in the

First Two Centuries: Four Sketches on the Way to One Specific Portrait 39 Daniel Boyarin, The Christian Invention of “Judaism” 61

Philip A. Harland, Climbing the Ethnic Ladder: A Portrait of Interactions between Judeans and Other Peoples 81

Seminar on God & the Human Future

David Galston, Thoughts on Future Directions for the God Seminar 1 Keri Day, Musings 9 J. Kameron Carter, The Surreal Presence (Négritude’s Messy Poetics) 15

J. Kameron Carter, Paratheological Blackness 23

1

Devising Collectives Losing the Nation in the Story of Judaism and Christianity

Maia Kotrosits, Denison University

A response to Daniel Boyarin’s Dying for God: Marytrdom and the Making of Christianity

and Judaism and A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonia Talmud as Diaspora I’m pleased to again be carving out a moment in which the Christianity Seminar can reflect on the direction of its work. It feels right and important to do this especially in relationship to Daniel Boyarin’s fine scholarship, for at least two reasons. The first is that our work in many ways presupposes his scholarship’s dogged attention to the overlaps between and mutual constitution of what we call Judaism and Christianity in the first through fourth centuries, and even beyond. The second is that Boyarin has provided one model for the very project in which we are also engaged. Like the compatible and contemporaneous work of Virginia Burrus and Karen King, Boyarin’s relativizing and careful tracing of the emergence of orthodoxy/heresy discourses, and his repeated emphasis on creativity and invention in Christian and Jewish discourses of all kinds, not only forced scholarship on early Christian history to reckon with its own flat-footed and perhaps somewhat resigned referentiality. It thus helped open a door for a whole new set of counter-histories, framed largely as histories of the “construction of Christian/Jewish identity and difference” Counter-histories in this mode are now the order of the day for significant segments of scholarship, including the work of Shelly Matthews, Susanna Drake, Andrew Jacobs, among scads of others.1 The Christianity Seminar has periodically made recourse to this form of counter-history in relationship to the “master narrative” of Christianity, and we have continually tried to ask on our own terms how to understand what has traditionally been described as the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity. The parting of the ways as a concept is clumsy and reductive, at least from any kind of social perspective, as if two friends had an argument, shook hands and went on separately. Who (de)parts and over what? The model of course assumes singularity on so many levels, one “branch” or stream of tradition, with two spoke-like branches stretching off in their own direction.

1 Shelly Matthews, Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian

Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Susanna Drake, Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Andrew Jacobs, Christ Circumcised: A Study of Early Christian History and Difference (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

Westar Fall 2016 Kotrosits, Devising Collectives 2

The parting of the ways, even if rendered as a plural “many partings,” is a model that assumes abstractions straightforwardly represented by individuals or groups, instead of diffuse and various collectives, complicated social interactions, and intersubjectivity. It assumes, in short, “religion,” figured as an always-already known entity, in which some kind of conscious ideological disagreement – the Antioch incident writ large – is the primary determinant of content and catalyst for change.

In several of his books, Boyarin has played out a persuasive alternative to the parting of the ways, as well as to the notion that Christianity is the offspring of Judaism: he suggests that Judaism and Christianity are “[t]wins in a womb, tussling with each other, striving for separation, surely not separate until they are born, and even then, never sure of their sovereign identity….”2 They arose as entities, in other words, through a kind of mimetic relation, pulling from shared resources and using precisely the same discursive tools to construct themselves against one another. That process was uneven across time and space, and the differences being constructed in that process belied more significant overlaps and similarities in both content and style of articulation. “Sometimes partings,” he writes, “can seem more like encounters.”3

In Dying for God, Boyarin re-reads martyrological literature in particular for the ways it reveals the mutual dependence and constitution of, and the “porousness” between, Judaism and Christianity. He wants, and effectively charts, “a complicated, nuanced historical account of how Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultural elements became creatively combined into late antique martyrology.”4 He continues, “We must think of circulating and recirculating motifs, themes, and religious ideas in the making of martyrdom, a recirculation between Christians and Jews that allows for no simple litany of origins and influence.”5 In one familiar example, the consonance of 4 Maccabees with Ignatius of Antioch’s letter to the Romans, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and the Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, is described by Boyarin not as a dependence on Christian sources which “originated” the concept of marytrdom, as Bowerstock and others have suggested, but as a function of being “produced in the same religious atmosphere, the same (Asian?) religious environment.”6 As Boyarin suggests later on,

We need to think about the multifold dimensions of intergroup interactions, from dialogue to polemic, or perhaps, better put, from cooperative and identificatory dialogue to polemic and disidentification, in order to understand

2 Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1999), 126. 3 Dying for God, 126. 4 Dying for God, 118. 5 Ibid. 6 Dying for God, 115.


the histories of rabbinic Judaism and Christian Judaism, the children of Rebecca, as intimately and intricately enmeshed and embroiled with each other as any twins have ever been. (Dying for God, 125)

Religion is a point of friction for Boyarin. His use of religion as a category in Dying for God is unqualified, and stands in uncertain relation with his emphasis on shared cultural elements. Later, in Border Lines, he goes further to suggest that Christianity produces a notion of religion, an abstraction that presents itself as unfastened from culture.7 In A Traveling Homeland, Boyarin does not address religion as such. He reads the Babylonian Talmud through diaspora theory as articulated by scholars such as Stuart Hall, and Brent Hayes Edwards, and he suggests the Talmud be read as a creative diasporic production, one that engenders (and is engendered by) a kind of cultural orientation and community, largely through shared textual practices. The Babylonian Talmud both treats Babylonia as homeland and acts as homeland, he proposes, but not as a melancholy substitute for a lost one; rather as a representative space of collectivity and group formation of people who do not necessarily share a place of origin.8 His use of diaspora circumvents a notion of collectivity formed on the basis of religion, even though scriptural textual practices are at the heart of this collectivity.9 What he wants is not a picture of diaspora Judaism, exactly, but rather of the way what we call “Judaism” coalesces through cultural practices of a mixed population. Here again “culture” takes precedence over religion, perhaps even replaces it. But while the term religion disappears, without a qualitative redefinition of it and its relationship to “culture,” it seems that religion’s modern connotations do not. I am sympathetic to so many of Boyarin’s theoretical moves, both in this book and in his work at large. Indeed I think our seminar cannot do any kind of new thinking

7 Boyarin writes that “at least one function of heresiology if not its proximate cause, was to

define Christian identity – not only to produce the Christian as neither Jew nor Greek but also to construct the whatness of what Christianity would be, not finally a third race or genos but something entirely new, a religion.” Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 4. Boyarin however seems to attribute a kind of teleological desire on the part of “Christianity” or its agents here, and does not offer a context for either the production of this “whatness” or the desire animating it. Why would construction of this difference matter? What forces give rise to such desires for self-definition? I wonder. Very recently, Boyarin has co-authored a book with classicist Carlin Barton, proposing that the modern notions attached to the term “religion” actually obscure the more complicated cultural landscape of the ancient world Boyarin and Barton, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Because this book’s release date is October 2016, I’m obviously not able to comment on that book in more detail here.

8 Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 19

9 A Traveling Homeland, 4.


without accepting his basic thesis about the complicated interimplication of what we call Jewish and Christian belongings in antiquity and late antiquity, or his assumption that orthodoxy and heresy produce boundaries in their articulation, boundaries that do not even hold “on the ground,” so to speak.

In particular, I am sympathetic to this introduction of diaspora theory and reconstituted homelands for understanding the Babylonian Talmud, in part because (as the Seminar is plainly, perhaps exhaustedly, aware!) I’ve been using the same theories and basic thesis for thinking about what we call early Christian literature for the last five years or more.10 There are however a number of differences of emphasis in our respective work that I think are worth playing out, because they pose some important queries for the Seminar theme at hand (“ethnicity”), and for how we pursue our intellectual project of painting new socially descriptive pictures of the place of Christians/Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean.

Importantly, in his move away from geographic referents for diaspora belonging and toward shared cultural practices, Boyarin not only follows a number of recent theories of diaspora, but implicitly undermines contemporary Zionist investments which have doubled down on geo-political boundary marking as constitutive of Jewish belonging. Likewise, Boyarin’s recourse to diaspora social practices and productions is an effort to avoid what he calls the “lachrymose” associations that typically attend pictures of Jewish diaspora, associations that might evoke uncomplicated or exceptionalist narratives of Jewish victimization. Diaspora, he claims, is borne of factors other and more than traumatic upheaval, and Talmudic culture and its transference and transformation across time and place is an example of that. His picture of diaspora is in fact a largely happy one, as he borrows from Robin Cohen terms such as “solidarity” to describe Jewish imbrication in local culture, and the notion of “transnational bonds of co-responsibility” to describe diaspora networks of relation.11 In one chapter, for instance, he focuses on the positive narrativizing of the late ancient “exile” to Babylon, and notices that Babylonia as a location of exile is described by a Palestinian Rabbi as a kind of “homecoming to the motherland.”12 In doing so, Boyarin suggests that “the entire notion of ‘diaspora’ as the act of forced dispersion from a single homeland is exploded.”13 Although I’m not sure I completely follow the extremity of that statement, I

10 In addition to my various seminar papers, see especially Kotrosits, Rethinking Early

Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), but also “Babylon’s Fall: Figuring Diaspora in and through Ruins” Bible and Critical Theory 11:2 (2015) 1-17.

11 A Traveling Homeland, 4, 5. 12 A Traveling Homeland, 43. 13 Ibid.


do find Babylonia-as-motherland nicely complicating, if not all that surprising from either a historical or a theoretical perspective. Homelands are always belated constructions, and always renegotiations of belonging that play into imperial (or otherwise dominant) histories and geographies, and Babylon was perhaps a signal instance of this, as a historical site of ambivalence throughout Israel’s history since the 6th century BCE.

In the end, Boyarin offers a constructive conception of Jewish diaspora that refuses the core terms that typically undergird, or rather reify, Jewish belonging -- geography, religion, ethnicity, and trauma-as-victimization. This is no small feat, and while I find myself aligned with many of Boyarin’s investments, I want to ask what that particular and careful titration of contemporary Jewish politics might mean for ancient and late ancient historical description. In other words, if Boyarin is running a virtual obstacle course of modern political hazards in his re-definition of Jewish diaspora, what gets lost in the running?

Or maybe the question is: what losses get lost in the running? Indeed while it’s true that diaspora theory has paid attention to the constructive and creative dimensions of diasporic culture, one would be hard pressed to find trauma far from that creativity. Brent Hayes Edwards, whose work Boyarin cites, does see textual practices as the heart of transnational black diaspora, for instance, but the articulation of that diasporic culture, a distinctively black identity and culture, is a resignification of dominant racializing discourses that produced “blackness” as such from the start.14

I myself am not so sure that positive voicing or narrativizing of exile negates, or is mutually exclusive to, collective trauma – especially given that the reason for this late antique “return” to Babylonia was an escape from Roman violence. “Trauma” doesn’t always produce lachrymose postures; it has affective reverberations that are more complex than simply sadness. Boyarin admits that he cannot argue against such a reading of these texts as adjustments and re-castings of “negative” experience, but he says, with a curious level of trust in the self-presence of ancient writers, that he can “state with a certain degree of confidence that such an interpretation is hardly necessary or even suggested by the texts themselves.”15 I do also wonder how such a happy picture of assimilation gels with his work in Dying for God which positions martyrdom, nothing if not narratives which seek to recover violence toward some sort of meaningful or “positive” social outcome, as central to at least certain forms of Jewish identity construction or self-understanding.

14 See Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black

Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 15 A Traveling Homeland, 42.


I want to ask about the quiet baggage that gets carried along in such instances and stories of migration, though, even and especially when they are “returns” of some form or another.16 In this case, I’d like to attend to the quiet baggage of “the nation.” “Nation” or the Greek word ethnos that it is meant to translate, is about much more than homeland, of course, but its potential geographical referents (ones that, as diaspora theory attests, we should not take straightforwardly) are hard to deny. Indeed, by invoking the term ethnos, specifically, I want to focus our discussion of ethnicity through notion of “nation,” and to do so because it is more geo-politically loaded: the term figures both in the history of Israel as “gentiles” and in Roman imperial history as those conquered by Rome.17 (Ethnicity is more troublesome, from my perspective, because in the modern world it tends to have liberal “multi-culti” valences – in other words, the shallow celebration of difference seen as neutral and lateral rather than hierarchical constructions of particularity posed against a universalized normativity.) Peoplehood in the early Roman period was not legible without some sort of geographic reference, even while (again) that geography was not stable, continuous, or uncontested – in part because the Romans remapped portions the Mediterranean after conquering them. What constituted “Judea” (previously Judaea, and before that Judah, and Israel…), for instance, was a moving target over time. But nonetheless “culture” and “religion” as categories for belonging were largely dependent on histories of territorialization – they were the culture or religion of X place, and the reason this is important is precisely because place was so thorny and so completely imbricated in Roman imperial (and other past) frames of conquest. To claim belonging to a people is to immediately make reference to such specific and constructed geographies.

Perhaps the only variance in this is when one claimed “Romanness.” In contrast to classical Greek notions of citizenship which were grounded in the polis and civic responsibility, Roman citizenship was expressed translocally as both familial and a particular kind of submission to Roman law, a submission that was imagined to enable

16 Return itself is not affectively straightforward either. As Grace Cho has posed of the

situation of Korean enslavement by the Japanese, for example, if one is born in Japan to Korean parents, does one really “return” to Korea? Grace Cho, “Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 151-169. See also Saidiya Hartman’s account of her tracing of her “origins” via following the slave trade routes in Ghana in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 2008).

17 Perhaps the first work truly exploiting this term’s importance in the overlapping discourses of Israel and Rome was Davina Lopez’s Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).


freedom.18 Romanitas was to accept Roman values as superior, but it also implied “a renunciation of all previous local attachments,” as Anthony Pagden has put it.19 The Roman ethnographic enterprise of describing and stereotyping the nations it conquered was, for Pagden, not in contradiction with the larger goal to incorporate – via erasure – “other” peoples/nations.20 In this way, the Antonine Edict which granted citizenship “universally” across the empire,21 was not a signal moment of transformation as much as the formal articulation of a long-held set of goals and values – so much so that this edict was in later history attributed to various other emperors, including Hadrian who ruled almost a century earlier.22

Universal and particular are not opposites, however. They rather operate in a dependent tension with one another. The imperial tendency to press disparate peoples and their traditions or cultures into similar molds – producing them as different kinds of “philosophy,” for instance23 – is both particularizing and universalizing. Imperial authorities sought to locate and target populations by various means, and to do so for physical eradication and/or cultural assimilation. Judea’s tentative and limited autonomy into the middle of the first century CE, and then its stagger and collapse, is simply part of the larger simultaneous movements of boundary expansion and slow revoking of local authorities.24

We might say then that the early empire’s intensive focus on national particularity through ethnography and affiliated mapping practices largely worked to parlay these particularities into a heightened investment in universal Roman belonging (cosmic rule, the oikoumene, etc.) In some instances, this perhaps gave national belonging, however imperially structured, additional traction for Rome’s conquered peoples, and thus it also gave the loss of that (imperially constructed) particularity more

18 Clifford Ando, “Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Universalism in the Aftermath of

Caracalla,” in Citizenship and Empire in Europe: 200-1900: The Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years. Edited by Clifford Ando (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016), 17.

19Anthony Pagden, “Afterword: Roman Citizenship, Empire, and the Challenges of Sovereignty” in Citizenship and Empire in Europe: 200-1900: The Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years. Edited by Clifford Ando (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016), 248.

20 Ibid. 21 As always, however, “universal” citizenship only encompassed those who counted as full

persons, and did not include slaves, women, or children. 22 Ando, “Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Universalism,” 9. 23 SeeSteven N. Mason, “Philosophiai: Graeco-Roman, Judean and Christian” in Voluntary

Associations in the Graeco-Roman World John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 31-58

24 Pagden, “Afterword.”


poignancy.25 But the slow erasure of local attachments in the shaping of a universal subjection to Roman law and paterfamilias is hauntingly similar to (not to mention contemporaneous with!) the de-localization of rhetoric, and an increasing emphasis on family instead of nation as primary structures of self-understanding in “early Christian” literature as the decades wear on.26

We must follow Boyarin’s impressive work noticing how the notion of any essential distinctness of “Christiantity” and “Judaism” in antiquity completely falls apart, but I want to argue that we also need to keep the (literal) landscape of the ancient Mediterranean in the frame. Indeed it seems that even as Boyarin’s singular focus on Christians and Jews in antiquity and late antiquity has yielded rich and provocative textual and discursive insights, it almost appears in his work as if Christianity and Judaism are singularly focused on each other in the ancient world, rather than captive to, and captivated by, other and larger forces and factors. If they are twins, their mother (or perhaps motherland) seems almost incidental. Attending to the ethnic/national landscape of the ancient Mediterranean means mining and following emphatically local attachments, even while what constitutes “local” as well as the very valence and forms of those attachments are unpredictable and under constant reformulation. For our scholarship to “lose the nation” repeats the movement in ancient literature without noticing what has happened: scholarship thus naturalizes the gradual obliteration of the local on the larger imperial level as, say, a move away from the particularity of “Judaism” to the universalism of “Christianity.” Indeed, the production of “Judaism” and “Christianity” as terms divested of national referents and imbued with ideological or creedal ones – in short, as “religions” in something more like the modern sense – might both be indebted to this imperial effort to efface localized attachments.

As we reframe early Christianity, then, I would ask this seminar to hold the loss of nation in the frame, and to do so against the potential perils of lachrymosity (lachrymosity being ever perilous) and despite the shadow that contemporary Zionism casts, not least because without loss and without land in our picture, what inevitably will come of that picture is the triumphalist story of an abstract entity – a faith tradition, a movement, always already coming to the fore.

25 This is compatible with Heidi Wendt’s thesis in her Christianity Seminar paper of last

year, “From the Herodians to Hadrian: The Shifting Status of Judean Religion in Post-Flavian Rome” (Presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA). Wendt argues in fact that the Roman-Jewish war actually increased the visibility of and interest in Judean traditions across the empire, and gave independent/self-authorized/institutionally unaffiliated religious “experts” more traction.

26 For a more extended argument on this see Kotrosits, Rethinking Early Christian Identity, chapter 6.

9

Decapolis Death Worlds Necropolitics, Specters, and Gerasene Ethnicity among the Tombs

Peter N. McLellan

Drew University

Madison, New Jersey

The bodies and localities of poor, criminalized people of color are signifiers for those who are ineligible for personhood, for those contemporary (il)legal statuses within U.S. law that are legally illegible. These statuses are legally illegible because they engender populations not just racialized but rightless, living nonbeings, or, in Judith Butler’s words, as “something living that is other than life.” —Lisa Marie Cacho1

American political and judicial discourse depends on the exercising of power

against those whose lives never actually count, who cannot count as living. What is more, they are so far outside the space of the living that whatever the authority is meted against them cannot even be called “justice.” Such is the call to which Cacho accedes above, that U.S. civil society depends on the distribution of life through legal rights, but that such “due process” is always already limited to particular subjects over against others. That such racism creates and perpetuates rightlessness, creates what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “a killing abstraction,” in which minoritized populations are merely “dead-to-others.”2 Thus, the threat to legal order, I assume in this paper, is an always already racialized subject, recognizable not just as Other, but also only as dead. This project does not stop there, however: the already dead Other, imagined in ways detailed enough to inform stereotypes, threatens both in its life and its afterlife. My starting point is Mark’s presentation of the Gerasene Demoniac (5:1-20), not just as a possessed or mentally ill individual,3 but a rhetorical tool by which the narrator constructs a space—

1 Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), 6. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 15.

2 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002), 16.

3 Simon Mainwaring takes a different tact to most interpreters of the role of the demoniac in this passage. While most scholars are interested in allegorical reading of the man’s name and relationship to his community—which, admittedly, I undertake here as well—Mainwaring contends that this man exists as a mentally ill person, suffering the ill-effects of empire. In short,

Westar Spring 2016 McLellan, Decapolis Death Worlds 10

“the tombs”—through which an ethnic group is constructed as already dead. Thus, while a Christianity may or may not be under negotiation here, my interest rests with the way any sort of group identified with Mark’s Jesus is imagined here with the construction of the Gerasenes as a necessary excess.4 Mark 5:1-20 features Jesus’ arrival in the Decapolis, called here “the country of the Gerasenes,” where the audience is immediately confronted by a demon-possessed man. But the demoniac is faced down by the Markan protagonist to a suicidal death, Jesus’ utterance mirroring a necropolitical decree of the kind characterized by Sunera Thobani: “The Empire of Terror offers a stark choice to its objects of power: incorporation or extermination. Its forms of sovereignty intend the taking of no survivors: loyalty or death.”5 For those who refuse, death beckons, but as Achille Mbembe has made clear, for others the option hardly exists.6

As I will show, the regulatory act Mark demands his Gerasene characters take up is always already a failure. These people, characterized as failed and unlivable bodies simultaneously embody a threat to an established social order and are asked to police the boundaries of their death world. In this way, policing as a performance of civic participation is constructed as an act of service or safety demanded by the state apparatus, but only for its own vitality. Jasbir Puar has noted that the practical effect of such border enforcement is the creation of a tension between a desire to accede to life and the conditions of death, out of which predetermined acceptable subjects must emerge.7 Indeed, when one accedes to the conditions of the biopolitical, they leave behind the conditions of death, within which manifold subjects subsist. This process, of constructing an ethnic Other as already dead, and the results of this process, are the realities with which this project wrestles. But as this passage demonstrates, spirits—most he is interested in “individual agency” under occupation (Mark, Mutuality, and Mental Health: Encounters with Jesus [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014], 172).

4 In this way, my reading is sympathetic to the work of Denise Buell, whose concepts of race and ethnicity are contingent with religion, arguing, “Our interpretive models should seek not an original essence for Christianity but rather highlight the processes and strategies of negotiation and persuasion that permeate the very creation of Christianness” (Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005], 29). Indeed, Buell notes that racial-ethnic belonging—whether fueled by religious discourses or not—can be defined by “the dynamic interplay between fixity and fluidity. Appeals to kinship and descent are one significant way in which the “reality” and “essence” (or fixity) of ethnicity/race is articulated” (9). With that said, I find myself here less interested in Christianness than I am with the Gerasene-ness imagined by the Markan community.

5 Suner Thobani, “Prologue,” in Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (eds.), Queer Necropolitics (New York: Routledge, 2014), xv.

6 My primary conversation partner for this project is Achille Mbembe and his signal article “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), 11-40.

7 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).


immediately, “Legion”—refuse the laws that divide minoritized bodies from one another. Engaging with the hauntology of Jacques Derrida,8 I argue that colonizing ideologies—whether espoused from the imperial center or out of the colonized margins—depend on necropolitics, not as an inevitability, but as a fiction whose own failure has been exposed by the ghosts haunting out of these death worlds, who, in the process of their mystical demystifying, create alliances across the boundaries of those necrotic spaces. Decapolis Death Worlds Achille Mbembe’s work with necropolitics is replete with spatial reasoning, considering lives within the “postcolony” or the “frontier.” Such spaces, characterized as “death worlds,” are the unbounded places outside the borders of civilization.9 Similarly, thinking spatially about the Gospel of Mark’s encounter between Jesus and the Gerasene Demoniac demonstrates the way the narrative’s locatedness does work as an ideological formation.10 That is, narrative spaces are more than just plot devices, but come preloaded for the author, reader, and audiences with meaning from cultural memories, histories, stories, and values. Applying such a hermeneutic to Mark’s Gospel yields similarly fruitful results.11 Consider Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between

8 The field of hauntology has been typified with recourse to both Jacques Derrida, Specters of

Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf ; New York and London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2006 [1st edn, 1994]) and Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

9 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 25-35. See also Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). In conversation with Mbembe, Sunera Thobani helpfully notes that the death world is that place where the liberal democratic citizen-subject is not, where “the mark of extermination that infuses its racial logic of power gives rise to the ‘Indian’ reserve, the slave plantation, the native quarter, the Bantustan, the Nazi camp, as well as the slums, prisons and refugee camps proliferating around the world” (“Prologue,” xv).

10 Critical space theorists have long pursued a socially-conditioned definition of space and territoriality over a biologically produced notion. For more see, for example, R.J.A. Johnston, A Question of Place: Exploring the Practice of Human Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell 1991); Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 7; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Explorations in Anthropology; Oxford: Berg, 1994).

11 For a first-of-its-kind reading of the Second Gospel with a critical-space hermeneutic, see Eric C. Stewart’s Gathered around Jesus: An Alternative Spatial Practice in the Gospel of Mark (Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009). No doubt we should consider such a volume in light of Elizabeth Struthers Malbon’s work (cf. Narrative Space and Mythic Meaning in Mark [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986]), but the two differ in so far as Stewart


“representations of space” and “spatial representations.”12 Here, in the words of Andy Merrifield, a distinction can be drawn between “conceptualized space” (representations of space) and “lived space” (spatial representations).13 In other words, space is manifest ideologically, through mapping, narrative, and in its material forms; space is conceptual. It is also, however, a lived reality, insofar as the subjects who move and interact with a given space are marked by it and mark it; they can accede to its ideological demands, refuse them, or simply live otherwise. As I will demonstrate below, the Markan narrator constructs an ideological space for the Gerasenes to reside, the tombs, a space marked by death, which marks them for death. The question with which we might wrestle, then, is whether or not their lived reality reappropriates such spatiality.

No doubt, Mark 5:1-20 unfurls in a spatially-rich environment. But in this specific space, the cloying stench of death lingers. Coined by Mbembe, the term necropolitics follows Foucault’s assertion that the modern state organizes populaces biopolitically. Mbembe’s innovation arrives as an assertion that control over mortality for the purpose of maximum production is actually an insufficient concept for conceiving of neocolonial centers and peripheries.14 Necropolitics accounts for the fact that contemporary states are dependent upon subjects existing outside the realm of the livable, in “death worlds.”15 Within such spheres, state powers see themselves as legitimate arbiters of maximum destruction against the “savage” frontiers of the colony, thereby creating a space in which existence is possible only in a “state of pain.”16 With a “crying” demoniac (5:5, 7), who gashes himself with stones (v. 5), the Decapolis is surely marked with such torment. Readers are introduced to the scene as Jesus and his disciples approach the shore shortly after Jesus calms a storm upon the Sea of Galilee (4:36-41). No doubt, those attuned to deathly themes in the passage may feel a tingle as we hear they sailed to “the other side” (5:1a). Yet, as Eric Stewart argues, such a phrase also establishes a distance—indeed, an exotic character—to the Decapolis, insofar as great sea voyages were common

applies a concept of space, detailed below, understood broadly as “social,” whereas Malbon’s effort explores space as a narrative construct.

12 In his 1976 volume Lefebvre infamously (re)elaborated a “spatial triad,” dividing space into “spatial practice,” “representations of space,” and “spatial representations,” so as to argue that “(social) space is a (social) product” (The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith [Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1991], 33, 26).

13 Andy Merrifield, “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space,” in Thinking Space, edited by Michael Crang and Nigel Thrift (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 174-175.

14 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11-12. 15 Ibid., 39-40. 16 Ibid., 38.


themes in Greek heroic tales.17 And while, as we shall see, this realm serves as a space of the dead, it does seem to function as a discrete territory. In other words, Hans Leander notes, Mark’s use of the Greek phrase χώρα “of the Gerasenes” (v. 1b) acts as a spatial designation—delineated also by a “boundary” (ὅριον, v. 20)—marked by the people who live there; in short, a political boundary.18 The region, then, belongs to a particular people, not on account of its geographical location, but on the identity of those within. The question for our purposes must become, identified according to whom? Insofar as this representation of space functions, at least partially, on the level of narrative, it also operates ideologically. That is, Mark conceptually identifies the Gerasenes within this χώρα, mapping a space into which they might fit. This discursive relationship to spatiality means, as Warren Carter argues, that the single body of the demoniac acts as a synecdoche for an entire society,19 in this case the occupied people of the Decapolis. But, if space is a socially-produced and socially-productive force, the way the tombs construct Gerasene ethnicity is salient for this present argument. The pericope gains its necropolitical edge from the start: “And as he left the boat, immediately, from the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit met him” (5:2). No doubt, we can engage our analysis of this characterization of Gerasa with Mbembe’s notion that colonial powers necessarily practice “seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial

17 Stewart, Gathered, 182. Following Roy Kotansky (“Jesus and Heracles in Cadiz: Death,

Myth, and Monsters as the ‘Straits of Gibraltar’ [Mark 4:35-5:43],” in Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Bible and Culture: Essays in Honor of Hans Dieter Betz, edited by Adela Yarbro Collins [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998], 160-229), Stewart argues that this voyage “becomes a voyage to the ‘Other Side,’ that is, to the edges of the oikoumenē.”

18 Leander is aware of the complexity of a conversation to delineate the boundaries of a country for the Gerasenes. The notion that a people might occupy some discrete and identifiable territory near the seashore is something of a controversial topic, Leander argues, as the city was instead located some “80 kilometers from Jerusalem” (Hans Leander, Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013], 214). He therefore follows Stephen Moore, who notes that the Hebrew consonants within “Gerasa” maintain the meaning of “drive” or “cast out” (Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006], 28). The term, “political space” is partially indebted to Malbon’s argument that such spaces, named properly with a people, should be understood as “geopolitical” spaces (Narrative, 15-49).

19 Carter argues that the Legion represents the possessed character of all occupied peoples (“Cross-Gendered,” 144-145). His primary interlocutor here is Maud Gleason, whose studies of Greco-Roman rhetoric point to the notion that “images of the body” work as “synechdohe for an entire society” (“Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus,” in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by Simon Goldhill [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 52). Leander works with perhaps a more refined notion, arguing that this passage is very clearly marking a particular people (Discourses, 205-219).


relations.”20 Indeed, he will continue, these spaces are divided violently by conquerors so as to construct lands of origin for “[people] of ill repute.”21 Here, too, the “savage” frontier is imagined by the Markan narrator to be out of control and wild, even demonic. The man approaching Jesus from the tombs had been chained there and broken free; he howled, “day and night,” so wild that he gashed himself with stones and “no one was able to bind him, not even with a chain” (5:3-5). At this point, the striking image of a Gerasene man, roaming the tombs and the mountains of the whole region, and screaming from his possession serves to transform the entire region into a lawless space.22 In other words, the narrator presents us with a people who are open to conquest, a conquest that is justified, on account of their lack of self-control, their inability to protect their borders from the assault of outside entities. In fact, when it comes to materializing the Gerasenes, in the past or present, spatiality and characterization may be the only tool at interpreters’ disposal to even begin some sort of reconstruction. Treatment of the “Gerasenes” as a marker of a “people” has a convoluted past in twentieth- and twenty-first-century biblical scholarship. Most readers, though, have approached the preferred majority Greek term Γερασηνῶν as something between a text-critical and spatial-political problem. Γερασηνῶν is traditionally associated with the ancient city of Gerasa, contemporary Jerash,23 but other possibilities have made mischief in alternate Greek manuscripts, including Γαδαρηνῶν (Gadarenes, of Gadara)24 and Γεργεσηνῶν (Gergesenes, of Gergesa).25 While “Gerasenes” seems the most likely choice, it becomes so only as lectio

20 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 25. 21 Ibid., 27. This phenomenon is not lost on Stewart who also notes that the wild and death-

dealing behavior of the Gerasenes functions to characterize them as a wild and “uncivilized” people (Gathered, 182).

22 Carter notes that the wildness of this space, typified by the emasculated demoniac, allows Jesus to look the part of the most powerful being in the arena: “In these terms, the man as metaphor for society subdued and dominated by militarily based Roman dominance communicates in vv. 2–5 the experience of that power in terms of death (among the tombs), social alienation, overwhelming power, lack of control, self-destruction, demonic control, and antithesis to Gods empire/rule manifested by the manly man Jesus (1:15)” (“Cross-Gendered,” 145). Indeed, to be fair Carter’s argument has more to do with a Jesus versus the empire conflict at work. My argument, therefore, extends his claim to mark the whole of the territory in which this conflict is meted out.

23 Γερασηνῶν is attested by א* B D 2427vid latt sa. 24 Support for this moniker can be found in A C. Matthew’s use of the pericope (8:28) also

deploys the term “Gedarenes,” perhaps already pointing to a trajectory of scribal skepticism over Mark’s shaky geography.

25 This reading is attested to in 2א L Δ. For Origen’s account, see his Commentary in John 6.24. For discussion of this conversation, see especially Tjitze Baarda, “Gadarenes, Gerasenes, Gergesenes and the ‘Diatessaron’ Traditions,” in Neotestamentica et Semitica: Studies in Honor of


difficilior; in short, both Gadara and Gergesa were located on the Sea of Galilee, while Gerasa was located roughly thirty miles inland from the sea.26 Of course, as I have already begun to demonstrate, constructing the Gerasenes as a discrete, identifiable people can still be accomplished through a necropolitical reading of the passage. That is, returning to Cacho, racial-ethnic identities are always already ascribed apart from one’s hometown: racism ensures that illegality and death are recognizable identity markers, traits that make the Other knowable. If we are to proceed under the notion that Mark is deploying the death-dealing language of conquering powers, it behooves us to consider who the conquerors are in this passage and how they operate vis-à-vis the, literally, demonized Gerasenes. When Jesus confronts the demoniac and asks for the spirit’s name, the spirit famously answers, “Legion, for we are many” (5:9b). Given this uniquely Roman moniker, scholars have long noted this passage’s not-so-veiled dig at Roman military occupation of the region in the first-century CE.27 But in his postcolonial analysis of the Second Gospel, Hans Leander notes that in Mark Jesus’ performance mimics that of the emperor Vespasian as described in first-century Roman texts. Both are presented as victorious military leaders in Gerasa (5:9; Josephus, Jewish War 4.488), both heal the sick in similar ways,28 and they

Matthew Black, E. Earle Ellis and Max Wilcox, eds. (Edinburgh: T&T clark, 1969),181-197; John McRay, “Gerasenes,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 2 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 991-992; Bruce Metzger, Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion Voulme to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (2nd edn.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 18-19; John T. Fitzgerald, “Gadara: Philodemus’ Native City,” in Philodemus and the New Testament World, idem. Dirk Obbink, and Glenn S. Holland, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 343-397; Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 263-264, esp. note b.

26 Collins, Mark, 263. 27 This claim has been made numerous times over the past century. Some of the more

prominent postcolonial and empire-critical readings to follow this notion include Paul W. Hollenbach, “Jesus, Demoniacs, and Public Authorities: A Socio-historical Study,” JAAR 49 (1981), 567-88, Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 43–48; Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 190–94; John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco and New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), esp. 91; Richard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 140–48; Moore, Empire, 24–44; Joshua Garroway, “The Invasion of a Mustard Seed: A Reading of Mark 5:1-20,” JSNT 32, no. 1 (2009), 57-75, Leander, Discourses, 201–19. For a salient critique of the more tendentious tendencies of many of the above accounts, see Laura E Donaldson, “Gospel Hauntings: The Postcolonial Demons of New Testament Criticism,” in Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections, Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, eds. (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 102-106.

28 Both Jesus and Vespasian cure men with withered hands (3:1-5; Dio Cassius 65.8.1) and, with more exotic specificity, blind men with spittle (8:22-26; Suetonius, Vespasian 7).


each appear to fulfill Jewish messianic expectations (8:29; J.W. 6.312-313). Rhetorically, Jesus functions as a general as powerful and successful a military leader as the Emperor himself; practically, however, we need to also interrogate the way in which Mark not only sets up Jesus as conqueror but also the Gerasenes as conquerable. Indeed, rather than appearing as a party worthy of justice—perhaps one of Jesus’ numerous healings (1:40-45; 2:1-12; 3:1-6; 5:21-43; 6:53-56; 7:24-37; 8:22-26; 9:14-29; 10:46-52)—29the Gerasenes appear worthy only of a tragic existence. Perhaps more insidiously, following the carnage of the Jewish War—in which Vespasian infamously dispatched a cavalry regiment to pillage and burn the entire countryside30—Mark re-presents this suffering, extending its memory in perpetuity through his Christological manifesto. The practical effect of narratives of this kind, as Mbembe notes, is a “peaceful” imperial center, be it Rome or Palestine, London or Washington, established through comparison to the “savage” frontier in which “war without end” rages.31 Policing Dead Space We have already seen that this space, constructed as χώρα, is politically-bounded and recognizable within the Markan imaginary, but might we also interrogate the ways the narrative describes the policing of said borders, the means by which they are reinforced? Such a project emerges as critical to an interpretation of this passage because, when it comes to death worlds, policing and identity-formation come hand-in-hand. In the present example, we might note that Mark presents the residents of the Decapolis as eager to regulate the demoniac in ways that reinforce their collective identity in a constructive way, we might say that they police his behavior for their own performative ends. My argument is that Mark rhetorically creates an ethnic group performing an ideal act of policing the very death world from which they come. The narrator’s desire, however, is complicated if we maintain, as I have above, that the narrator’s characterization of the demoniac serves to construct an image of the Gerasenes as a whole. Indeed, if this is the case, this passage coopts the agency of the people of the region for the purpose of policing the very border separating them from the realm of the living. In short, they are obliged regulate their very death. Fixing the Gerasenes with an apparently stable—if necrotic—racial-ethnic identity, I argue, is accomplished in large part through a complex negotiation of conceptual and lived spaces, beginning with a twofold rhetorical move on the part of the author to engage tombs as a concept and as a materially-recognizable space. In the first

29 No doubt, the Gerasene is himself cured of an “unclean spirit,” but the Decapolis remains a tomb, thus maintaining the space’s and people’s necrotic identifier.

30 Leander, Discourses, 214. 31 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 23-24.


place, we see an effort to construct the demoniac’s non-living status. That is, tombs are a place where the dead are supposed to reside. The lengths to which the Gerasenes went to force the man to the necropolis are telling: they “often bound him with fetters and with chains” (5:3-4), a process, thus, that was repeated. In other words, the narrator has created a situation in which a people, already associated with death, willingly maintain that identity marker.

Second, an examination of Greco-Roman tombs, broadly,32 further illuminates the ideological work done by the Markan journey to the Decapolis tombs. That is, to simply say that marking the Gerasenes with a space of the dead puts them to death is not enough. If space is socially productive, it behooves interpreters to consider precisely what sort of work cemeteries do to the subjects forced within them, particularly their unwelcome guests. In the first place, tombs across the Roman world were hardly static machinations of stone, but rather spaces through which identities were constantly negotiated. Examining Jewish tombs in northern necropolis at Hierapolis, Philip Harland has noted the ways in which “graves of those who had passed on can also further our understanding of cultural interactions among the living.”33 Harland’s main object of interest is the tomb of Publius Aelius Glykon Zeuxianos Aelianus, the tomb of a Jewish family, who left behind funds for the associations of the purple-dyers to celebrate the festival of Unleavened bread, and the carpet-weavers to celebrate the festivals of Pentecost and Kalends.34 The participation in both Jewish and non-Jewish celebrations, argues Harland, posits a question of whether the Glykon family, who clearly identified as Jewish,35 were “(born) Jews or whether they were gentiles who adopted important Jewish practices (judaizers) and then arranged that other (guilds) also engaged in these practices after their deaths.”36 More important to Harland than this family’s essential racial identity is the notion that their tomb becomes a part of the acculturation process of a relatively recent Jewish community in Hierapolis.37 No doubt, this particular tomb

32 As my examples below demonstrate, this project is less interested in the particularities of

individual necropoleis, but concerned more so with common regulatory traits shared across regions of the Empire between the first-century BCE and the second century CE.

33 “Acculturation and Identity in the Diaspora: A Jewish Family and ‘Pagan’ Guilds at Hierapolis,” Journal of Jewish Studies 57, no. 2 (2006), 222.

34 Walter Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, Band II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 196; cf. Harland, “Acculturation,” 228.

35 Harland will note elsewhere in this piece that the northern necropolis, which houses a majority of Hierapolis’ Jewish tombs, is marked with a large number of menorahs (Harland, “Acculturation,” 227). The Glykon tomb, however, does not feature the symbol and is found in the southeast necropolis, apart from most of the Jewish tombs.

36 Ibid., 229. 37 Ibid., 239-242.


serves as one example among many possible other tombs, but the point stands: the necropolis was also a space by which the dead might continue performing their identity, even after life.

No doubt, individual and group identity-formation through epitaphs operates as an explicit means by which the dead might be shown to belong to—or set themselves apart from—a given society. But such spaces also trade in an alternative, more implicit discourse of identity-formation: legality. In western necropoleis, burial plots would be marked by legally-binding “boundary stones,” writes Virginia Campbell, marking the spaces in which a body might be interred.38 Of course, the delineation of boundaries is, from the outset, an attempt to construct a binary between inside and out. Thus, if a legitimate party resides within the boundaries, the threat of an outside intruding ever lurks. Greco-Roman tombs were frequently inscribed with the names of the buried and buried-to-be, prescriptions for memorial of the deceased party, and penalty for violation of the space (e.g. anyone who might otherwise be buried in said tomb).39 Legal language, including prescriptions for behavior vis-à-vis burial spaces and punishment for violation,40 created criminal bodies. To put it another way, reading tombs as “representations of space,” in which both proper use and violation are presented transparently, comes preloaded with the notion that a violator of the space is a haunting threat. Without the privilege of an epigraphical naming on a mausoleum, the would-be criminal is marked by death in the tombs, not because he or she has be laid to rest, but because their sovereignty as a living subject is always already subject to rightlessness.

In this way, the move by the Gerasenes to regulate the demoniac’s behavior simultaneously figures him as dead and imagines him as a proper criminal. Yet, I argue,

38 Virginia Campbell, The Tombs of Pompeii: Organization, Space, and Society (New York and

London: Routledge, 2015), 99-100. See also, Jocelyn Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 73-100; Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 99. The plot might even be dedicated by a particular entity. In Pompeii, for example, Virginia Campbell has noted that numerous tombs include a decretum decurionum, given by the municipality for use of public land (Campbell, Tombs, 84-98). Harland makes a similar case in the east, but focusing rather in particular associations as the maintaining bodies of certain tombs (Harland, “Acculturation,” 232-235).

39 For more on tombs in the Roman world, particularly as regulated space, see Campbell (Tombs, 84-109). See also J.H.M. Strubbe, “‘Cursed Be He That Moves My Bones,’” in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, edited by Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 33-59.

40 Campbell notes that in and around Pompeii the town council readily granted the use of public land for burial, but also argues that once a body was buried in a tomb, legal recourse was made not to municipal law, but divine law (Tombs, 10-11, 90-93).


whether they intend to make a criminal out of him, hope his presence within the tombs reforms him, or are simply at a loss, hardly matters. In constructing a people as out-of-control and already dead, the Markan narrator makes a savvy move, insofar as he both conjures the Gerasenes as unable to bind their demons and gives them a material solution. His method should not appear unfamiliar to those attuned to contemporary global sexual politics. Jasbir Puar has noted the ways in which Western white queer groups are complicit in the spreading of racist ideology, which figures non-white and non-western queer subjects as victimized by particularly hateful and backward rhetoric. Such homonationalism, as Puar terms it, incites now-normative gay subjects to join in the liberal discourse of, say, “civil rights.” Such discourses, however, are unable to comprehend the non-white, non-Western queer subject, who exists in religiously-, ethnically-, and mortally-other spaces.41 She argues, then, that biopolitical discourses depend upon a “tension” among global queer subjects, in which some are acceptably white and others are aligned with the terroristic other, thinkable only as citizens of the dead.42 Indeed, such a tension between “bio and necro” constantly reproduces itself, reinforcing the distance between the living and the dead, relying on a knowledge and fear of death as an incitement to competition, to division, and incitement to life.43 The Markan project appears quite similar. There can be no doubt, Mark’s Jesus has aspirations, as we have seen, imperial aspirations, and he performs his script well. But if the copycat maneuver enacted by this Son of God is just that, mimicry, then it should also be noted that the act looks to move him out of a similarly non-Roman subject position. That is, this Galilean peasant ironically targets the people of another Roman frontier territory for re-conquest. The recognizably normative Jesus moves to exorcise the demons of the Gerasenes, embodied within a man possessed by demons who has now offended too many Greco-Roman sensibilities—allowing himself to be penetrated, unable to control his behavior, chained and shackled, and engaging in self-harm (5:2-5).44 Yet, the Gerasenes themselves are also implicated in their failure to

41 The liberal gay subject has come to maintain an ideology of “queer secularity,” which “is

also underpinned by a powerful conviction that religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist… By implication, a critique of homophobia within one’s home community is deemed more pressing and should take precedence over a critique of racism within mainstream queer communities” (Puar, Terrorist, 15-16).

42 Ibid., 35. 43 Ibid., 35-36. 44 Carter helpfully notes, “This is a scathing indictment of Roman power, but we must not

miss its important gendered texture. Integral to the characterization of the man in these terms in vv. 2-5 is the lack of self-control. A lack of self-control ‘calls into question one’s masculinity’ and


regulate and police him. In this way, we are returned to Puar, who notes that queer subjects are further partitioned from one another through competition in the state’s need for white marginalized groups to police the lives of those on the savage frontiers. Indeed, the “exceptionalism” given to the newly normitivized Western LGBT community becomes nothing more than a police baton, wielded against societies who fail to treat their own non-normative sexualities in the Western liberal mode.45 Thus, in familiar fashion, we may find a binary through which Jesus rises to political and cosmological prominence at the expense of the Gerasenes. Yet, the binary is also productive: not only are the Gerasenes on the losing end of Jesus’ “success,” but they are constructed as the necessary ethnic excess of drives to imperial-like control, an ethnic group founded as waste. Mark has set up a space in contradiction. Certainly, what we find is a death world, but one that should be regulated; it has every opportunity to be: the borders are politically-recognized, the people have the means to “chain up” their socially-threatening subjects, and the narrative even makes clear they have no qualms about placing their criminals in the highly-regulated necropoleis of their region. Yet, as is common on the peripheries of the colonial empire, failure and death are the norm. The contradiction of this space, therefore, presents itself in the threat that the death engendered within it is policed by those who cannot contain that threat. Still, the question of power’s operation in the realm of the dead presents itself: are the threatening dead as such because their lives are inherently unlivable, or has the construction of the space as productive of criminality created the need for policing? Indeed, the Gerasenes exist in a necropolitical police state, in which they have been drafted to regulate their own state of death, an endeavor they have a priori failed. When the (Un)Dead Haunt While biopower exists “to stave off death,” as Puar summarizes Foucault’s notion,46 necropower assures those further from the allure of life of death’s immanence. Within this necropolitical reality, Mbembe lifts up the subject of the “suicide bomber,” in whom the deferred future comes quickly, crashing into the present as his or her only

creates a process of ‘sliding down the scale from man to unman.’ Lack of self-control was womanish. The presentation of this unruly unman in vv. 2-5 constructs Roman power as effeminately out-of-control” (“Cross-Gendered,” 145). See also Colleen Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21-25. For more on Greco-Roman masculinity and self-control, see Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 151-156.

45 Puar, Terrorist, 14-15. 46 Ibid., 32.


hope of escaping their life under the inevitable shadow of death.47 Along with time, spatiality, too, is negotiated as warfare, in the modern world executed at distance, is collapsed into “body on body” combat.48 But the bio-necropolitical tension need not end at death: afterlives beckon. We may start such an investigation with an understanding that, while the suicide bomber endeavors to achieve freedom from death through death,49 his or her demands echo at least through a news cycle and, at most, through the memories and tears of their loved ones. Still, biopolitics leave little room—for reasons, perhaps, understandable—for discussion of transcendence. However, I believe room can be found in Mark 5, to discuss the phantom, the spectral, and the spiritual. When this spirit is exorcised from the man and “enters into” a herd of pigs, only to charge over a cliff to their death, a message is communicated far beyond the pages of the Second Gospel, and beyond the Decapolis. Spirits, in their invisibility and their unbelievability communicate; they, as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon argue separately in their hauntologies, make demands.50 Through this sacred text, and against this sacred text, this spirit preaches.

47 Mbembe argues that the suicide bomber operates with the “logic of martyrdom,”

contrasted with the “logic of the survivor.” The survivor, he writes, is one who struggles against his or her enemies, only to come out alive on the other end. The martyr, though, accomplishes “homicide and suicide…in the same act.” Indeed, this means that they suicide bomber lives under a rubric which understands the logic of the survivor to be antithetical to his or her own worldview (and vice-versa). In this way, the bomber overcomes: “The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation” (“Necropolitics,” 36-37). Brining Mbembe’s notion of the suicide bomber into conversation with that of Gayatri Spivak, Puar again enters the necropolitical conversation, but this time working with the notion of the “female suicide bomber,” who “[disrupts] the prosaic proposition that terrorism is bred directly of patriarchy and that women are intrinsically peace-manifesting.” Indeed, for Puar, and by extension Spivak, the female suicide bomber, in her final death, exceeds the genered binary and resistance/complicity binary. Or, in Spivak’s words, “[There] is no recoding of the gendered struggle” (Puar, Terrorist, 220; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Terror: A Speech after 9-11,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 [2004], 96-97).

48 Ibid., 37. 49 Ibid., 36. 50 Avery Gordon writes, “Any people who are not graciously permitted to amend the past,

or control barely visible structuring forces of everyday life…[are] bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts and [are] bound to call for an ‘official inquiry’ into them” (Ghostly,151; see also Denise K. Buell, “Hauntology Meets Posthumanism: Some Payoffs for Biblical Studies,” in Jennifer L. Koosed [ed.], The Bible and Posthumanism [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014], 37-38). Derrida generally avoids an explicit claim of agency for the ghost, but he accedes to an intersubjectivity between the subject and the other that, I think, Gordon and Buell generally miss: “The pledge is given here and now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional” (see Derrida, Specters, 37).


When, as Puar has demonstrated, the apparatuses of power work to divide marginalized bodies, the opportunities for collaboration against those powers is compromised. That is, alliances with attractive political actors are demanded by the political object of desire—say full political participation and representation—within a biopolitical society, necessitating a turn against those subjects with whom the marginalized are identified. But if, as I have argued, Mark 5’s imagined Gerasene community is portrayed as always already dead, a threat to social order, and failed regulators of that threat, then the spirit, Legion (v. 9), enacts a slippery and transcendant resistance. In fact, Derrida says as much of the “specter”: that it “haunts all places at the same time…. The spectral rumor now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the ‘sublime’ and the spirit of nostalgia crosses all borders.”51 For our purposes, the border crossing arrives temporal-spatially—between first-century Palestine and twenty-first-century United States—but also collectively—the specter bursts through the boundaries erected between marginalized groups. That is, the ideological formation of the incessant, slogging march of time demands present subjects disregard past bodies as dead-to-rights, making identifying with such bodies the heinous sin of “anachronism.”52 Thus, it is in the name of “order” or “prosperity” that groups with otherwise common histories and accountabilities are divided against one another in pursuit of wealth, rights, and representation. Yet it is the demand of the specter, who manages to see, as Derrida argues, invisibly as if through a visor, that we “hear voices.”53 With a hauntology in view, Legion slips out of the body of the Gerasene man, carrying the necrotic cries out of the necropolitical police state that is the Decapolis. Legion leaves the narrative space where the Markan ascent to Romanness would hold the spirit as a marker of the death of a people, to times and spaces in which the agency of the Gerasenes might be heard. In this way, its refusal to maintain such boundaries condemns Mark’s partition of Roman

51 Derrida, Specters, 168-169. 52 In their respective analyses of race in antiquity Benjamin Isaac and Denise Buell both

interrogate the ways racial prejudice in and around contemporary political discourse inform and are informed by conceptions of ancient identity and power. A classicist, Isaac notes that while precise language may differ discourses of power, informed by difference in appearance, language, or land of origin, reinforce violent ideologies (The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004]). Buell, a historian of early Christianities, tracks the way “ethnic reasoning” (a term she develops) can be deployed by any group in order to give themselves legitimacy through the use of the “language of peoplehood.” The phenomenon can be seen as a methodology across space-time, even influencing how we understand race/ethnicity in our contexts through the way we view past usages of the formation (Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity [New York: Columbian University Press, 2005]).

53 Derrida, Specters, 168-169.


occupied communities against one another, a separation that figures one as pseudo-imperial and the other as dead. Ghosts, however, do more than condemn erected boundaries, they demonstrate the boundaries themselves to be fictions. In other words, Legion bursts through the established dividing lines of demographic, of space, and of time, uniting the cries of all necrotically-bound peoples. When British gay rights groups, as Puar says, call for an end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while also questioning the absence of queer advocate voices from within Palestine,54 Legion continues their cry.55 More immediately, though, what might Legion cry when urban American policing policies are presented as non-racist because African-American cops also walk the beat? No doubt, these spaces, too, are constructed in the public imagination as failures of policing policy, of economic policy, of racial integration. They are, in short, considered only as death worlds, where the sexual deviant and the homophobe are thought to reside. Already queer, threatening places, we send to the realm of “broken windows” as violent regulators those who themselves lack wealth, and Legion cries. Legion cries foul at the notion that those who subsist in such death worlds are a threat that must choose between self-policing or occupation by a foreigner. Legion rejects policing strategies that pit the lower-middle class against the poor, and knows that tension must be held between #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName; and even then, Legion says the name of those trans African-American subjects rendered invisible because the only comprehensible gay body to the biopolitic is white. In all this, Legion lives into the threat, knowing only that unity in discontent, a unity which celebrates the Other’s unique subjectivity, can respond effectively to the lies of a biopolitical futurity.

54 Puar, Terrorist, 14-16. 55 The Greek term deployed for the speaking voice of the demoniac is κράζω (5:5, 7).

25

Difference and Similarity: A Review of Daniel Boyarin’s A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity

and Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity

Nina E. Livesey

I first read your 1994 monograph A Radical Jew in the late 90s in a course on Galatians and found your energetic and provocative style tremendously engaging. Some twenty years later, my engagement and interest in your arguments has not waned. With depth and breadth, you plunge into issues that are for many modern Jews and Christians central to who they are and to how they differ from each other.1 In that you draw upon an array of writings from various cultures and philosophies—as well as on multiple interpretive methods2—you are able to deftly steer your readers into new modes of thought.

In your 1994 monograph A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity— influenced by F. C. Baur and James D. G. Dunn, among others— you adopt a universalist approach and argue that Paul was a radical reformer of Judaism who sought to erase the distinctive marks that set Jews apart from others. In your 2004 writing, Border Lines, you take up the question of how and why a border was erected between Judaism and Christianity. You focus there on the parallel discursive practices of each group and observe a phenomenological difference—that manifests in unique textual products—between the two cultures only around the sixth century.3 In comparing your 1994 work to your later 2004 monograph, the notion of difference typifies the former, while similarity permeates the latter. I use the categories of difference and similarity to organize my review, comparison, and critique of your two works.

1 In A Radical Jew, you argue that Paul has “set the agenda for issues regarding gender and

ethnicity for both Jews and Christians until this day.” Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 4. (Italics are yours.)

In Border Lines, you engage the issue of the Logos—a second authoritative divine being of God—and comment that this belief is understood by both ancient and modern authorities to be “a virtual touchstone of the theological difference of Christianity from Judaism.” Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 38.

2 In A Radical Jew, you develop a “cultural reading” of Paul. By that you mean that you take into consideration other cultures’ readings of him as well as the politicized readings that are the outgrowth of people subjected to colonialist or racist practices. As a rabbinic Jew, your own cultural and political location informs your interpretation. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 40.

3 You write that it is the form of textuality that in the end marks the difference between Jewish and Christian orthodoxies. Boyarin, Border Lines, 199–200.

Fall 2016 Meeting Livesey, Difference and Similarity 26

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As a seminar, we too are engaged in re-describing and reimagining early Christianity/early Judaism. We orient ourselves less on the outcomes of that history—on the phenomenological developments of the two traditions—and more on a thick description of the events and the material production (texts and artifacts) from the first two centuries. Like you, we are seeking to make sense of these diverse and often intractable materials. We are privileged to have the opportunity to think along with you.

Paul Triggers Difference: A Radical Jew

In A Radical Jew, you argue that Paul was an important Jewish thinker of his time as well as a Jewish “cultural critic.”4 Paul recognized in his contemporary Judaism a tension between a “narrow ethnocentrism and universalist monotheism.”5 The ethnocentrism—also understood as Jewish particularism—especially troubled Paul, as it “implicitly and explicitly created hierarchies between nations, genders, [and] social classes.”6 As you put it, his “genius”7 was to replace the embodied signs of Judaism—circumcision, kashruth, Sabbath observances, the Torah itself, and even the embodied sign “Israel,”8 signs that mark Jews as Jews9—with spiritual signifiers.10 Paul denied the literal, the embodied signs or marks of Judaism, and affirmed instead spiritual signifiers, such as the universal Law of Christ, love, and faith.11 You comment, “What is new in Paul is not the notion that one cannot be justified by acquiring merits [as the traditional reading of Paul would have it] but the notion that faith is the spiritual signified of which covenantal nomism [or Torah adhesion] is the material signifier, and that in Christ the signified has completely replaced the signifier.”12

Paul comes to this line of reasoning through his participation in the thought-world of “eclectic middle-platonism,” found among Greek-speaking Jews of the first century.13 Due to this influence, he assessed a difference between outer material signs—the body, religious practices, and language itself—and their inner representations, and

4 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 2, 12, 52–56, 106, passim. 5 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 52. 6 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 52. 7 This is a word you employ often to characterize Paul. See Boyarin, Radical Jew, 38, 85, 231,

passim. At one point you write, “It was Paul’s genius to transcend ‘Israel in the flesh’”(ibid., 231). 8 You remark, “Paul, no less than Philo, sought to overcome that embodiment of the Jewish

sign system.” Boyarin, Radical Jew, 22. 9 This is, of course, Dunn’s evaluation of Paul. You cite from James D. G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul,

and the Law (Louisville: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1990), 194. 10 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 25, 54, 85, 94, 96, 120, passim. Ibid., 120. 11 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 132, cf 120. 12 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 120. 13 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 14.


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he subordinated the former (the body) to the latter (the spirit). This hierarchical dualism between body and spirit—the body’s inner and true significance—is matched in his hermeneutical practices, especially in his use of allegory.14 Allegoresis is a mode of interpretation “founded on a binary opposition [dualism] in which the meaning as a disembodied substance exists prior to its incarnation in language—that is,. . . a dualistic system in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.”15 With allegory, referents (signifiers) point to reality that is beyond and superior to the referents themselves. Moreover, Paul’s often cited binary opposition between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma) is evidence of Pythagorean thought,16 another form of eclectic middle-platonism. It is especially within his letter to the Galatians, in which one finds a constellation of predominantly Hellenistic hermeneutics17 and discursive practices, where one sees ample evidence of this influence.

Paul’s hierarchical dualism is intimately tied to his valorization of Oneness. Paul, you write, “was motivated by a Hellenistic desire for the One, which among other things produced an ideal of a universal human essence, beyond difference and hierarchy.”18 Evidence of this strong belief is found especially in Gal 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (NRSV).” Indeed, this verse is your starting point and “hermeneutical key”19 to Paul’s thought. Here but also elsewhere, Paul erases difference, especially ethnic and gender difference.20 The embodied Jew and the embodied woman become subordinated to one human essence. It is the erasure of difference, the erasure of particularity, that brings about the significant cultural shift,

14 You remark, “The fundamental hermeneutical stance which he [Paul] takes to the text is

allegorical; that is, the language and even its apparent referents are understood as pointing to a reality beyond themselves.” Boyarin, Radical Jew, 118.

15 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 14. 16 Chapter three is devoted to the opposition between the spirit and the flesh. Boyarin,

Radical Jew, 57–85. Paul’s various oppositions, such as body/soul, humans/God, works/faith, traditional teaching/revelation, etc., indicate the influence of Pythagorean thought and expression. Ibid., 30–31.

17 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 118, 228, passim. Paul, however, you argue can still participate in Hebraic midrashic techniques.

18 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 7, 106, 181, passim. You write, “[W]hat drove Paul was a passionate desire for human unification, for the erasure of differences and hierarchies between human beings, and that he saw the Christian event, as he experienced it, as the vehicle for this transformation of humanity.” Ibid., 106.

19 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 6, 22. 20 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 8. Galatians itself, on your reading, is “entirely devoted to the theme

of the new creation of God’s one people, the new Israel through faith and through the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.” Ibid., 106–7.


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“the difference.”21 Paul’s radical message was the eradication of human difference,22 a message that continues to reverberate today.

Surely, you employ the adjective “genius” to Paul as tongue-in-cheek. I read your book then and now as a lament for an appreciation of Jewish particularity, Jewish distinctiveness, indeed for Jewishness itself. How can Paul, from your perspective, be a “good guy.” Indeed, you claim that while Paul is not the origin of anti-Semitism, he is the origin of the “Jewish Question.”23 The Jewish Question, however,—defined as the “problem” of how to integrate Jews as Jews into the larger society,—24 but which you might define as the “continuing significance of the Jewish people,”25 is a problem and akin to anti-Semitism.26 In your reading, Paul makes faith the great equalizer that has completely replaced the signifiers, the particulars that define the ancient Jew, Jewish rites, the Torah itself, and Israel according to the flesh.27 You argue that the subordination of the particular or the body to the universal becomes for Paul “the actuality of a new religious formation which deprives Jewish ethnicity and concrete historical memory of value by replacing these embodied signs with spiritual signifiers.”28 You compare Paul’s allegorical method to the midrashic hermeneutic of other Jews of the time and remark that, in contrast to Paul, midrash makes concrete reality of language and history “absolutely primary.”29 In midrash there is no division (no duality) between the referent (language) and what it signifies. Paul fails to honor his tradition. Indeed, your views appear to be close to those of the nineteenth-century

21 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 25. 22 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 107. 23 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 156. 24 Alex Bein, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, trans. Harry Zohn (Cranbury

NJ, London, Ontario, and New York: Associated University Presses, 1990), 19, 21. As Bein remarks, at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, when Jews left the Jewish districts and entered more fully into the surrounding economic, social and political life, and demanded equal status with the other citizens, that “people [began] to regard their existence as a problem requiring a solution.” At first, people spoke of toleration but by 1842 the Jewish Question came to mean the problem of integrating Jews into the Christian society. In 1880 the Jewish Question intensified into the anti-Semitic movement. Ibid., 20.

25 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 203. 26 If F. C. Baur was not anti-Semitic, he surely was supersessionistic with regard to his

understanding of Paul. Baur writes, "the apostle feels that in his conception of the person of Christ, he stands on a platform where he is infinitely above Judaism, where he has passed far beyond all that is merely relative, limited, and finite in the Jewish religion, and has risen to the absolute religion." F. C. Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ, trans. A. Menzies, (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2003), 2.126.

27 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 120, cf 132. 28 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 25. 29 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 118.


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Jewish historian Henrich Graetz, who wrote, “[W]ithout Saul, Christianity would have no stability. . . he seemed created to establish what was new, and to give form and reality to that which seemed impossible and unreal.”30 In Graetz’s view, Paul was a “destroyer of Judaism,”31 not a Jewish genius.

The notion that Christianity is a universalistic religion is without a doubt well rooted in the modern Christian imagination.32 I would argue, however, that universalism is more a phenomenon of early nineteenth-century Europe,33 than it is of Paul. Indeed, it is the German theologian of that era F. C. Baur (1790–1860), who is in large part responsible for the universalist interpretation of Paul.34 Baur claimed that Paul was strongly against Jewish exclusiveness.35 Baur also evinces anti-Judaism. According to him, Jews believed they had a “theocratic supremacy” (“theokratische Primat der jüdischen Nation”) and an absolute claim on God.36 Baur likely had first-hand experience of the Jewish Question.

In contrast to Baur’s universalist, literalist and anti-Jewish reading of Paul, other scholars, such as Denise Buell and Carolyn Johnson Hodge, have argued convincingly that early Christians like Paul made universalizing claims for strategic reasons. They employed universalist arguments to win over non-Jews, for self-legitimazation purposes, and to compete with insiders for the superiority of their own version of Christianity.37 Hodge, for example, argues that Paul does not value universal over ethnic religion but instead deploys “ethnic discourses” in order to negotiate the relationship between Jews and gentiles.38 Buell writes,

30 From Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews from the Earliest Times to the Present Day II, 149.

As cited in Daniel R. Langton, "The Myth of the ‘Traditional View of Paul’ and the Role of the Apostle in Modern Jewish-Christian Polemics," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28, no. 1 (2005): 78.

31 Langton, "The Myth of the 'Traditional View of Paul'", 79. 32 Hodge discusses how modern Christians who know that they are not Jews understand

that Christianity transcends ethnic identities and then project that onto Paul. Caroline E. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47–48.

33 Indeed, at the same time Europe was dealing with the Jewish Question. 34 On this, see Hodge, who credits nineteenth-century exegetes such as F. C. Baur with the

universalist reading of Paul. Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 6. 35 Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ, 1.356–57. Baur writes, “The main idea running

through its entire extent [Romans] is the absolute nothingness of all claims founded on Jewish exclusiveness. The aim of the Apostle is to confute the Jewish exclusiveness so thoroughly and radically that he fairly stands in advance of the consciousness of the time.”

36 F. C. Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre, (Leipzig: Fues's Verlag, 1867), 2.353.

37 Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2, 136, passim. See also her final chapter, pages 138–65.

38 Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 48, 127–28.


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We need to approach Christianity not as an essence but as a contested site—one defined and claimed by competing groups and individuals—and Christian history not as an evolving totality but rather as a series of ongoing struggles, negotiations, alliances, and challenges.39

Buell also maintains that in order to gain adherents, these ancient authors presented an ideal form of religion with unified beliefs and practices.40 In making their universal claims, these early Christian authors made use of “culturally available understandings of human difference.”41 That is, they grounded their hermeneutic in the language of genos, of race, ethnicity, and people.42 According to Buell, “it is not feasible to continue to accept a definition of Christianity as a new kind of religion, detached from traditional social and political cultures and centered on belief.”43

Furthermore, following on the scholarship on Paul since the late twentieth century, Hodge remarks that Paul in Galatians and elsewhere does not address Jews and gentiles alike, but instead only gentiles.44 Paul’s intended audience and his overall rhetorical purpose matter.45 On this now common-for-many-scholars understanding of Paul’s audience, Paul does not ask Jews to abandon their particular traditions and rites, but instead discourages gentiles only from adopting them. Finally, and again in the more recent scholarship, Paul was not attempting to resolve a tension between narrow ethnocentrism and universalist monotheism,46 but instead negotiating how gentiles (his intended audience) could be incorporated into the God of Israel.

39 Buell, Why This New Race, 29 40 Buell, Why This New Race, 140. 41 Denise Kimber Buell, "Ethnicity and Religion in Mediterranean Antiquity and Beyond,"

Religious Studies Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 2. According to Buell, ancient Christian authors employed “ethnic reasoning”—“modes of persuasion that may or may not include the use of a specific vocabulary of peoplehood”—to “legitimize various forms of Christianness as the universal, most authentic manifestation of humanity”(ibid).

42 Buell, Why This New Race, 2. 43 Buell, Why This New Race, 156. Hodge comments, “the bifurcation of body and belief,

ethnicity and religion, was foreign to first-century thinkers.” Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 48. 44 Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs, 9–11. 45 On the issue of Paul’s intended addressees, see especially Pamela Eisenbaum who

comments that it is extremely important to understand that negative statements Paul makes concerning the law can be “easily explained” when one realizes that he is addressing gentiles and not Jews. Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 216–17, cf 61, 244, 248, passim.

46 See Eisenbaum who argues that Jews were able to hold in tension the notion that God was over the entire universe (universal) and that God was at the same time the God of Israel (particular). Israel itself played the role of mediating between God and the nations (non-Jews). Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 196–97.


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Early Jews and Early Christians as Twins:47 Border Lines

By contrast to A Radical Jew, in which you argue that Paul signals difference—difference in thought and in hermeneutical practices,—in Border Lines you defer a real sense of difference between Judaism and Christianity until the sixth century.48 Indeed, you begin this study by refusing to understand that in even by late antiquity there was a fully formed and separate Christianity49 and Judaism.50 Judaism and Christianity come into being, you argue, together, through ongoing contact with each other. The two engage in similar discursive practices. Even by the sixth century, when different textual products represent a phenomenological difference between the two, you again resist difference with the inference that religion itself is a projection and not a “disembedded category.”51

Wave theory—from the field of linguistics—provides you with a helpful model for describing Christian-Jewish history. In the traditional or family-tree model for understanding the relationship between dialects, shared origins accounts for the similarities among them. By contrast, wave theory posits that similarities in dialects may come about through contact.52 Wave theory assesses that dialects are not strictly bounded or separated but instead “shade one into the other.”53 By applying the wave theory model from linguistics to group formation, you argue that instead of a “pure” Jew or a “pure” Christian (that is, essential origins), one finds instead hybridity—the shading of groups into each other—with no such purity to be found. In the more traditional family tree model, Christianity breaks off from a “pure” Judaism, as it is conceptualized in the “parting of the ways” perspective. In wave theory, there is an absence of original Judaism, and hence no “parting of the ways.” As you note, there were an assortment of religious “dialects” throughout the Jewish world that eventually develop structure and become organized into “religions.”54 Border Lines concerns itself with the ways in which the structures and organizations occur that eventually develop into the “religions” of Judaism and Christianity.

Heresiology, you argue, is key to the beginning of the organizational process of both cultures. Late second-century Rabbis and Christian authors, such as Justin and

47 Boyarin, Border Lines, 5. 48 Boyarin, Border Lines, 199–200, cf. 21. 49 The differentiation process occurs, you posit, because “a serious problem of identity arose

for Christians who were not prepared (for whatever reason) to think of themselves as Jews, as early as the second century, if not at the end of the first.” Boyarin, Border Lines, 16–17.

50 Boyarin, Border Lines, 7. 51 Boyarin, Border Lines, 27. 52 That is, by the “convergence of different dialects spoken in contiguous areas.” Boyarin,

Border Lines, 18. 53 Boyarin, Border Lines, 18. 54 Boyarin, Border Lines, 19.


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Irenaeus, engaged in heresiology,55 defined as discursive practices employed to erect borders between themselves and others and to establish identity (orthodoxy). Heresiology brings about both orthodoxy and heresy, which come into being discursively and together.56 The heresiological project is important to Justin, as evidenced by the fact that for the first time with him one finds the Greek word hairesis to undergo a shift in meaning. No longer does hairesis mean “a party or sect marked by common ideas and aims,”57 but changes to signify “a group that propounds false doctrine.”58 In other words, prior to Justin, one finds sects with differing ideas and practices but that do not break loose from a larger tradition. By contrast, with Justin one finds evidence that certain groups are considered as outside of a larger and recognized tradition. With Justin too there is a rise in the significance of doctrines, another sign of emerging orthodoxy.

Similar heresiological activity also occurs on the Jewish side, in the Mishna, a text of proximate date to Justin’s Dialogue. In this late second-century composition and not prior to it, one finds the terms min and minut employed, like hairesis, to mean heresy. The change in the meaning of min suggests that the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah, like Justin, no longer imagined themselves as a sect, but as the majority voice, as those who establish the larger tradition.59 Like Justin, the Rabbis engaged in a similar discursive process, in the “parallel shaping”60 of themselves as orthodox and of others as heretical. Thus, authors representative of each group “exercised agency”61 to appropriate ideas and self-representations for their particular communities. You insist that the parallel shaping is not a matter of the influence of one group on another but instead of each group’s engagement in “dialogical relations between texts and traditions.”62

55 Boyarin, Border Lines, 5, 55. They engage in this practice in “strikingly similar” ways. Ibid.,

5. 56 Boyarin, Border Lines, 3. Quoting from Judith Lieu, you note, “It is in opposition that

Christianity gains its true identity, so all identity becomes articulated, perhaps for the first time, in face of ‘the other,’ as well as in the face of attempts by the ‘other’ to deny its existence” (Ibid.,72).

57 Boyarin, Border Lines, 3, 40. 58 Boyarin, Border Lines, 3, 55. 59 Boyarin, Border Lines, 55. As you remark, minim arises out a challenge to identity, raised

by Justin and others like him. 60 Boyarin, Border Lines, 55. 61 Boyarin, Border Lines, 66. 62 Boyarin, Border Lines, 66. You note that the “process of local variation of a common

tradition is known by folklorists as ecotypification. Rabbinic and orthodox Christian heresiologies are, thus, on my account, ecotypes of each other” (Ibid).


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Justin’s heresiological activity, you argue, very much turns on the notion of the Logos.63 Indeed, Logos theology itself is central to your thesis and functions in Border Lines with a significance similar to the Universal One in A Radical Jew.64 According to your reading, in his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin makes the Logos the “major theological center” of Christianity.65 Belief in the Logos determines who is and who is not Christian: Christians are those who believe in the Logos, Jews are those who do not, and Christians who do not believe in the Logos are deemed heretics.66

Justin, however, creates Logos as a point of distinction (a doctrine to denote difference) where no such distinction otherwise existed. Pre-rabbinic Jews of Justin’s time also acknowledged the Logos. Logos is central to Philo’s theology.67 For him, “Logos is both a part of God and a separate being.”68 Philo envisioned the Logos as a mediator figure, “a personified demiurge.”69 In the Targums—pararabbinic Aramaic translations of the Bible—one finds the notion of the Memra (“word” and also “God”), best understood as a divine entity or mediator.70 For these synagogue Jews outside of rabbinic control, the “Memra [had] a place above the angels as that agent of the Deity who sustains the course of nature and personifies the Law.”71 The Babylonian Talmud (Sanh. 38b) provides additional evidence of an early belief in a second divine entity, who functions like God, known as Metatron.72 That both early Jews and early Christians held a Logos theology, leads you to conclude that actual Christians and Jews would not have distinguished themselves over this issue.73 It is only the heresiologists, such as Justin and the early Rabbis, who made of the Logos an issue over which to distinguish themselves

63 “[F]or Justin belief in the Logos as a second divine person is. . . the very core of his

religion.” Boyarin, Border Lines, 39. 64 Boyarin, Border Lines, 38. 65 Boyarin, Border Lines, 38. 66 Boyarin, Border Lines, 39. In your reading, the Dialogue is aimed simultaneously in two

directions: it attempts to distinguish/create Gentile Christian identity, and it protects Justin from the charge of the heresy of ditheism. Ibid., 38.

67 You quote and agree with the evaluation of David Winston who wrote, “Logos theology is the linchpin of Philo’s religious thought.” Boyarin, Border Lines, 113. See also ibid., 114–16.

68 Boyarin, Border Lines, 114. 69 Boyarin, Border Lines, 116. 70 Boyarin, Border Lines, 117. 71 Boyarin, Border Lines, 116. You remark, “Although, . . . official rabbinic theology sought to

suppress all talk of the Memra or Logos by naming it the heresy of Two Powers in Heaven, before the Rabbis, contemporaneously with them, and even among them, there were a multitude of Jews, in both Palestine and the Diaspora, who held this version of monotheistic theology” (ibid.). In all of the Palestinian Targums, the word Memra comes to mean simply “God,” and its usage is nearly parallel to that of the Logos. See ibid., 119.

72 Boyarin, Border Lines, 120–23. 73 Boyarin, Border Lines, 125.


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from each other. Justin discursively denies the Jews the Logos, while the Rabbis turn the Logos into a heresy, and thus reject it for themselves.

You provocatively term the discursive heresiological activity in which both groups engage, “crucifying the Logos.”74 While both groups participate in the “crucifixion,” that with which they replace the Logos differs. For the Rabbis, Torah comes to supersede the Logos in authority. According to the them, the Logos is only to be found within the Book and no place else. For their part, the Christians transfer the authoritative heavenly Logos to a Logos incarnate, to Jesus.75 In the former, the Logos winds up in writing (in the Torah or the Book), whereas in the latter, the Logos ends up in the voice of a person.76 For the Jews, “The supersession of the Logos by writing gives birth to rabbinic Judaism and its characteristic forms of textuality.”77

By engaging in the activity of “crucifying” the Logos each group disavows a part of itself.78 Despite the loss of an aspect of its own tradition, each group takes part in this self-denying activity, because its interest is in differentiating from each other, from its twin. You write, “By naming the traditional Logos or Memra doctrine of God a heresy, indeed, the heresy, Two Powers in Heaven, the rabbinic theology expels it from the midst of Judaism, hailing that heresy at least implicitly as Christianity, at the same time that, in a virtual cultural conspiracy, the emerging Christian orthodoxy embraces the Logos theology and names its repudiation Judaism.”79

There is, however, another so-called crucifixion of the Logos in which both groups participate. This second discursive exercise also takes place nearly in tandem in the fifth–sixth centuries. The writings of post-Nicene Christianity and the final redactions/layers of the Babylonian Talmud provide evidence of this discursive event. Once again, while the discursive practices of both groups are similar, each group devises

74 See Boyarin, Border Lines, especially chapters 2, 4–6. 75 Boyarin, Border Lines, 129. On the Christian side, this move can be seen in the prologue of

John’s Gospel. You write, “When the text announces in verse 14 that the ‘Word became flesh,’ this advent of the Logos is an iconic representation of the moment that the Christian narrative begins to diverge from the Jewish Koine and form its own nascent Christian kerygma, proclamation” (ibid., 105).

76 The Gospel of Truth, considered Christian as it refers to an authoritative Jesus, disrupts this neat distinction in Logos’s resting place. In that text, the Logos becomes identified with the Book, namely, the Gospel of Truth. For more on this, see Anne Kreps, "The Passion of the Book: The Gospel of Truth as Valentinian Scriptural Practice," Journal of Early Christian Studies 24, no. 3 (2016): 311–35.. Kreps remarks that in the Gospel of Truth, “The Son, the divine logos, is recited into the world as a book” (ibid., 319).

77 Boyarin, Border Lines, 146. 78 Boyarin, Border Lines, 131. The Jewish notion of Two Powers in Heaven is disavowed by

the Rabbis, an activity that may be a response to Christianity. Ibid., 132–33, cf. 145–46. 79 Boyarin, Border Lines, 145–46.


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its own unique understanding of how the “crucifixion” should play out, that is, where its final authority should ultimately lie. On the Jewish side, authority winds up in polynoia, many-mindedness or multiple authorities.80 The move to polynoia only occurs in the latest layers of the Babylonian Talmud (fifth–sixth century); the earlier layers evince one authoritative voice of God, homonoia, envisioned as embodied in Torah. That is, in the final redactions of the Talmud, the Oral Torah—the multivocal writings of the Rabbis— supersede the divine voices within Torah itself.81 In part, the Rabbis make possible this shift in the understanding of authority through the creation of the myth of Yavneh. These later Rabbis invent Yavneh as the ecumenical council that makes Oral Torah authoritative, with the result that the divine authority previously located in the Torah submits to their own authority. The hermeneutic of polynoia means that indeterminacy is the standard, rather than one truth (Logos)—which lies behind and outside the text—considered determinative of meaning.82 This is a crucial move, as it marks the phenomenological difference between the two groups. As you write, “the notion that God himself [sic] suffers a fall into language, and thus into linguistic indeterminacy, may be the most powerful and creative, perhaps even unique, theological notion of rabbinic Judaism. And this is a distinction that made a difference.”83

On the Christian side, this second crucifixion also occurs in the late ancient/early medieval period and is evident in the writings of St. Augustine (fifth century) and St. Gregory (sixth century), authors of patristic orthodoxy. In contrast to the Rabbis, however, for these Christian authors, uniformity or homonoia—saying the same thing is the standard.84 Nicene Christianity rejects dialectic in favor of a “miraculously authorized monovocal truth.”85 The Christian authors crucify the Logos by binding it to heaven, and the Logos behind the text becomes the authoritative voice. This shift to monovocality from an earlier multivocality comes about in the same discursive fashion employed by the sixth-century Rabbis, through the creation of a myth. Christian authors invent the legendary council of Nicaea, which, like Yavneh, was also a claim for the ultimate truth, not to be found in the Oral Torah of course, but instead in its apostolic teachings. Both myths authorize sixth-century orthodoxies.86 Both groups

80 Boyarin, Border Lines, 153, 162. 81 Boyarin, Border Lines, 172. 82 Boyarin, Border Lines, 191. 83 Boyarin, Border Lines, 178. 84 Boyarin, Border Lines, 178. 85 Boyarin, Border Lines, 193. You claim that the origins of this understanding can be found as

far back as Paul and seen within the writings of Tertullian. Ibid. 86 Boyarin, Border Lines, 196.


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crucify the Logos, but to different ends. While the Rabbis espouse mulivocality, the Church Fathers submit to univocality. You comment, “[P]ost-Nicene orthodox Christianity bound the Logos to heaven (the full transcendentalizing of the Son), the late ancient Rabbis broke it (the tablets have been smashed, and the Torah is not in heaven).”87 The textual products that result from these sixth-century discursive exercises are both forms of orthodoxy, and in both human actors lose the ability to discover truth through rational decision making and dialectic.88 You write,

The volubility of human voices that issued from the very different Babylonian rabbinic and (neo-) Nicene strategies of defanging disputation of its power to produce truth is conducive to significant contrasts in the modes of textuality within the two religious cultures and the two orthodoxies that emerged triumphant, each in its own (unequal) sphere, at the end of late antiquity.89

Conclusion: Sparks of Discussion90

The beauty of these two works, indeed one might even say their genius, is not only in their sophistication but in your ability to weave diverse material into a coherent whole. Both works are masterful. It seems to me, however, that there is a certain vulnerability with regard to your approach. In both of these works, you begin with later manifestations—the Universal One and the Logos—and then look for how these particular notions got their start. Authorial intent underlies your assumptions: Paul intended to subordinate the particular to the universal; Justin intended to deny the Logos to Jews. While I have no doubt that many modern Christians consider that Christianity is a universal religion, I doubt, as mentioned above, that Paul intended to create such a universal entity. His motivation for doing so escapes me; if anything Paul condescends to gentiles (see, for example, Gal 2:15). I wonder too how Paul could have been a Jewish cultural critic if, and as you argue in Border Lines, there was likely no unified Judaism at his time to which he could have been opposed. And while I agree that the notion of a second divine being equal in authority to the one God (the Logos in the form of Christ) conceptually divides modern Jews and Christians, I am less convinced that Justin claimed the Logos for himself and denied it to Jews. Such an argument implies that Justin was somehow savvy to the centrality of Logos theology for

87 Boyarin, Border Lines, 200. 88 Boyarin, Border Lines, 200. 89 Boyarin, Border Lines, 201. 90 Borrowed from your expression, “Sparks of the Logos” in Part III of Border Lines.


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contemporaneous Jews and even for later Christians. Justin, however, does not evince knowledge that Jews held a Logos theology. Indeed, he expends much literary and exegetical effort, devoting at least three-quarters of his lengthy Dialogue, in an attempt to persuade Trypho and his teachers—and likely himself too—that Jesus is the Logos/Christ. At the Dialogue’s end (142), Trypho’s refusal to embrace the Logos, likely serves as additional evidence to Justin’s internal audience that Jews are ignorant and hard hearted. Justin, however, is in the business of differentiating himself from Trypho-like Jews,91 and the Logos does function as one, if not the primary, site of distinction. Buell comments that Justin employs the Logos to root Christian identity in the past and thereby justify its beliefs.92 My point it that neither Paul nor Justin appear to be later-doctrine savvy93 and operate instead in a type of conceptual fog.94 Seeds of what become normative are present in both Paul and Justin but the forces bringing those later normative notions to fruition are less apparent during their time.

I see a close connection between our recent conclusions95—we vote on issues to determine consensus—and your own over the issue of discursive constructions. In Border Lines you argue persuasively that Yavneh is a construction of the latest redactors (the Stammaim) of the Babylonian Talmud and that later Christian writers such as Athanasius construct the legend of Nicaea, a council that made dissent no longer acceptable.

91 As Buell and others have argued. Buell, Why This New Race, 95–115. Buell mentions Justin’s

Logos theology but largely with regard to his Apologies. The logos spermatikos is a seed of the divine logos resident in all humans (2 Apol. 8.1).

92 Buell, Why This New Race, 79, 115. 93 Much of the recent scholarship on Paul contends that he is less (if at all) focused on

doctrine and more on particular situations of particular communities. Victor Furnish, for example, remarks, “More recent studies of Christian origins have shown that it was quite mistaken to label Paul the founder of Christianity, as we know it.” Victor Paul Furnish, The Moral Teachings of Paul, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), 10. Furnish adds, “His [Paul’s] aim in writing was to address the particular needs of specific Christian congregations, in specific locations, involved in specific situations, at specific times” (ibid., 15).

94 The Dialogue has the reputation as being rambling. Robert Miller comments, “The dialogue is very long (almost as long as all four gospels combined), repetitious, poorly organized, and padded with numerous extended scriptural quotations.” Robert J. Miller, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 232.

95 In particular, see the recent Seminar papers by Hal Taussig that provide the history and current scholarly direction with regard to Gnosticism and Martyrdom. Hal Taussig, "Questioning the Category of Gnosticism for the Rewriting of the History of Early Christianity: An Appreciation and Extension of the Work of Karen King," Forum, Third Series 5, no. 1 (2016): 7–31; Hal Taussig, "What Do Fiction, Mass Crucifixions and Killer Seals Add Up To? :Summarizing Break-Throughs in Martyrdom Scholarship Since 1990," Westar Spring 2015 Christianity Seminar Paper: 1–19.


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Finally, as indicated above, within these two works are notions of difference and similarity, with tensions around these notions both within and between the works. In A Radical Jew, the over-arching thesis is that Paul signals difference and marks the beginning of a divide between Judaism and Christianity. Border Lines: A Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, already in its title anticipates a distinction between two religious groups. In that later work, for example, one finds an underlying emphasis on and indeed the movement toward distinctiveness: the Rabbis insist upon multivocality rather than the univocity adopted by later Christians. At the same time, Border Lines also argues that all along the way toward difference the two entities are twins, hence, similar. The dance around difference and similarity, however, is based on an assumption of unified entities, organized products that function as distinctive wholes. And while within Border Lines there is ongoing resistance to the notion of unified and distinctive entities, they nonetheless appear to be your ending point, and in A Radical Jew, your starting point. These unified wholes, lurking in the background, fight against the complexity of the relationships of various groups, the fundamental hybridity that you also seek to demonstrate and indeed argue is true of the situation on the ground.

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Hidden Transcripts of Violence and Partial Recovery in the First Two Centuries: Four Sketches on the Way to One Specific Portrait

Hal Taussig

Preface

This paper and Phil Harland’s paper mark a new stage of the Christianity Seminar. They come quite directly from the last four years of the Seminar in specific relationship to an-going diffuseness in the work of the Seminar. At least at the level of the (very active) Seminar’s Steering Committee, there is a growing sense that in the first two centuries of the common era, there is a variety of vocabularies related sometimes intensely and sometimes incidentally to the figure of Jesus. In acute awareness of the ways later Christianity pushed strongly to make these vocabularies into one language and one institution, our Seminar now on numerous fronts is collectively uneasy with both an enduring set of differences among these vocabularies of these first two centuries and the impulses in later Christianity toward unity and universalism. No matter whether in attempted efforts to connect and separate “Judaism” and “Christianity,” interests in placing some notion of proto-Christianity along a gender scale, resistance to and longing for right practice and thought, sorting out the significance of woundedness and death; our Seminar has made little headway in finding unanimity and clarity about what might eventually be called Christianity. Even trying on an overarching nomenclature of “early Christianitys” (instead of orthodox and heterodox versions of Christianity), there has been little advance. We are then more or less ready to accept the interim and multiple character of such Jesus vocabularies in these first two centuries as a way to make peace with the variety of it all. So we now enter into what may be something like 18 months of writing portraits of different Jesus-related phenomena in these first two centuries. With these portraits, we probably mostly eschew the possibility of an emerging homogeneity and direction of this era. This has to be seen then as a rejection of the overarching assumptions that the emergence of early Christianity has to do with settling on a second century resolution of what was orthodox and heresy, even while taking seriously the multiplicity of meanings, practices, and directions of Jesus vocabularies. That is, it seems to me that at least the Seminar’s Steering Committee is not discouraged, but finds that these multiplicities in the first two centuries belong to a rewriting of the history of early Christianity. It is then with this sense of a more complex, yet beckoning, task that we are now beginning to work on how this direction might become a conversation with the larger (at least) American public about what texts and practices of the first two centuries may have

Westar Spring 2016 Taussig, Hidden Transcripts 40

been. So different members—hopefully as many as possible—are taking on the possibility of writing portraits of phenomena in the first two centuries. If this works, what will emerge in our work are a set of relatively or wildly different portraits of people who use Jesus vocabularies at least sometimes. These different portraits will not clarify everything, but will begin both to call the bluff on Christianity being a unified truth from the beginning and to clarify some of the deeper causes, impulses, and contradictions of the first two centuries. We are trying then to write for the public about this larger (set of) pictures. So in the following paper of mine, I have tried to avoid scholarspeak and say within language that most people that graduate from high school can understand. We ask you as the Christianity Seminar as a whole then to test these two initial attempts at several levels: 1) most straightforwardly to see where you agree and disagree with the content of each portrait (these two portraits do not attend to each other at all, and need not be considered together except inasmuch as both deal with the first two centuries; 2) very importantly, and quite different from the #1, to see how much our attempt to write for a readership educated at least through high school work and were such an ambition harms the quality of the Seminar’s scholarship; 3) to think with each of us in terms of our kinds of writing. In other words, if these portraits seek to communicate to a larger public, what sorts of writing in each portrait help and hurt the chances of a successful engagement with the larger public.? This preface then is for the Seminar audience, what follows is meant for a larger audience. I have included in side “boxes” four different sets of information relative to the larger portrait, but meant to avoid interrupting of the flow of the portrait itself.

Violence in the First and Second Centuries of the Mediterranean The Sebasteion at the ruins of the ancient city of Aphrodiseas in current day Turkey is a stunning picture of the cartoons, subtexts, longings and propaganda of life in the Roman empire of the first and second centuries. With much of the long colonnade between a temple and the ancient marketplace still accessible, this huge monument has over 100 scenes of Roman glory, conquest, and regrets. There is one particular large plate that has fascinated me. The image is of the hero Achilles (on the right) carrying his adversary in battle Penthesileia, whom he has just mortally wounded in battle. Her powerful body towers over him, as he carries her, and it is not clear whether she is still alive. He gazes into her eyes, acknowledging that, as a previously celebrated story from another time described and was in the first century portrayed in stone, Achilles has fallen in love with her, perhaps even as he vanquished her and her famous and up to now undefeated army.


Penthesileia and Achilles, Aphrodisias Museum (Photo: H. Taussig) This expressive stone plate fully and hauntingly extends the aching melancholy of the story. It is far from accidental that this poignant picture of tenderness and violence was made in Aphrodisias in the first century. Although more or less all of Asia Minor was under the rule of Rome, Aphrodisias was technically a “free” city. Landlocked and surrounded by Roman territory, Aphrodisias was not militarily occupied and had its own governance. The emperor indeed patronized this (“free”) city, giving it occasional gifts and praising its legacy. And the monumental Sebasteion celebrated the Roman victories, peace, and connection to Aphrodisias, not unlike similar monuments to Roman power in many other Mediterranean cities that were explicitly under Roman control. Perhaps none of these monuments, however, contain a picture like the Sebasteion’s conquering hero of Achilles and the defeated, yet loved, dying Penthesileia. Somehow someone in this somewhat “free” city had managed—under the guise of an ancient war story—to show the conquering hero as the one stricken with affection and the defeated Penthesileia as the more noble person looming large. Although Rome was ruthless in its rule and unwilling to see itself as anything but righteous and all-powerful conquerer,


here is a melancholic portrait of both the conquering and the conquered. Just barely hidden—or perhaps for many in Aphrodisias, just visible enough to prompt a wry smile—here is the conquering hero who appears shaken and undone. And here is Penthesileia, known in lore around Aphrodisias for centuries as the surprising and successful defender of Asia Minor, that even in her dying appears in charge of the picture. The closer recent historians have looked at Rome, the more thorough its state violence has become evident. For instance, the Sebasteion’s portrayal of Rome’s conquest of Britain pictured the emperor in a rape pose over the female figure representing the fallen nation.

Claudius standing over Britannia (Photo 2610: H.Taussig)


Rome’s policy in its military conquests indeed regularly involved the command that the conquering soldiers rape the devastated (male) enemies. Similarly the conquest of each nation incorporated the forced enslaving of thousands for use in other parts of the empire as manual labor and skilled administrative personnel. The empire was also known for its heavy plundering and taxing of the conquered nations. Rome proclaimed its domination as the will of the gods, and Augustus and other emperors after him proclaimed themselves as divine. For the first three centuries of Rome’s rule, all non-Romans were labeled barbarians, not fully human. The empire performed massive torture and ritualized public killings in the forms of crucifixions and arenas. So the portrait of Achilles and Pentethesileia somehow escaped Rome’s thorough-going self-glorification and control. It can be seen implicitly as a critique of Roman power, and almost certainly was understood that way by many of the people of the “free” city of Aphrodesias. Perhaps even more for the locals, a closer look seemed to underline what it meant to live in Aphrodisias where violence and freedom were knotted together, and where melancholy and irony were at least as present as freedom and glory. This unusual plate helps think about the overall picture of Roman state violence around the Mediterranean, especially in asking how it related to the first two centuries of literature mentioning Jesus or Christ. The picture of Achilles and Pentethesileia could not be straightforward critique of imperial slavery, conquest, and dominance. The empire was well-known for its vicious punishment. Indeed crucifixion itself—always carried out in public—under Roman law was reserved for those plotting to overthrow Rome, and regularly used to intimidate the occupied countries by random crucifixions. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus recounts how in Judea alone the Roman governor Pilate crucified thousands. So, the Achilles and Pentethesileia portrait was a “hidden transcript”1 of state violence, since open speech about the violence that surrounded the city of Aphrodesias would have been punished.

1 Cf. Box 1.


Reading Jesus/Christ Literature about Violence as Hidden Transcripts

Such “hidden transcripts” occur often also in the Jesus/Christ literature of the first two centuries. The artful hiddenness of these powerful textual portraits of loss, trauma, and violence did allow them to think and feel deeply about their circumstances without putting their writers and readers in trouble with the Roman rulers. Oddly for much later Christian modern readers, the cleverness of these ancient stories was by and large so successful that their subtle meanings and hidden messages about violence are almost completely lost to the modern reader. In large part it was the ingenuity of the ancient texts that have made it very difficult for modern minds to see the violence at all. Instead 20th and 21str century eyes can only see in the ancient texts modern Sunday school lessons for children, theological treatises, and quaint Roman customs. The ways modernity has looked past and covered over the deep social and interior ancient work on how to live with heartache and torture is strong enough that I take up a series of examples in the Jesus/Christ-related literature of the first two centuries. In fact, in the collections of that literature many seemingly unfocused, yet persistent, images, stories, worries, fantasies, and analyses of violence show up. Many do seem to fix, if only involuntarily or flailingly, on Roman violence, damage, and power. As it turns out, these bundles and threads of such

1

BOX 1 Hidden Transcripts Resisting and

Making Fun of Violence It turns out that the way this story of the possessed man in the tombs distances the tortured experienced of people under foreign occupation resembles how many “peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, laborers and prisoners”…”create a secret” language that makes fun of those dominating them.

James C. Scott, the author of the idea of a “hidden transcript” gives several examples of such mockery that cruelty exploitation. “In the case of spirit possession, a woman seized by a spirit can openly make known her grievances against her husband and male relatives, curse them, make demands, and, in general, violate the powerful norms of male dominance. She may, while possessed, cease work, be given gifts, and generally be treated indulgently. Because it is not she who is acting, but rather the spirit that has seized her, she cannot be held responsible for her own words. The result is a kind of oblique protest that dares not speak its own name but that is often acceded to if only because its claims are seen to emanate from a powerful spirit and not from the woman herself.” (Scott 1990, 141)

Scott has found many such examples in “carnivals” of Europe and Latin America. In these cases it is not some kind of “spirit possession” that allows a group under duress and violent threats to criticize the rulers. Rather it is the festive spirit of the carnival and the chance to wear costumes and masks that give members of the groups in difficulty to express their discontent and critique. Under the cover of masks, costumes, and festivities, they can speak “normally suppressed speech and aggression.” In a


literature about violence have surprising twists, humor, and melancholy along with a certain disinterest in tragedy. A Man Goes Crazy. The first example of such twisted, darkly humorous literature is found in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. My retelling of it relies slightly more on Luke’s version:2

The man was sick—possessed it seemed. So much so that his misery was beyond bearing. He screamed so much that he retreated to living among the tombs. The agony was so great that he was often found smashing himself with rocks, perhaps to get himself out of the terrible pain, or maybe not even knowing why. The story proposes subtly that the possession came mostly from the presence of the occupying Roman army legion’s presence around the Sea of Galilee, where the man lived. And indeed—according to the symbolic, fanciful, and analytic way the story unfolds—the man was relieved of his pain when the “spirits” of the occupying army are transferred by a healer from the man to an exact number of pigs standing nearby that equaled the number of Roman soldiers in the region. When those spirits of the occupying army were transferred to the pigs, the man’s possession was gone and all the pigs ran over the edge of a cliff, and died. The man was sort of saved from the violence the army did to him. The army violence against the man went away, although not the army occupation itself. The man indeed returns to his right mind, although the people of the area are not pleased, asking him to leave. Somewhat puzzled, but certainly relieved, one wonders about the dead pigs, and the real occupying army that could still make other people crazy and hurt themselves.

The story accurately addresses the massive damage an occupying army can do to the population it controls, and gives such a population ways to think about how to cope, escape some of the pain, and even laugh a bit about the similarities between armies and

2 Luke 8:26-39

2

carnival such criticism simply on one level seems like just fun and festivity,” even while speaking truth to power.

Europe still has such carnivals. Perhaps the most lively example is in mid-winter in Basel, Switzerland. There giant floats parade down the middle of the streets with huge satire figures of current local and international authorities on colorful display. The population in general carry huge bags of confetti which they throw in the faces of policemen and stuff down the pants of the mayor and city council members. The pubs are full of roving musical groups singing bawdy and politically critical lyrics. Although much of the early literature about the Jesus people now is read as “holy” and “solemn” literature; it seems likely that its ancient readers saw it as comical and irreverent “hidden transcripts.”


pigs. But any suspicious Roman authorities would have a hard time making a case against the author of the story or those who listened attentively to it. Not worried so much about whether the story is encouraging a calamity in which many Roman soldiers fall off a cliff and die, the people under the thumb of the Roman army can tell the story of the pigs running off the edge of the cliff and laugh at the way the story is told links the pigs and the soldiers. A chance to wish the cruel soldiers ill, fantasize about them going over the cliff, and being happy for the man is no longer possessed by the cruelty of the soldiers—all without being accused of rebelling against Rome. The nagging questions about the fact that the army is still ruling the countryside in the middle of the satisfaction of the giggles reminds the story-tellers that all still is not right. A Singer Imagines the Destruction of Rome. The second example is a song that imagines that Rome is on fire and all its power has been destroyed. The song—from the Revelation to John—was probably written several decades after Rome was indeed damaged by a fire set perhaps by those against Roman rule and more or less centuries before Rome was destroyed. My shortened telling is from the 17th and 18th chapters, and although written near the height of Roman domination is told as if it is the far off city of Babylon that is destroyed, only with the imagination that Babylon stood on seven hills, just like ancient Rome:

One of seven angels takes a dreamer to a lonely place and points out a giant sex worker riding on a monster. The angel says to the dreamer that the giant woman is Babylon the Great, and that the seven heads of the monster on which she rides are seven hills. The angel identifies the giant woman as the great city that holds sway over all the rulers of the earth. Then another angel descends from the sky and starts singing of how Babylon the Great has fallen. All the wealth that she had now is now destroyed. In a single hour all the ships carrying great commerce have been destroyed. Another voice from the sky announces that God has remembered the cruelty of Babylon in order to destroy it and will reward the dreamer and his people to make up for all the torture and misery they have experienced.

The song rages against the violence of this great city that rules over all the earth. It promises revenge and reward for those who have been tortured and in misery. Although there is little, if any, sign in the late first century that Rome can be destroyed and punished and that the people it has cruelly pillaged can be restored, the song paints a massive tableau in which the reigning city is completely annihilated and the dreamer’s people are saved. Indeed, nothing like what the song described happened. What then happened to those who heard the song of the Great City’s destruction. Did some sing along? As New Testament scholar Adella Yarbro Collins has suggested,


did the raging song bring catharsis to those who had suffered so much at the hands of Roman imperial power or other violence? Was this song a way of escaping the violence—if only in reading, singing, or performing it? Did it give those were under the thumb of such cruelty some perspective? It is clear in many situations of violence that anger and fantasy help people survive unthinkable damage and loss. Was this anger and hope good news for the composers and singers of this song? These two chapters in Revelation may be the closest of any Jesus/Christ literature to a call to attack Rome. And the voice of the dreamer claims in the first chapter that he has been punished for his teachings. On the other hand, here too there is no explicit attack on Rome, but on the much more ancient city of Babylon in faraway Mesopotamia. Rather than humor and healing, the response to violence is anger, fantasy, and outrageous hope. Divinity Hidden in the Rubble of Trauma and Loss. The third example of responding to violence in this literature is a long poem in the voice of a divine figure. Not unlike many ancient Mediterranean divine voices from literature of the first and second centuries, this divine figure announced its self in long stanzas full of self-praise. Although only one ancient manuscript exists of this poem called The Thunder: Perfect Mind; there are many similar long poems in the literature of the Egyptian gods and goddesses, the Hebrew scriptures, and—somewhat less long, yet clearly similar—in the late first century Gospel of John. The first verses of Thunder are especially similar to these other collections of that time:

I was sent out from power I came to those pondering me And I was found among those seeking me Look at me, all you who contemplate me Audience, here me. Those expecting me, receive me Don’t chase me from your sight Don’t let your voice or your hearing hate me Don’t ignore me any place, any time I am the first and the last (1:1-5a)

Found in the Egyptian desert along with 50 some Christ related documents near a fourth century Christian monastery, Thunder’s date of composition could be anywhere from the first century BCE to fourth century CE. Even with this lack of clarity of when it was written, it still falls within the time of the Roman empire, and its discovery along with many other Christ-related literature points in that direction. Although its


beginning sounds like a powerful and dominating deity, the text quickly diverges into images much closer to the pain and vulnerability of the Gospel of Luke and the Revelation to John.

I am she who is honored and she who is mocked… I am a sterile woman and she has many children.... I am the slavewoman of him who served me…. I am she who is disgraced and she who is important… Do not be arrogant to me when I am thrown to the ground… Do not stare at me in the shit pile, leaving me discarded… Do not stare at me when I am thrown out among the condemned Do not laugh at me in the lowest places Do not throw me down among those slaughtered viciously…. In my weakness do not strip me bare Do not be afraid of my power…. I am she who exists in all fears and in trembling boldness…. I shall shut my mouth among those whose mouths are shut and then I will show up and speak Why then did you hate me, you Greeks? Because I am a barbarian among barbarians?.... Hear me in tenderness, learn from me in roughness I am she who shouts out and I am thrown down on the ground I am the one who prepares the bread and my mind within….(1:5b,7a, 10a; 2:10b, 12a, 13a, 14-15, 17, 18b; 3:2-3; 4:24-25a)

It is difficult to miss the many images of social humiliation evoked in mocking, sterility, slavery, disgrace, being thrown to the ground, being condemned, in the lowest places, among the slaughtered, weakness, being hated, being stripped bare, and among barbarians. Nor is this voice ever not in danger of all kinds of violence: being chased, enslaved, beat, condemned, slaughtered, and stripped. On the other hand, “trembling boldness” is around more than one corner of these images, and the one speaking, even when in danger or disgrace, is neither pitied nor beyond the human. This Thunder: Perfect Mind seems to live in the mire of humiliation and violence. Its voice—usually female, but not always—cries out in pain, fears being overwhelmed, and experiences loss and loneliness. At the same time, s/he sounds like a goddess, and almost certainly is modeled in part on the powerful Egyptian goddess, Isis. But Isis never lost a battle, and was always control, while the Thunder voice is both divine and human. She is honored and mocked, disgraced and important, and shouting out and thrown to the ground. Although divine and violently humiliated, this are not treated as


opposites. The tension between the divine and the beaten is irregular, with the experience of violence, slaughter, and disgrace being mentioned somewhat more than powerful divine. When she is divinely strong, it has the character of being “the one who prepares the bread and the mind within.” Although Thunder does not mention Jesus at all, she resembles the way Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of John. There it is he who regularly in a divine voice proclaims “I am.” And, Jesus in the Gospel of John, even with his divine authority, cries when his best friend dies and is finally tortured to death on the cross. These two figures are more or less alone in the ancient world as being divine, even while being overwhelmed by violence. Building Community Alongside the Experience of Crushing Pain. The final example of this literature facing quizzically into violence in the first and second century is my imagination of a group gathered in the typical setting of that era, a common meal in an urban neighborhood. It draws directly from the Gospel of Truth and the Martyrdom of Polycarp:

Simmias had often heard their songs as he walked underneath their second floor window. He never quite stopped fully to listen, but had to admit that he slowed down to listen to the music and catch snatches of the words. But now he was walking up the steps to the improvised dining space. All because one evening last week as he was slowing down to listen to the music, all of a sudden he saw his neighbor, Aelius, and his wife, Gavia, walking into the building with the music. They had stopped to

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BOX 2 Festive Meals, Supper Clubs, and “Worship” of Early Christ Groups

This example of penetrating violence in the lives of first/second century people, some of whom told stories and sang songs about Jesus points directly to three major dimensions of life in that time. They are:

• The immensely popular tradition of festive meals together among wide swaths of people in the Mediterranean. Such evening meals occurred in the quite small homes of ordinary people, the quite lavish dining rooms of aristocrats, rented spaces, and occasionally buildings owned by supper clubs. They happened upon many different occasions: regular gatherings of specific groups one or several times a month, family and friendship occasions, such a birthdays or visits from other towns or countries, and traditional festivals. These meals date back to the classical period of Greece but had grown rapidly from the first century BCE to the third century CE. Common at these meals were the position of reclining that meant to express leisure, a range of food eaten with hands near the beginning of the meal, festive toasts at a mid-point in the meal, a great deal of wine-drinking, discussion, and games. • The formation of thousands of different supper clubs. Here too these traditions hearkened back to Greek


greet each other, ending in the neighbors inviting him to join them. He didn’t have time, but they encouraged him to join them the next week at the same time. And now, a week later, he was following them up the steps.

Like so many of these neighborhood meals, the room was crowded with the reclining diners tightly wedged in, some draped over one another. They were fashionably late, and no one noticed, especially since lively conversation and eating were in full swing. No music yet, and the food was tasty. Gavia reclined on the other side of the room with the other women. Simmias smiled to see her reclining, since that was not always the case at meals in this city; while Simmias and Aelius ended up reclining on the same couch. Across the way he saw one other person he knew, and it was clear that several of those reclining were from the Egyptian neighborhood next to his.

Before long, he saw the symposiarch starting to stand for the libation, while others were making sure they had a bowl to drink from.

Quickly the host and at least five others, men and women were singing just as he had often heard from the street in previous weeks. With bowls of wine raised high, they sang strongly:

2

classic culture, but in the later eras, often referred to as Hellenistic and/or Greco Roman periods such supper clubs grew to such an extent that five different Roman emperors attempted—unsuccessfully—to have all supper clubs banned. Although these gatherings in classical times were mainly philosophical in character, the later times expanded into much less distinguished groups like carpenters, bricklayers, neighborhood groups, and religious associations. A number of such supper clubs welcomed slaves and women into full membership, so much so that there is much evidence that both women and slaves were elected leaders of their clubs.

The groups that gathered in the name of Jesus or Christ or discussed Jesus in the first one hundred fifty years most closely resembled the supper clubs and more or less always based their time together around meals described here. Although rarely featured as such in modern-day churches, this means that “worship” and “church” for the first 6-8 generations were meals at something like a Jesus of Christ supper club. For instance, inasmuch as there were “sermons” at these early gatherings of those interested in Jesus in one way or another, the “sermon” was in the mode of the speakers at supper club gatherings with somewhat different stories and content. The early writings of Paul and the Acts of the Aoostles have clear pictures of people gathering in these settings around the meals. Similarly, the gospels portrait of Jesus have many stories about him teaching at meals, although in those cases, Jesus is almost always at guest at such meals, rather than Jesus participating in what might be thought of as a Jesus supper club.


“The verb walks through creation as the fruit of creation’s heart and the face of its love.

This active word bears all things, choosing and receiving all things, Bringing them back to the Father, the Mother, Jesus of boundless sweetness.”3 Now between gulps of wine, most everyone was singing. He did not, since he

did not know this libational song. But as the music wafted over him, he noticed that words about creation and sweetness certainly matched the mood of the moment and the taste of the wine.

As the libation shifted to a spoken toast, Simmias noticed a girl of about 10 or 11 making her way through those reclining toward his neighbor, Aelius. And as she came closer he surmised from one other occasions that this was probably the daughter of his Aelius and Galia, reclining with him right now on the couch. Since children were not often around for such suppers, her approach caught him off-guard, but when he looked more closely, there was more to see. The whole left side of her face was so sunken that he could not quite tell whether she even had an eye on that side of her face. It was if something has smashed her cheekbone in, displacing the contour of her cheek and gnarling her flesh into what now was mangled burrows and mounds.

And now she was right next to him as she excitedly told her father that her favorite uncle from Sardis had just arrived at the house.

“He is picking up some supplies at the port tomorrow, and brought a slave and a servant with him to help carry the stuff back.”

“Rufina, are those other two with him?” her father quickly worried. “No, he said that they will find a place to sleep down near the port. But he will

stay with us tonight. When will you and Momma come home?” “We’ll stay longer, but not too much. You can have your favorite uncle to

yourself until then. But don’t bother him if he has something else to manage. Meanwhile Simmias found himself—and a few others around him—alternately

staring at the girl’s face and trying not to call attention to her. As she walked away, he couldn’t help but ask Aelius what had happened to his daughter.

3 Gospel of Truth 10:5,6


“Almost four years ago, Rufina was playing in the street, when one of those small squads of soldiers were chasing several men down the street. You know, how children run toward the hubbub in the street at least as much as away from it. A few of her friends accidentally ended up in the way of the pursuing the soldiers. The decanus took a hefty swing with the broad side of his sword to clear the children out of the way, and it caught her full force in left side of her face, just as she had ducked the wrong way.”

Several other recliners listening immediately erupted in protest. Simmias did feel the same, but was perhaps even more surprised at the resiliency of this child. As word spread into other parts of the room, it seemed that some others already knew the story. There were small waves of sympathy for the girl, grumbling about soldiers in general, and fondness by those who knew her.

It was as if Rufina was still her, her short visit had such a stir. The symposiarch leaned over to two of the better singers in the room, and before long they were singing:

“God opens his bosom…and reveals a hidden self.

This hidden self is the Child of God,

So that through God’s compassion,

The generations learn about God.”4

Simmias noticed though that this symposiarch wasn’t any better than

4 Gospel of Truth 10:7, 8a

BOX 3 The Gospel of Truth

“The Good News of Truth is Joy” are the first words of this free-flowing, non-story document, most likely from the early-to-mid second century. As it overflows with joy, fulfillment, and sensuousness, this gospel by turns sounds like a poem, a letter, or an ecstatic sermon.

The Nag Hammadi has two copies of this gospel, and there are substantial differences between the two, indicating that this gospel was probably well-known around the Mediterranean. Some scholars think that it was authored by the well-known early Christian thinker, Valentinus (who was also accused of heresy, resulting in many of his works being destroyed or lost).

The Gospel of Truth takes seriously human pain and error, but concentrates of the ways the goodness and beauty of life continue to overflow everywhere.

The Gospel of Truth’s portrait is full of old and new details and at the same time unique in the way all those details gush forth. One of the major meditations on the meaning of Jesus on the meaning of Jesus in early Christianity, it contains many dimensions, including a strong awareness of Jesus as teacher of parables, developed references to him as the Word in the Gospel of John, calling him “the Mother,” an extended portrait of Jesus’s cosmic role as the one whose teaching corrected the Transgression that made all humanity ignorant, and significant attention to the meaning of Jesus’s death.

Continue to overflow everywhere.


most at guiding conversation or entertainment at the meal. Already someone else he did not know was talking in a loud voice to his neighbor about the young girl.

“Aelius, I am sorry that you have been dishonored here tonight. You must be feeling great shame with your damaged daughter coming here.”

“My friend,” Aelius responded thoughtfully, “I do not have shame. I was glad to have my daughter here. She brought me important news and I love her.”

The room was silent. Since Simmias was new, and he too was undone by the appearance of the girl, he had no idea of how to receive both the oddly sympathetic gesture of the one on the other side of the room. Nor could he quite take in the public tenderness of Aelius himself. He could feel a similar discomfort to his own in the room.

Then the song. It was coming from Gavia, Rufina’s mother. First her voice alone, and then quickly other voices.

“He was nailed to a tree and became the fruit of the God’s knowledge. This fruit did not cause destruction when it was eaten, But it caused those who ate it to come into being and find contentment…”

As the song began to swell, Simmias wondered what this story was. Of course, he knew that hundreds had been tortured to death by crucifixion over the decades in this city. And, he sensed that somehow the shame and open-heartedness of Rufina belonged to this song, even though she had been brutally maimed by a soldier, not crucified.

The song went on, at times softly, at other moments swelling: “And he discovered them in himself, And they discovered him in themselves —the uncontainable, the unknowable …one who is full and made all things. All things are in that one and all things have need of him.” 5

Now Simmias began to hum along, not knowing the story or the words, but sensing that many here knew a way beyond shame for this father and his daughter. And perhaps for a lot of them in the room and the humiliation they knew.

They kept singing. “He came into their midst and spoke a teacher’s words… After all these, the little children came… When they had been strengthened… They knew and they were known…”6

5 GTruth 4:5-8 6 Gospel of Truth 5:8,11, 12a


On one level, for Simmias, he did not really need to know who this story was about, since it seemed mostly just to carry the curious mix of joy and pain in the room. And he let it sink in why he—as he had walked down the street outside this second story dining room on other nights and heard this singing—had been drawn to the poignant sounds and words of the singing. Maybe he didn’t need to know the story of some teacher whose followers had “discover themselves in him” and who had been crucified, but he wouldn’t mind singing the songs rather than just humming along.

Lost in thought, he did not know that the song had stopped and now some conversation among different individuals was going on. Slowly though once again a particular conversation seemed to catch his and others’ attention. It was a woman from the Egyptian neighborhood.

“Somehow this thing about Aelius’s daughter coming into our meal this evening has me wondering about that execution in the market last month of that old man. I did not know him, but I think some of you did. What was his name?”

From across the room, someone said “Polycarp. Yes, I knew him.”

“Yes, Polycarp.” the woman said, “Anyway just being with this girl tonight, and knowing her disfigurement by a soldier, makes me angry all over again about the soldiers last month killing that old man. What did he do to deserve death?”

Across the room came another response, “He had refused to offer incense in honor of the emperor. He was part of a group that followed the anointed teacher of Israel that we sometimes talk and sing about. You know how the Romans hate it when people don’t say ‘Caesar is Lord.’ I guess this Polycarp ignored it one too many times.”

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BOX 4 The Killing of the Smyrnean Leader,

Polycarp Stories of the death of Polycarp in Asia Minor were probably well known in Asia Minor (current day Turkey) and even more widely. These stories focus on an elderly man, who was a long-time leader of one or more local or regional gatherings of Christ followers., most likely in or near the city of Smyrna.

The stories tend to agree on some basic elements: Polycarp has refused to make a standard gesture of loyalty to the Roman emperor, which has put him at odds with local authorities. These authorities seek a compromise with Polycarp, suggesting what they ask him to do is a minimal, almost meaningless, gesture, but Polycarp does not do the gesture, which would have been something like offering a small symbolic gift to the emperor. This refusal eventually causes the authorities to have him arrested. After additional negotiations fail, Polycarp is killed.


“But an old man? Why couldn’t they let him be? Is the emperor so insecure that an old man not offering incense is a threat?” The woman was yelling now, ”Anyway everybody knows that the people of Israel have an exemption from incense to the emperor, and Jesus who Polycarp followed was belonging to Israel. And why did this girl get so mangled?”

Simmias was aware that this conversation was more frank and open about these painful aspects of his life than usual. And, strangely his body was more relaxed. Perhaps because it was a relief to talk openly about the bruising character of his and his neighbors’ lives. And then there was the way the songs made him feel safer and something like hopeful.

The man who knew Polycarp was speaking now, “When Polycarp learned that the soldiers or somebody were after him for not sacrificing to the emperor, he left the city and asked me to come with him. We went and stayed with friends in the country. That didn’t last long, because we learned they were still chasing us. So we hid in a neighboring farmhouse where two slaves of our friends were lodged. But then we heard that soldiers were still on our trail, so we left for another farm where my uncle lived and we would almost certainly would be safe. It was hard for Polycarp to walk so far.”

2

There are other aspects of these stories that fit less well together. These elements include: Polycarp fleeing from the authorities’ attempt to arrest him; Polycarp hosting those who want to arrest him at a meal; Polycarp praying fervently and for long times before he is arrested; after being arrested Polycarp successfully fending off an attempt to burn him at the stake; Polycarp being stabbed to death; Polycarp brought to the arena and threatened with death by wild animals; Polycarp choosing to die by fire; Blood and a dove extinguished the fire thst was meant to burn Polycarp to death; Judeans promoting the killing of Polycarp; the authorities not releasing Polycarp’s body and burning it so that it would not be venerated by the people; Some people taking some of his bones and arranging for it to be venerated.

There is a great deal of scholarly debate about when the initial story of Polycarp’s death was written. Some say that although there are other second century writing about Polycarp, the first story of his death was not written until the third century, the fourth century, or the eleventh century. The range of opinions on what actually happened range from Polycarp died violently, but it is impossible to know how; some of the elements of the stories are not historically accurate; the most detailed story of his death was the first and contains a good portion of historically accurate details.


It’s true, Simmias thought, that he had known at least 11 people who had been chased or hunted by soldiers. And, at least some of them were almost certainly innocent. Enough to make him wary of whether this could happen to him.

“But the soldiers found the place where the slaves lived and tortured them successfully to find out where Polycarp and I were hiding. They came at night time and ordered him to come with them. I was worried they would turn to me next, but even before that could happen, there was Polycarp inviting the soldiers to dinner before they would leave. I was surprised that they accepted, and there we were all together reclining and—admittedly with a bit of nervousness all around—telling stories and enjoying the mostly leftover food from earlier in the evening. By this time, I had decided to disappear toward the end of the evening.”

Simmias noticed the coincidence of Aelius and Gavia inviting him to this meal and the generosity of Polycarp inviting the soldiers to recline with him and his friends. But, of course, in tonight’s meal there was little at stake, while apparently Polycarp risked a great deal. For some reason, he suddenly found himself thinking of how his own wife had died. She had died in childbirth, as well as the child, around this time of evening.

The man was still talking about Polycarp, and most everyone seemed interested.

The woman who had been so upset to hear about Polycarp’s death asked, “So did the soldiers take him away?”

“Yes, eventually, but they did something that made me stay beyond when I had planned. As we were lying there together, they began to encourage him to save himself. They said things like, “You don’t have to really mean it, just say that Caesar is Lord and we will let you go.”

“And he didn’t save himself?”, someone shouted. Simmias later learned that he was a slave.

“Well, it’s not really clear, is it. Polycarp had been on the run, hoping to escape at least until the authorities were distracted by something else. But no, it seemed like lying about his convictions was too much. I don’t quite understand. But it was at that point I excused myself for a few minutes, and then let myself out the back door.”

Simmias was still thinking about his wife, and his almost son. Strange how the combination of the devastating face of the young girl, this story about an old man who was executed, and the pleasure of this meal had unloosened his brave exterior.

Such slippage seemed to be happening to others. Another woman whom Simmias thought he knew from his neighborhood was telling about a dream she had. “I was fighting with someone. It was dark. And then others came from


behind me and started beating me. And then I was falling from great heights or flying without wings. People were killing their neighbors, smeared with their blood.”7 She said then she awakened, and it felt as if all this was nothing.8 Simmias then knew that this woman did live in his neighborhood, because actually a fight very much like her dream had actually happened in their neighborhood last month.

The slave that had just asked the question about Polycarp certainly did not act like a slave in this gathering, and Simmias did know that at most of these supper clubs slaves could participate and even be a symposiarch. At any rate, that slave was talking again. He was standing, so it seemed like he was going to give a speech or something.

“I know some think the way Polycarp died somehow makes the bad things that happen to us better. And the death of Socrates is supposed to be some kind of example for us. Even tonight, at least one of our songs about the teacher Jesus being crucified sounds like his death sustains us. But I’m not sure I follow. With Polycarp, couldn’t our association with him get us in trouble. Maybe the soldiers will come after us too. And besides, it sounds like Polycarp was trying to run away, and I heard some story that Jesus, when he was being crucified, yelled at God for abandoning him. Neither sound all that much like a clear example for us.”

The slave did not stay standing as long as Simmias expected, and now Aelius himself was—still reclining right beside him—responding.

“Brother, these seem to me like the right questions. But telling stories and singing songs together isn’t really so much about having examples to follow as having stories and songs to live with. You know, like the song the evening about Jesus, who “discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves.” In a way, it’s actually better when people like Polycarp and Jesus are not especially good examples. Their stories are untamed in ways that make us more alive than if he always had done the right thing.”

Simmias was thinking again about the girl Rufina, how alive she had been, even though half of her face was gone. He could feel that it was also this mangled face that was still so vibrant that had opened him to reflection about the death of his wife and child. The tension between his own unhealable loss and the renewal of Rufina was hard to take. But the freedom of conversation—including the accidental encounter with Rufina—had put something inside him in motion. Not that his ache and fear was all better. Only that there seemed to be more space for him to maneuver.

7 Gospel of Truth 14:12,13 8 Gospel of Truth 14:14,15


How long had he been musing. He did not know, but now the symposiarch himself was standing and singing. Everyone else was singing. And it was a song he knew, or at least the chorus.

He leapt in to singing it: “As long as you live, shine.”9 It was good to be able to sing something. Then he did not know the chorus. It was different.

“Destroying the hostility, the good news of peace for you who were far off” But then again he could sing the chorus, “As long as you live, shine.” More that he did not know.

“Peace for those who were near, no longer strangers, but citizens”10 Now some were starting to get up to leave, and they were still singing. He

sang the chorus when he could. He noticed that Aelius and Gavia were leaving, and so he followed them out.

They walked home together. They talked about the visit of Aelius’s brother.

Conclusion Once the strong, although sometimes cleverly disguised, presence of violence and its painful consequences in the first and second century writings are noticed; it is necessary to re-think some basic assumptions. It has already been noticed that contemporary Americans often miss the violence in these texts altogether. Even when the widespread Roman torture and execution of crucifixion occurs in these texts, most readers today do not think about it as a part of a wholesale government tactic for keeping an occupied countryside in check. Rather people in our time read that solely as a religious text about Jesus (and only Jesus!) saving people from their sins. This, of course, is either a small portion of the meaning an ancient person would receive. The frightening effect thousands crucifixions a year had on the general population forced the ancient readers to see in Jesus’s crucifixion—no matter what other thoughts they had—a representation of the many thousands of other people’s crucifixon. In the four examples given here of early Christ-related texts, it seems clear that making sense of the violence the first and second centuries saw and experienced was very important to the ancient writers and readers of these writings. These people needed to come to grips with seeing neighors, strangers, or their own family humlliated, tortured, robbed, enslaved, maimed, impoverished, and killed. The clever, if indirect, ways that the texts addressed a wide variety of violence testifies to how much it

9 “Hoson Zns,” Epitaph of Seikilos, First Century CE, rendered by Micael Levy, Track Seven,

The Just Intonation of Antiquity, https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=ancient+drinking+songs&view=detail&mid=DAD913C3B45AF3FDFACFDAD913C3B45AF3FDFACF&FORM=VIRE

10 Ephesians 2:17, 19


mattered to them to think, feel, and come to terms with it. As has become clear in the “hidden transcripts” not only of the Christ-related texts but the other public expressions like the portrait of Pentethesileia, the tricky language the people used indicates more their commitment to talk about the violence than that other parts of their lives were more engaging. It is time then to reclaim the attention these Christ-related texts gave to systemic violence and the ingenious ways they addressed it without losing their lives. Instead of reducing the meaning of Jesus’s experiences of violence and death to a sacrifice for sins, a wide range of texts see Jesus’s death in primary ways as an effort to make sense of people’s pain and loss. The only thing Jesus says, for instance, in Mark’s whole story of his death is “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” (15:34) This story of Jesus’s crucifixion is evoking the myriad losses and pains of many other people. In direct relationship to his own painful struggles, Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ, and yet I live. So it is no longer I that live, but it is Christ who lives in me. As for my present earthly life, I am living it by confidence in God’s child….For you all are children of God, through your confidence in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 2:20, 3:26) That is, in this text Paul saw the crucifixion of Christ as a cipher for a way to understand the trauma in his and other people’s lives, and it was the way Christ faced torture and death that gave both Paul and those to whom he wrote confidence in a landscape of violence. It is also interesting to notice in the addresses to violence in the four textual examples here that there is not standard interpretation of what to do with violence. In the story of Jesus with the “demoniac” in the tombs, the way to face violence of soldiers terrorizing the countryside is through clever naming the villainous soldiers, laughing darkly about it, and celebrating an (at least temporary) recovery from the violence. But in the case of the dreamer in the Revelation to John, the strategy of facing violence has to do with being angry at Rome and having confidence in God’s revenge. In the Thunder, the approach to humiliation and violence is to merge “all fears and trembling boldness” in a (nameless) divine figure (2:18b) And finally in the imagined gathering at a meal, the approach is to get together, to tell stories of heartbreak, to sing about crucifixes that turn into fruit trees and one’s hidden self becoming the Child of God, and to drink a fair amount of wine together. Not unlike the differences between the way the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the four examples here mostly use Jesus in different ways to work on how to process and strategize about the huge losses in people’s lives. This proposal then sees a certain almost haphazard group of early texts about violence improvising responses to and preparing one’s self for permeating violence. The responses in the four texts here as well as the characterization of Mark and Galatians do not share answers, but rather share the courage to address violence and its effects. In no


case does one find a tragic approach to violence. And, in no case is violence completely and successfully solved. What this provisional funky group of writings share is a courageous and clever response to and plan for experiencing (almost inevitable) violence. And, one might add that all of these negotiations with the experience of violence make some kind of provisional advance in the on-going struggle. There is no reason to apply this almost accidental bundle of writings to all of the Christ-related writings of the first two centuries. On the other hand, neither is there reason to ignore their temporary ways of getting a leg up on violence that keeps coming at them. As for how much violence itself has to do with all of the Christ-related writings of the first two centuries, two answers seem to work: 1) the strong picture of violence in this parcel of story, song, dream, and poem points toward making sense of violence as a significant part of a larger collection of Christ-related writings; 2) there are almost certainly other major issues and themes in the bigger bundle of the first two centuries of Christ-lated texts.

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The Christian Invention of “Judaism”

Daniel Boyarin University of California at Berkeley

In this lecture, I argue that “Judaism” was invented by Christians to serve the

formation of the Church (with a capital C) as a new form of human collective. Jewry, however, I suggest, remained forever the old form of human collective, in which a People (locatively defined) worshipped its god and practiced its historical practices.

A Palinode

In a much earlier adumbration of the argument that I am making here, I proposed that the invention of “Judaism” by Christian writers was part and parcel of the invention of “religion” in the fourth and fifth centuries. As demonstrated at length by Brent Nongbri in his Yale dissertation, some of my key evidence was simply misconstrued by me, in large part because I committed what I take to be now a cardinal sin, depending on translations for scholarly work. Consequently I now am convinced that the idea expressed there that “religion” in something close to the modern sense discussed above in the first chapter was fabricated in the fourth century is generally invalid.1 Nongbri himself, writes, however that “in spite of these points of disagreement, I think that Boyarin’s recognition that this time period marks a certain epistemic shift is an acute observation.”2 Nongbri’s own account of that epistemic shift is of great interest and has much to teach us. I would focus here, however, on the transformations of “Ioudaismos” that I see taking place then. If, in its earlier and very rare usage, as I have argued in chapter 2 above, Ioudaismos in the pens of Palestinian Judeans means only loyalty to Judean doings, now it comes to mean, but only in Christian parlance, something quite distinct from that. Abandoning the (now clearly perceived as) anachronistic term, “religion,” in my analysis, I am going to term the new turn—not claiming, of course, any originality here—as the invention of “orthodoxy,” as well as its concomitant body, the Church, for which here, however, I will use the Greek term Ekklesia. Put in other terms, it involves the shift from locative to non-locative accounts of group boundaries and definitions. According to Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy” is a way that a “religion,” separated from the locativity of ethnic or geocultural self-definition as Christianity was, asks itself: “[H]ow, if at all, is one to identify the ‘centre’ of [our]

Westar Fall 2016 Boyarin, Christian Invention 62

religious tradition? At what point and why do we start speaking about ‘a’ religion? . . .”3 I will modify this only by suggesting that in place of “religion” here and to keep things clear, let us substitute Ekklesia, not as the building or as the local community but as the corporate body of Orthodox Christianity as well as its supernal homologue. The Ekklesia, we might say, invents “Judaism” as an alternate, as the dark double of the true Ekklesia, transforming Jews from a People to an Ekklesia via the medium of orthodoxy, an Ekklesia that it names Ioudaismos in Greek.

The crux of the matter seems to me to be that in order for there to be a true Ekklesia, there had to be a false one too. Let us go back, then, and look at the beginnings of the Christian naming of Ioudaismos, and work our way up to the period in question at the end of the fourth century. What I hope to show is that the development of Christian orthodoxy involved not only the production of Christian heresies but also the interpellation (hailing into existence) of another “orthodoxy,” another Ekklesia, as it were, with an orthodoxy of its own, that of the Jews. This dark double of the true Ekklesia was frequently, at least later on, named, in fact, Synagoga. Needless to say, this word never has such a meaning in Jewish sources, as it refers in them only to a building and a community that worships in it and not a corporate body [corporeal or mystical] at all.4 This latter orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of the phantasmal Synagoga, was named by Christians, Ioudaismos. As we shall observe, this term, originally used by its earliest Christian writers as an internal flaw or tendency in Christianismos, through the fourth century becomes the name for that other (false) orthodoxy, “Judaism.”

Ignatius; or, Ioudaismos Becomes “Judaism”

Ignatius of Antioch is apparently the first Christian writer (I am not including Paul as a Christian, who may, nonetheless, have been his source for the word). The bishop and future martyred saint inveighed mightily against those who blurred the boundaries between Jew and Christian. His very inveighings, however, are indicative of the ideological work that he is performing. In Ignatius’s time (and, I will hypothesize, for many generations after), “Ioudaismos” and “Christianismos” constituted a very fuzzy category, or better, set of categories.5 The “fuzzy category” is referred to by Ignatius as the “monster”: “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Ioudaismos” [Magnesians 10:3],6 he proclaims, thus making both points at once, the drive of the nascent orthodoxy—understood as a particular social location and as a particular form of self fashioning and identity making7—, to normative separation and the lack of clear separations “on the ground.” What is most important for my purposes here, however, is to see that for Ignatius, Ioudaismos is clearly a matter of praxis, not yet an institution, not yet a Synagoga.


The question of names and naming is central to the Ignatian enterprise. Near the very beginning of his letter to the Ephesians, in a passage the significance of which has been only partly realized in my view, Ignatius writes, “Having received in God your much loved name, which you possess by a just nature according to faith and love in Christ Jesus, our Savior--being imitators of God, enkindled by the blood of God, you accomplished perfectly the task suited to you” [1:1].8 Although this interpretation has been spurned by most commentators and scholars of Ignatius,9 I would make a cornerstone of my construction the to read this as a reference to the name “Christians.”10 It was, after all, in Ignatius’s Antioch that the people were first called by that name (Acts 11:26). Ignatius is complimenting the church in Ephesus as being worthy, indeed, to be called by the name of Christ owing to their merits.11 Indeed, as Schoedel does not fail to point out, in Magnesians 10:1, Ignatius writes, “Therefore let us become his disciples and learn to live according to Christianity [Christianismos]. For one who is called by any name other than this, is not of God.”12 Even more to the point, however, is Magnesians 4:1: “It is right, then, not only to be called Christians but to be Christians.”13 Ignatius tells the Ephesians, then, that they are not just called Christians but are Christians, by nature [φύσει], as it were.14 Ignatius goes on in verse 2 to write, “For hearing that I was put in bonds from Syria for the common name and hope, hoping by your prayer to attain to fighting with beasts in Rome, that by attaining I may be able to be a disciple, you hastened to see me.”15 Once again, the interpretative tradition seems to have missed an attractively specific interpretation of “name” here that links it to the “name” in the previous verse. It is not so much, I opine, the name of Christ that is referred to here16 as the name of “Christian,” which equals “disciple” (cf. again Acts 11:26: “And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.”). The “common hope” is Jesus Christ (cf. Eph. 21:1; Trallians 2:2),17 but the common “name” is “Christian.”

I would suggest that Ignatius represents here the martyrological theme of the centrality of martyrdom in establishing the name “Christian” as the legitimate and true name of the disciple; this, in accord with the practice whereby “Christianos eimi” were the last words of the martyr, the name for which she died.18 Similarly in the next passage, Ignatius explicitly connects martyrdom with “the name”: “I do not command you as being someone; for even though I have been bound in the name, I have not yet been perfected in Jesus Christ” [3:1]. The “name” in which Ignatius has been bound (i.e., imprisoned and sent to Rome for martyrdom) is the name “Christianos.”19 The nexus between having the right to that name and martyrdom or between martyrdom and identity, and the nexus between them and heresiology, separation from Ioudaismos is also clear.20 In opening his letters with this declaration, I think, Ignatius is declaring one of his major themes for the corpus entire: the establishment of a new Christian identity,


distinguished and distinguishable from Ioudaismos. If this is seen as a highly marked moment in his texts, then one can follow this as a dominant theme throughout his letters, and the protoheresiology21 of Ignatius is profoundly related to this themes, as well.

This issue is most directly thematized, however, in Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians. He exhorts: “Be not deceived by erroneous opinions nor by old fables, which are useless. For if we continue to live until now according to Judaism, we confess that we have not received grace” [Magnesians 8:1].22

Ioudaismos is defined here by Ignatius, a erroneous opinions and old fables, but what precisely does he mean? Let us go back to the beginning of the letter. Once more, Ignatius makes a reference to the “name”: “For having been deemed worthy of a most godly name, in the bonds which I bear I sing the churches” [1:1].23 Here, as Schoedel recognizes, it is almost certain that only the name “Christian” will fit the context. This thought about the name is continued explicitly in Ignatius’s famous, “It is right, then, not only to be called Christians but to be Christians” [4:1].24 On my reading, it is the establishment of that name, giving it definition, “defining, . . . policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity [Christianismos] from the name of another [Ioudaismos]” that provides one of the two thematic foci for the letter (and the letters) as a whole, the other—and related—one, being, of course, the establishment of the bishop as sole authority in a given church.

Near the end of the letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius writes, “(I write) these things, my beloved, not because I know that some of you are so disposed, but as one less than you I wish to forewarn you” [11].25 Although Schoedel and others treat this as mere rhetoric—i.e., that some of them were so disposed and Ignatius is either being ingratiating or purposefully idealizing—, I would suggest that we might take it literally, as an indication that Ignatius knows that what he is doing is constructing borders, delimiting what will be understood as legitimate Christianity, the proper name, and what will be excluded as Judaism, rather than confronting a real danger.

As a sort of thought experiment, at any rate, I would like to take seriously the possibility that the “heterodox” ideas anathematized by Ignatius were, indeed, in some important sense Ioudaismos, i.e., that the folks who held them might well have thought of themselves as, in some important sense, Ioudaioi, at the same time, of course, that they were “Christians” (perhaps, for them, avant la lettre). The issue joined by Ignatius then is the making of the Christian name as something distinct and different, an opposed place to Judaism, “defining and policing the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another,” preventing the smuggling of stolen goods.


Ioudaismos, so far for Ignatius does not seem to be what it means in other writers of and before his time, namely the “false views and misguided practice,” or “insisting especially on the ritual requirements of that system.”26 Ignatius troubles to let us know that this is not the case, as we learn from a famous and powerful rhetorical paradox in his Letter to the Philadelphians: “But if anyone expounds Judaism to you, do not listen to him; for it is better to hear Christianity from a man who is circumcised than Judaism from a man uncircumcised; both of them, if they do not speak of Jesus Christ, are to me tombstones and graves of the dead on which nothing but the names of men is written” (Philadelphians 6:1).27 After considering various options that have been offered for the interpretation of this surprising passage,28 Schoedel arrives at what seems to me the most compelling interpretation, “perhaps it was the ‘expounding’ (exegetical expertise) that was the problem and not the ‘Judaism’ (observance).”29 I would go further than Schoedel by making one more seemingly logical exegetical step, namely to assume that for Ignatius, “Ioudaismos” is a matter of expounding, just as “Christianismos” is. In Ignatius, I suggest, Ioudaismos no longer means observance per se (except insofar as expounding itself is an observance). In other words, for him Judaism and Christianity are two doxas, two theological positions, a wrong one [ἑτεροδοξία 8:1]30 and a right one, a wrong interpretation of the legacy of the Prophets and a right one. The right one is that which is taught by the prophets “inspired by his grace,” and called “Christianity” as it is that “revealed through Jesus Christ his Son, who is his Word” [8:1]. The point may in fact be even more radical, namely that Ioudaismos is comprised by even the study of the Prophets, or any Scripture at all. The words quoted certainly seem to mean that Christianismos consists of “speaking of Jesus Christ,” Gospel—still oral of course—,31 while Ioudaismos is devoting oneself to the study of Scripture. Although, to be sure in chapter 9 of Magnesians Ignatius mentions one aspect of practice, namely the abandonment of the Sabbath for “the Lord’s Day,” assuming that the plausible translation “Lord’s Day” for κυριακή is correct,32 nevertheless Schoedel seems correct in asserting that it was too much attention to the meaning of biblical texts and not practicing of “the Law” that was at issue, that is a Scripturally based Christianity versus an exclusively apostolic faith, “disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.”33 Ignatius explicitly links those who have not abandoned the Sabbath for the Lord’s Day as those who deny Christ’s death, as well [9:1], a point that will take on greater significance below.

For Ignatius, seemingly, “Ioudaismos” and “Christianismos” are both versions of what we would call “Christianity,” since his opponents are those who say, “If I do not find it in the archives, I do not believe (it to be) in the gospel” (Philadelphians 8:2).34 Ignatius’s antagonists, real or imagined, are not actually what we today would call


“Jews,” since Gospel seems to be a relevant concept for them, but Christians, even uncircumcised ones, who preach some “heterodox” attachment to Christ, or even merely an insistence that everything in Christianity be anchored in Scriptural (the only Scripture they had, the “Old Testament”) exegesis.35 They do not put Christ first, and therefore, they are preaching “Ioudaismos,” and they are “tombstones.”

What is this Ioudaismos, and how does it define Christianismos? A closer reading of the passage will help answer this question:

I exhort you to do nothing from partisanship but in accordance with Christ’s teaching. For I heard some say, “If I do not find (it) in the archives, I do not believe (it to be) in the gospel.” and when I said, “It is written,” they answered me, “That is just the question.” But for me the archives are Jesus Christ, the inviolable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and faith through him--in which, through your prayers, I want to be justified. [8:2]36

The Greek of this passage allows for two translations at a crux. ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ

οὐ πιστεύω can either be taken, as Schoedel does, as “I do not believe (it to be) in the gospel,” or, as Bauer would have it, “[When I do not find it [also] in the Archives], I do not believe it, [when I find] it in the gospel.”37 Schoedel gives his reasons for taking the first option: “Ignatius could not have accomplished anything by twisting his opponents’ words that badly (I take it for granted that they regarded themselves as believers in the gospel.)” And then comments:

Conceivably a group of Christians could have declared rhetorically their unwillingness to believe the gopsel unless it was backed up by Scripture simply to make clear the importance of Scripture to them. But then why would Ignatius have replied by saying, “It is written”? And why would they have challenged him on that as if to suggest that the truth of the gospel itself was in doubt? The answer may be that the group was actually made up of Jews closely associated with Christianity but doubtful of its central tenets. But surely Ignatius has in mind Christians in danger of being attracted to Judaism (cf. Phd. 6.1)—people close enough to other members of the congregation that they almost “deceived” Ignatius (Phd. 11.1). When Ignatius indicates that “repentance” and a turning to the unity of the church is in order for this group (Phd. 8.1), it is likely that they were recognizably Christian.38


The possibility that Schoedel refuses to consider is that Jews who insist that the true gospel must only contain ideas, histories that can be backed up from Scripture, might have been precisely “people close to other members of the congregation,” and even, quel horreur, “recognizably Christian.” The group in Philadelphia to which the future martyr is objecting so strongly would be, on this reading, Christian Jews who insist that the gospel can only contain scriptural truth, and this was acceptable to the Philadelphian congregation with whom they were in communion.

Schoedel’s incredulity is generated by his assumption that Jew and Christian are separate identities by the time of Ignatius, an assumption that I would seriously put into question. If we do not make this assumption and recognize that the very content of the probably oral gospel is under question at this time, then whence those “central tenets of Christianity”—whose Christianity, indeed?—that these Jews close to Christianity might be said to doubt? That is exactly the question that they put to Ignatius: “they answered me, ‘That is just the question,’” to wit: Who are you, Ignatius to determine what is or is not gospel? For Ignatius, however, for whom some non-scriptural kerygma is central and, sees, as he insists over and over, such reliance on Scripture as itself, Ioudaismos, the following of Jewish Scriptures, and not Christianismos, the following of Christ’s teaching alone. This opposition between Ignatius and these other Christian Jews has been symbolized by him already as an opposition between those who keep the Sabbath and those who only observe the Lord’s Day.

Here Ignatius draws it out further via an epistemological contrast between that which is known from Scripture (=Ioudaismos) and that which is known from the very facts of the Lord’s death and resurrection (=χριστομαθία). As we have seen above, for Ignatius those who observe the Sabbath are implicated as ones who deny the Lord’s death as well (Magnesians 9:1). Schoedel believes that: “the link between Judaizing and docetism was invented by Ignatius,”39 and, moreover, “it may well be that the form of the polemic compelled Ignatius to look for a serious theological disagreement where none existed.”40 I have argued elsewhere, however, that Jews who held a version of Logos theology, and perhaps might even have seen in Christ the manifestation of the Logos, might yet have balked at an incarnational christology,41 i.e., rather than the “low” christology of which so-called Jewish-Christians are usually accused, their christology might have been, indeed, too “high” for Ignatius’s taste. That which is not found in the Archives, then, is precisely the notion that the Logos could die! That is, exactly that which Ignatius himself claims as the something which the gospel has that is distinctive over-against the Old Testament [9:2]: “the coming of the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, his passion and resurrection.” This suggests strongly that, if not precisely the same people—if, indeed, there were such people altogether—, it is the same complex


of Christian Jewish ideas, accepting Jesus, accepting the Logos, denying actual physical death and resurrection, which Ignatius names as Ioudaismos, the product of over-valuing of Scripture against the claims of the gospel, which alone must be first and foremost for those would have the name Christian, that name for which Ignatius would die.42

In any case—that is whether or not my suggestion for a new variant on the idea of essentially one “heresy” for Ignatius is acceptable—, Schoedel has surely advanced our understanding by showing that “it was Ignatius and not they [the “heretics”] who polarized the situation.”43 Ignatius produced his Ioudaismos (and perhaps his docetic heresy as well) in order to more fully define and articulate the new identity for the disciples as true bearers of the new name, Christianoi. In my view, Ioudaismos, the Ekklesia, was not invented primarily as a pejorative term but rather adopted and shifted in meaning precisely so that Christianismos could have an other (in its semantic paradigm of what sort of thing it is).44 Ignatius has, in some important sense, taken the first step in the invention of Judaism as an Ekklesia as part and parcel of his invention of Christianity. Oddly enough, the “Judaism” that he creates has very little to do, it seems, with Jews.

Jerome and Epiphanius

By the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea, the first church historian and an important theologian in his own right,45 could write “I have already said before in the Preparation46 how Christianity is something that is neither Hellenism nor Judaism, but which has its own particular characteristic piety [ὁ Χριστιανισμὸς οὔτε Ἑλληνισμός τις ἐστιν οὔτε Ἰιουδαισμὸς, οἰκεῖον δέ τίνα φέρων χαρακτῆρα θεοσεβείας],”47 the implication being that both Hellenism and Judaism have, as well, their own characteristic forms of piety (however, to be sure, wrong-headed ones). He also writes:

This compels us to conceive some other ideal of piety [eusebia], by which they [the ancient Patriarchs] must have guided their lives. Would not this be exactly that third form of eusebia midway between Judaism and Hellenism, which I have already deduced as the most ancient and venerable of all religions, and which has been preached of late to all nations through our Saviour. . . . The convert from Hellenism to Christianity does not land in Judaism, nor does one who rejects the Jewish worship become ipso facto a Greek.48

Here we find in Eusebius a clear articulation of Judaism, Hellenism, and

Christianity as “forms of piety.” There is something called “eusebia” which takes different “forms.”


The fullest expression of this conceptual shift may be located in the heresiology of Epiphanius (fl. early 5th c.). For him, not only “Hellenism” and “Judaism” but also “Scythianism” and even “Barbarianism” are no longer the names of ethnic entities49 but of “heresies,” that is, institutions other than orthodox Christianity.50 “<Hellenism,” he writes, originated with Egyptians, Babylonians and Phrygians>, and it now confused <men’s> ways.”51 It is important to see that Epiphanius’s comment is a transformation of a verse from the Pauline literature, as he himself informs us.52 In Colossians 3:11 we find “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.”53 This is a lovely index of the semantic shift. For pseudo-Paul, these designations are obviously not the names of “heresies” but of various ethnic and cultural groupings,54 whereas for Epiphanius they are the names of “heresies,” by which he means groups divided and constituted by theological differences fully disembedded from ethnicities: How, otherwise, could the religion called “Hellenism” have originated with the Egyptians?55 Astonishingly, Epiphanius’s “Hellenism” seems to have nothing to do with the Greeks; it is Epiphanius’s name for what other writers would call “paganism.” Epiphanius, not surprisingly, defines “the topic of the Jews’ eusebia” as “the subject of their beliefs.”56 For an Epiphanius, as for Gregory, a major category (if not the only one) for dividing human beings into groups is “the subject of their beliefs.” The system of identities had been completely transformed during the period extending from the first to the fifth centuries. The systemic change resulting in theological difference as a modality of identity that began, I would suggest, with the heresiological work of Christians such as Justin Martyr works itself out through the fourth century and is closely intertwined with the triumph of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is thus not only a discourse for the production of difference within, but functions as a category to make and mark the border between Christianity and its proximate other Ekklesiai, particularly a “Judaism” and a “Paganism” that it is, in part, inventing.

There is a new moment in fifth-century Christian heresiological discourse. Where in previous times the general move was to name Christian heretics “Jews” (a motif that continues alongside the “new” one), only at this time (notably in Epiphanius and Jerome) is distinguishing Judaizing heretics from orthodox Jews central to the Christian discursive project.57 As one piece of evidence for this claim, I would adduce an explosion of heresiological interest in the “Jewish-Christian heresies” of the Nazarenes and the Ebionites at this time. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, J. K. L. Gieseler already recognized that “the brightest moment in the history of these two groups doubtless falls about the year 400 A.D., at which time we have the best accounts concerning them.”58 Given that, in fact, it seems unlikely that these sects truly flourished


at this particular time,59 we need to discover other ways of understanding this striking literary flowering. The Ebionites and Nazoreans, in my reading, function much as the mythical “trickster” figures of many cultures, in that precisely by transgressing borders that the culture establishes, they reify those boundaries.60 The discourse of the “Judaizing heretics” thus performs this very function of reinforcing the binaries.

The purpose of Epiphanius’s discourse on the Ebionites and Nazarenes is to participate in the imperial project of control of (in this case) Palestine by “identifying and reifying the . . . religions.” Epiphanius explicitly indicates that this is his purpose by writing of Ebion, the heresiarch-founder of the sect: “But since he is practically midway between all the sects, he is nothing. The words of scripture, ‘I was almost in all evil, in the midst of the church and synagogue’ [Proverbs 5:14], are fulfilled in him. For he is Samaritan, but rejects the name with disgust. And while professing to be a Jew, he is the opposite of Jews—though he does agree with them in part.”61 In a rare moment of midrashic wit (one hesitates to attribute it to Epiphanius himself), the verse of Proverbs is read to mean that I was in all evil, because I was in the midst [between] the church and the synagogue. Epiphanius’s declaration that the Ebionites “are nothing,” especially when put next to Jerome’s famous declaration that the Nazarenes think that they are Christians and Jews, but in reality are neither, strongly recalls for me the insistence in the modern period that the people of southern Africa have no religion, not because they are not Christians, but because they are not pagans.62 Suddenly it seems important to these two writers to assert a difference between Judaizing heretics and Jews. The ascription of existence to the “hybrids” assumes (and thus assures) the existence of non-hybrid, “pure” Ekklesiai. Heresiology is not only, as it is usually figured, the insistence on some (or another) right doctrine but on a discourse of the pure as opposed to the hybrid, a discourse that then requires the hybrid as its opposite term. The discourse of race as analyzed by Homi Bhabha proves helpful: “The exertions of the ‘official knowledges’ of colonialism—pseudo-scientific, typological, legal-administrative, eugenicist—are imbricated at the point of their production of meaning and power with the fantasy that dramatizes the impossible desire for a pure, undifferentiated origin.”63 We need only substitute “heresiological” for “eugenicist” in this sentence to arrive at a major thesis of this article.

Jerome, Epiphanius’s younger contemporary, is the other most prolific writer about “Jewish-Christians” in antiquity.64 Jacobs reads Jerome’s Hebrew knowledge as an important part of the “colonialist” project of the Theodosian age.65 I want to focus here on only one aspect of Jerome’s discourse about Jews, his discussions of the “Jewish-Christians.” Hillel Newman has recently argued that Jerome’s discourse about the Judaizers and Nazarenes is more or less constructed out of whole cloth.66 It thus


sharply raises the question of motivation, for, as historian Marc Bloch notes, “[T]o establish the fact of forgery is not enough. It is further necessary to discover its motivations. . . . Above all, a fraud is, in its way, a piece of evidence.”67 I would suggest that Jerome, in general a much clearer thinker than Epiphanius, moves in the same direction but with greater lucidity. For him, it is absolutely unambiguous that rabbinic Judaism is not a Christian heresy but a separate Ekklesia. The Mischlinge thus explicitly mark out the space of illegitimacy, of no religion:

usque hodie per totas orientis synagogas inter Iudaeos heresis est, quae dicitur Minaeorum, et a pharisaeis huc usque damnatur, quos uulgo Nazaraeos nuncupant, qui credunt in Christum, filium dei natum de Maria uirgine, et eum dicunt esse, qui sub Pontio Pilato et passus est et resurrexit, in quem et nos credimus, sed, dum uolunt et Iudaei esse et Christiani, nec Iudaei sunt nec Christiani.68 In our own day there exists a sect among the Jews throughout all the synagogues of the East, which is called the sect of the Minei, and is even now condemned by the Pharisees. The adherents to this sect are known commonly as Nazarenes; they believe in Christ the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary; and they say that He who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again, is the same as the one in whom we believe. But while they desire to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other.

This proclamation of Jerome’s comes in the context of his discussion with

Augustine about Galatians 2, in which Augustine, disallowing the notion that the apostles dissimulated when they kept Jewish practices, suggests that their “Jewish-Christianity” was legitimate. Jerome responds vigorously, understanding the “danger” of such notions to totalizing Imperial orthodoxy.69 What is new here is not, obviously, the condemnation of the “Jewish followers of Jesus” heretics but that the Christian author condemns them, in addition, for not being Jews, thus at least implicitly marking the existence and legitimacy of a “true” Jewish Ekklesia alongside Christianity, as opposed to the falsities of the Mischlinge. This move parallels, then, Epiphanius’s insistence that the Ebionites are “nothing.” Pushing Jacobs’s interpretation a bit further, I would suggest that Jerome’s insistence on translating from the Hebrew is both an instance of control of the Jew (Jacobs’s point) and also the very marking out of the Jews as “absolute other” to Christianity. I think that it is not going too far to see here a reflection of a social and political process like that David Chidester remarks in an entirely different historical moment, “The discovery of an indigenous religious system


on southern African frontiers depended upon colonial conquest and domination. Once contained under colonial control, an indigenous population was found to have its own religious system.”70 Following out the logic of this statement suggests that there may have been a similar nexus between the containment of the Jews under the colonial eye of the Christian Empire that enabled the discovery/invention of Judaism as an Ekklesia named Synagoga. Looked at from the other direction, the assertion of the existence of a fully separate-from-Christianity “orthodox” Judaism functioned for Christian orthodoxy as a guarantee of the Christian’s own bounded and coherent identity and thus furthered the project of imperial control, as marked out by Jacobs. The discursive processes in the situation of Christian Empire are very different from the projects of mutual self-definition that I have elsewhere explored.71 Hegemonic Christian discourse also produced Judaism (and Paganism, e.g., that of Julian) as other Ekklesiai or alternative orthodoxies precisely in order to cordon off Christianity, in a purification and crystallization of its essence as a bounded entity. Julian cleverly reverses this procedure and turns it against Christianity. In at least one reading of Julian’s “Against the Galileans,” the point of that work is to reinstate a binary opposition between Greek and Jew, Hellenism and Judaism, by inscribing Christianity as a hybrid. Eusebius’s claim that the one who leaves Hellenism does not land in Judaism and the reverse now constitutes an argument that Christianity is a monstrous hybrid, a mooncalf: “For if any man should wish to examine into the truth concerning you, he will find that your impiety is compounded of the rashness of the Jews and the indifference and vulgarity of the Gentiles. for from both sides you have drawn what is by no means their best but their inferior teaching, and so have made for yourselves a border of wickedness.”72 Julian further writes: “It is worth while . . . to compare what is said about the divine among the Hellenes and Hebrews; and finally to enquire of those who are neither Hellenes nor Jews, but belong to the sect of the Galileans.”73 Julian, as dedicated as any Christian orthodox writer to policing borderlines, bitterly reproaches the “Galileans” for contending that they are Israelites and argues that they are no such thing, neither Jews nor Greeks but impure hybrids.74 Here Julian sounds very much like Jerome when the latter declares that those who think they are both Jews and Christians are neither, or Epiphanius when he refers to the Ebionites as “nothing.” This would make Julian’s project structurally identical to the projects of the Christian heresiologists who, at about the same time, were rendering Christianity and Judaism in their “orthodox” forms the pure terms of a binary opposition with the “Judaizing” Christians, the hybrids who must be excluded from the semiotic system, being “monsters.”75 I suggest, then, a deeper explanation of Julian’s insistence that you cannot mix Hellenism with Christianity. It is not only that Hellenism and Christianity are separate “orthodoxies”


that, by definition, cannot be mixed with each other, but even more that Christianity is always already (if you will) an admixture, a syncretism. Julian wants to reinstate the binary of Jew and Greek. He provides, therefore, another instance of the discursive form that I am arguing for in the Christian texts of his time, a horror of supposed hybrids. To recapitulate, in Julian’s very formation of Hellenism (or should I say Hellenicity?76), as a difference not of ethnicity but of systems of belief and worship, he mirrors the efforts of the orthodox churchmen.77 While he was protecting the borders between Hellenism and Judaism by excluding Christianity as a hybrid, Julian, it seems, was, unbeknownst to himself, smuggling some Christian ideas in his very attempt to outlaw Christianity.78

This interpretation adds something to that of Jacobs, who writes that “among the deviant figures of Christian discourse we often find the Jew, the ‘proximate other’ used to produce the hierarchical space between the Christian and the non-Christian.”79 I am suggesting that the heretic can also be read as a proximate other, producing a hierarchical space between the Christian and the Jew. This point is at least partially anticipated by Jacobs himself when he writes that “Jews exist as the paradigmatic ‘to-be-known’ in the overwhelming project of conceptualizing the ‘all in all’ of orthodoxy. This comes out most clearly in the [Epiphanian] accounts of ‘Jewish-Christian’ heresies.”80 One way of spinning this would be to see heresiology as central to the production of Judaism as the “pure other” of Christian orthodoxy, while the other way of interpreting it would be to see Judaism as essential to the production of orthodoxy over-against heresy. My point is that both of these moments in an oscillating analysis are equally important and valid. Seen in this light, orthodoxy itself, orthodoxy as an idea, as a regime (as opposed to any particular orthodox position) is crucial in the formation of Christianity as the universal and imperial religion of the late Roman Empire and, later on, of European Christendom as well.

Notes 1. Brent Nongbri, “Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for

an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., Yale, 2008), 50–62. Nongbri goes sometimes too far, imho, in dismissing some of my interpretations there and somewhat mischaracterizes others but no matter, in essence he is right. In what follows, I simply delete the previous interpretations that I consider now partly or largely invalid and rephrase what remains in new terms that I think, today, make more sense.

2. Nongbri, “Paul Without Religion,” 62. 3. Rowan Williams, “Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?” in The

Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3.


4. This is true, I warrant, as well of the term aposynagogos in the Fourth Gospel as well

which only means kicked out of the synagogue, not excommunicated or rendered a non-Israelite!

5. Daniel Boyarin, “Semantic Differences: Linguistics and ‘the Parting of the Ways’,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Texte und Studien Zum Antiken Judentum 95 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 65–85.

6. William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. and ed. William R. Schoedel, Hermeneia--a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 126. See Judith Lieu, Image & Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 28 ff and passim for an exploration of the anxieties that this fuzzy border gave rise to. This position is partially pace Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 2 (1998): 187 who seems to regard such fuzziness (or “porosity” in his language) as particularly characteristic of Christianity. Hopkins’s paper is very important and will have to be reckoned with seriously in any future accounts of Judaeo-Christian origins and genealogies.

7. Rebecca Lyman, “The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr, Mimicry, and the Origins of Christian ‘Orthodoxy’” (2000).

8. Schoedel, Ignatius, 40. 9. Schoedel, Ignatius, 41. 10. Henning Paulsen and Walter Bauer, Die Briefe Des Ignatius von Antiochia und der Brief

Des Polykarp von Smyrna, Handbuch Zum Neuen Testament (Tübingen: Mohr/ Siebeck, 1985), 25.

11. Other interpretations, seeing this as a reference to the name Ephesus, seem to me quite far-fetched.

12. Schoedel, Ignatius, 126. I shall have more to say about this passage anon. 13. See also Ignatius to the Romans 3:2. 14. For φύσει in this sense, cp. Trallians 1:1 and discussion in Schoedel, Ignatius, 138. 15. Schoedel, Ignatius, 40. 16. pace Schoedel, Ignatius, 43. 17. Schoedel, Ignatius, 95; Schoedel, Ignatius, 140. 18. Judith Lieu, “‘I Am a Christian’: Martyrdom and the Beginning of ‘Christian’ Identity,”

in Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Christian Identity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003) Carlin A. Barton, “The ‘Moment of Truth’ in Ancient Rome: Honor and Embodiment in a Contest Culture,” Stanford Humanities Review (1998): 16–30.

19. Similarly, it seems to me that 7:1 of that letter in which Ignatius writes, “For some are accustomed with evil deceit to carry about the name, at the same time doing things unworthy of God” ( Schoedel, Ignatius, 59), it is not the name “Christ” that these folks are carrying about (pace Schoedel: “that is, they move from place to place looking for converts to their version of Christianity”), but the name Christian. Cf. Justin’s remark that, “For I made it clear to you that those who are Christians in name, but in reality are godless and impious heretics, teach in all respects what is blasphemous and godless and foolish” (Dialogue 80.3-4), A. Lukyn Williams, ed. and trans., Justin Martyr: The Dialogue with Trypho, Translations of Christian Literature (London: SPCK, 1930), 169–71; Justin, Dialogus Cum Tryphone, ed. Miroslav Marcovich, Patristische Texte und Studien Bd. 47. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 208–9.


20. As Lieu remarks, “The claiming of this identity involves the denial of other

alternatives,” Lieu, “I Am.” hence the importance of the name, martyrdom, and Ioudaismos in Ignatius. If one can be a Jew and a Christian, then Ignatius’s martyrdom would, indeed, be in vain.

21. Schoedel, Ignatius, 12 who sees ‘heresy’ and ‘heterodox’ as quasi-technical terms in Ignatius. But cf. Schoedel, Ignatius, 147: “But we should note first that in referring to the ‘strange plant’ as ‘heresy’ Ignatius is mainly concerned about the false teachers themselves rather than their teaching. ‘Heresy,’ then, is still basically a matter of people who disrupt unity and create ‘faction.’”

22. Schoedel, Ignatius, 28. See also C.K. Barrett, “Jews and Judaizers in the Epistles of Ignatius,” in Jews, Greeks and Christians: Essays in Honor of William David Davies, ed. Robin Scroggs, SJLA 21 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 220–44.

23. Schoedel, Ignatius, 104. 24. Schoedel, Ignatius, 108. 25. Schoedel, Ignatius, 128. 26. pace Schoedel, Ignatius, 118 who considers Ignatius’s usage the same as that of II

Maccabees, Paul, and the Pastoral Epistles. 27. Schoedel, Ignatius, 200 [emphasis added]. 28. Schoedel, Ignatius, 202–3. 29. Schoedel, Ignatius, 203. 30. Contra Schoedel, Ignatius, 118, I do not see here a near-technical term for heresy,

preferring the view of Martin Elze, “Irrtum und Häresie,” Kairos 71 (1974): 393–94. 31. Schoedel, Ignatius, 201. 32. Schoedel, Ignatius, 123, n. 3. 33. “But Ignatius makes a characteristic move when he links the resurrection with the

mystery of Christ’s death and emphasizes the latter as that through which faith comes. For it is Christ’s death that stands out as a ‘mystery’ in Ignatius’ mind (Eph. 19.1). One purpose of Ignatius here is to present the passion and resurrection (not Scripture as misinterpreted by the Jews and Judaizers) as that which determines the shape of Christian existence (and makes sense of Scripture),” Schoedel, Ignatius, 123–24.

34. Schoedel, Ignatius, 207. 35. For further discussion of this difficult passage, see Schoedel, Ignatius, 207–9 and

especially William R. Schoedel, “Ignatius and the Archives,” Harvard Theological Review 71 (1978). Oddly enough these Jewish-Christians sound like Saducees: “the Sadducean group reject [the oral traditions], saying that one should consider as rules [only] those which have been written down, and that it is not necessary to keep the regulations handed down from the ancestors,” (Josephus, Antiquities 13.297).For another recent discussion of these passages, see Birger Pearson, “The Emergence of the Christian Religion,” in The Emergence of the Christian Religion: Essays on Early Christianity (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997), 11–14. For the interpretation that I have suggested here, see also Einar Molland, “The Heretics Combatted by Ignatius of Antioch,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History V (1954): 1–6. See also the important argument of C. K. Barrett. Arguing that Ignatius indicates that he has heard this preaching, he writes: “Presumably in some kind of church meeting (like that in which Ignatius prophesied [7.1]—an important point, for it must mean that the persons in question were Christian, even if (in Ignatius’ eyes) unsatisfactory Christians. Ignatius is unlikely to have made his way into the synagogue,” C. K. Barrett, “Jews and Judaizers in the Epistles of


Ignatius,” in Jews, Greeks and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity. Essays in Honor of W. D. Davies (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 233. Finally, cf. Paulsen and Bauer, Die Briefe, 85–86.

36. Schoedel, Ignatius, 207. 37. Paulsen and Bauer, Die Briefe, 85. 38. Schoedel, Ignatius, 207. 39. Schoedel, Ignatius, 118. 40. Schoedel, Ignatius, 119. I disagree with Schoedel’s remark there that “We may observe

in this connection that Ignatius speaks of Judaism where Paul would more naturally have spoken of the law. Thus Ignatius’ contrast is between grace and Judaism and not, as in Paul, between grace and law.” I think that Ignatius simply does not operate with an opposition between grace and law at all, as we can see from Mag. 2: “because he is subject to the bishop as to the grace of God and to the presbytery as to the law of Jesus Christ.” Indeed, Schoedel’s remark is somewhat puzzling, since he himself argues that “Ignatius uses ‘grace’ and ‘law’ as parallel expressions,” Schoedel, Ignatius, 239. Ignatius’s Judaizers are apparently uncircumcised, making them very very different from Paul’s opponents indeed (cf. Phil. 6:1; see discussion in Ignatius, “The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius, the Martyr a Critical Study Based on the Anomalies Contained in the Textus Receptus” (1979), 41, who nonetheless insists that the “Judaizers” and the “Gnostic-docetics” must be two “irreducibly” different groups. This flows from Rius-Camps’s misapprehension that Ignatius’s “Judaizers” are the representatives of “Judaizing tendencies similar to those that sprang up in the Pauline communities,” notwithstanding the fact that virtually the entire content of the Pauline opposition was their insistence on Jewish law especially circumcision, while Ignatius’s Judaizing opponents’ “error” is christological and not connected with any insistence on Jewish practice, notwithstanding their maintenance of the Sabbath). Lightfoot’s arguments all stand up to Rius-Camps’s attempt at withering critique of them, Josep Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius, the Martyr: A Critical Study Based on the Anomalies Contained in the Textus Receptus, Xpictianicmoc (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1979), 40–51. Rius-Camps seems to believe that by defining “Judaizing” as a form of Christianity which “inculcates Jewish observances and practices” (Rius-Camps, Ignatius, 42), he has then proven that if Ignatius refers to those who expound Ioudaismos, they must too be inculcating such observances and practices, in spite of the fact that Ignatius himself refers to them as “uncircumcised”!

41. Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Crucifixion of the Logos,” Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3 (2001): 243–84.

42. This interpretation was generated in conversation with my colleague Rebecca Lyman for whose koinonia I am grateful. It must be conceded, however, that in the letters (Trallians and Smyrneans) where Ignatius is most explicit in his attacks on “docetics,” he does not mention Ioudaismos. I find it, nevertheless, quite plausible to see the same tendencies at work in these instances, with perhaps a somewhat varying emphasis. In all instances, it does seem to be denial of Christ’s passion that is at work. Similarly in Ephesians, where it is generally conceded that Ignatius combats “docetic” teachers (Schoedel, Ignatius, 59, 231), Ignatius does not name the “heresy” either but merely refers to those “who are accustomed with evil deceit to carry about the name” (7:1), but there, too, he emphasizes positively the reality of the Incarnation, death, and resurrection, “first passible and then impassible [of] Jesus Christ our Lord,” who is, moreover, “God in death.” According to this interpretation we must understand those mentioned in Smyrneans 5:1, “whom the prophecies did not persuade nor


the law of Moses, nor indeed until now the gospel” (Schoedel, Ignatius, 230), as meaning that they were not persuaded to interpret those documents and traditions (for the gospel is almost surely oral for Ignatius) as proof of the gospel of Incarnational christology. As Schoedel, himself an adherent of the view that two groups of “heretics” are comprehended in Ignatius, writes: “As we have seen, Ignatius thinks of the appeal to the Scriptures as making sense only if it is recognized that they point forward to Christ and find their fulfillment there. The prophets and Moses gain their significance from the events of the Lord’s ministry (cf. Phd. 5.2;8.2;9.2) and the commitment of the martyr (cf. Phd. 5.1;8.2). Thus arguments that Ignatius had used against Judaizers to subordinate the Scriptures to Christ are used here (in a modified form) against docetists to confirm the reality of the humanity of Christ,” Schoedel, Ignatius, 234. Given, however, that it seems most plausible (in my view) to see the issue between Ignatius and those who “expound Ioudaismos” in Magnesians and Philadelphians as also about the death of the Logos, it seems most elegant to assume as well that the same arguments are used with the same goals in mind in both groups of texts, thus supporting the view of Theodor Zahn, “Ignatius von Antiochien.” (1873), 356–99, esp. 370 and J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, trans., The Apostolic Fathers, second ed., rev. Michael W. Holmes, reprint, 1891 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1989), 359–75. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Ignatius uses precisely the same terms, “heterodoxy” and “grace” as the terms of opposition in Mag. 8:1 and Smyrneans 6:2. Cf. the awkwardness to which Schoedel is forced: “In any event, his arguments rely most heavily . . . on the nature of the gospel, and he finds it possible to adapt his views on the subject either to those who overemphasize the Scriptures (as in Philadelphia) or to those who teach docetism (as in Smyrna),” Schoedel, Ignatius, 242. A further possible objection to this interpretation is the fact that Ignatius accuses his opponents at Smyrna of having no concern for “the widow. none for the orphan, none for one distressed, none for one imprisoned etc.” [Smyr. 6:2] (Schoedel, Ignatius, 238), a set of objections that would seem hardly to have been directed at Judaizing. However, against this objection we can put Schoedel’s own obviously correct assertion that, “It would be naive, however, to think that the bishop was describing the behavior of his opponents accurately. What is true, perhaps, is that they valued their theology highly enough to be unwilling to sacrifice it simply to avoid the threat of disruption to the community,” Ignatius, 240. This would be just as true of alleged Judaizers who deny the physical death and resurrection as of so-called Gnostics. In my view, the interpretation that Ignatius deals with two groups of “heretics,” Jewish Christians who keep the Law and have too low a christology and “gnostics” who have too high a christology, owing to their over-allegiance to pagan philosophies is a product of the (later) heresiological schema itself, argued for compellingly by Karen King, wherein all heresy is either a matter of being too Jewish or not Jewish enough, as it were, Karen L. King, Making Heresy: Gnosticism in Twentieth Century Historiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). The very assertion of the existence of a real entity called “Gnosticism” is, following Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and the even more far-reaching King, is to buy into the (Justinian, Irenaean) heresiological ideology itself.

43. Schoedel, Ignatius, 234. To be sure, Schoedel in accord with his view would see this as only applicable in the case of the “Gnostic docetics,” while I would extend the point, either by seeing all the opponents as essentially one, particularly so if they are being polarized by Ignatius himself, or as applicable to both of the cases if the “two heresy” view holds.


44. Mason, in contrast, had argued that Ioudaismos was catachretically produced as a

pejorative term, and Schwartz wondered, quite reasonably, how then it fit with Christianismos formed in the same way. I trust that this account of Ignatius answers the objections raised by Schwartz against Mason on this text, Seth Schwartz, “How Many Judaisms Were There? : A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 2, no. 2 (2011): 226, n. 46.

45. J. Rebecca Lyman, Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1993).

46. Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981).

47. Eusebius, The Proof of the Gospel, ed. and trans. W. J. Ferrar, Translations of Christian Literature (London: S.P.C.K., 1920), I. 7. The translation here follows Andrew S. Jacobs, “The Imperial Construction of the Jew in the Early Christian Holy Land” (Ph.D. diss., Durham, N.C.: Duke, 2001), 33.

48. Eusebius, Proof, I. 9. I am grateful to my student Ron Reissberg for this reference. 49. Which is not, of course, to claim that the notion of ethnic identity is a stable and fixed

one either. See Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, England, 1997). 50. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I, Sections 1–46, trans. Frank Williams

(Leiden, 1987), 16–50. Cf., however, Eusebius’s Demonstratio evangelica 1.2.1 (Eusebius, Proof, 9).

51. Panarion, 17–18. In another part of the Christian world, Frankfurter points out, for the fifth-century Coptic abbot Shenoute “Hēllēne did not carry the sense of ethnically ‘Greek’ and therefore different from ‘Egyptian,’ but simply ‘pagan’—‘not Christian’” (David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance [Princeton, N. J., 1998], 79.)

52. Panarion, 9. 53. Cf. Jacobs, “Construction,” 55–56. 54. For a highly salient and crystal clear delineation of these terms, ethnic and cultural, see

Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, 2002), esp. 9–19. 55. As has been noted by previous scholars, for Epiphanius “heresy” is a much more

capacious and even baggy-monster category than for most writers (Aline Pourkier, L’Hérésiologie chez Épiphane de Salamine, Christianisme Antique 4 [Paris, 1992], 85–87; Young, “Epiphanius.”). See the discussion in Jacobs, “Construction,” 56.

56. Panarion, 24. 57. Justin’s discussion of Jewish heresies is a different move from this, as analyzed above. 58. Johann Karl Ludwig Geiseler, “Über di Nazaräer und Ebioniten” (1819), 279, as cited in

Glenn Alan Koch, “A Critical Investigation of Epiphanius’ Knowledge of the Ebionites: A Translation and Critical Discussion of Panarion 30” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1976), 10.

59. Günter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), 80, writes: “It seems that there were no significant Jewish-Christian communities left in Palestine itself, and the primary problem for the wider church was the attraction of Judaism for the members of Gentile Christianity.”

60. Nathaniel Deutsch, Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, vol. 22 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 1999), 19.

61. Panarion, 120.


62. David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 11–16. 63. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 71. 64. For a useful (if methodologically uncritical) summary of the material, see Ray A. Pritz,

Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearance in the Fourth-Century (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992), 48–70.

65. Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 76–77. 66. Hillel Newman, “Jerome’s Judaizers,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 4

(December 2001): 421–52. 67. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the

Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It, Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 93.

68. Jerome, Correspondence, ed. Isidorus Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), vol. 55, 381–2.

69. See the discussion in Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 114. 70. Chidester, Savage, 19. 71. Boyarin, “Justin Invents Judaism.” 72. Julian and Wilmer Cave France Wright, “Against the Galileans,” in The Works of the

Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave France Wright, Loeb Classical Library (London New York: Heinemann Macmillan, 1913), 389.

73. Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 319–21. 74. Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 393–95. Fascinatingly, this perspective

gives us another way of understanding Julian’s intention to allow the Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt. A large part of his polemic consists, as we have seen, of charges that Christians are nothing, since they have abandoned Hellenism but not become Jews, given that they do not follow the Torah. He imagines a Christian answering him that the Jews, too, do not sacrifice as they are enjoined (Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 405–7). What better way to refute this Christian counter-claim and demonstrate that the only reason that Jews do not sacrifice is that they have no Temple, than to help them rebuild their Temple and reinstitute the sacrifices?

75. For a somewhat different, but I think largely compatible, interpretation of Julian’s program, see Nongbri, “Paul Without Religion,” 63–66.

76. Hall, Hellenicity, xix. 77. Vasiliki Limberis, “‘Religion’ as the Cipher for Identity: The Cases of Emperor Julian,

Libanius, and Gregory Nazianzus,” Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 4 (2000): 373–400. 78. Wright points out that Julian has Christ-like figures in his own theology (Julian and

Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 315). 79. Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 30. 80. Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 57.

81

CLIMBING THE ETHNIC LADDER: A PORTRAIT OF INTERACTIONS BETWEEN JUDEANS AND OTHER PEOPLES

Philip A. Harland, York University, Toronto ([email protected]) Westar Institute, November 2016

The tribe of the Alexandrians . . . were better than those others [i.e. native Egyptians and foreign mercenaries in Alexandria], for even though they were a mixed people, still they were Greeks by origin and mindful of the customs common to the Greeks. Polybios as paraphrased by Strabo, Geography 17.1.12. Skythians . . . enjoy murdering people and are little better than wild animals.

Josephus, Against Apion 2.269.

Please do not resent my comparing myself to a man of royal status [the Skythian Anacharsis], for he too was a barbarian, and no one could say that we Syrians are inferior to Skythians. Lucian, The Skythian, 9.6-7.

Introduction This essay is a portrait of specific social and rhetorical interactions, a portrait of how

certain authors–Philo, Paul, and Josephus included–engaged both socially and rhetorically in attempts to establish a more favourable position for their own ethnic group–or for those that adopted certain ancestral customs of that group–on what I am going to call the “ethnic ladder.”1 Lucian’s comment that no one could claim that Syrians are inferior to Skythians points to commonly held representations of a hierarchy of ethnic groups, a sociocultural phenomenon that social scientists have been studying for some decades. So too does Polybios’ sentiment that, although Alexandrian Greeks were inferior to “pure-blooded” Greeks from, say, Peloponnesos or Attica, they were nonetheless superior to both native Egyptians and foreigners who settled in Alexandria (e.g. Lycians, Judeans, Macedonians).

By the Hellenistic period, at least, the ancient Mediterranean was a world in which numerous peoples encountered one another both in the day-to-day and in the

1 While it seems that the term “Judeans” was at first an outsider term (e.g. Klearchos, as

cited by Josephus in Against Apion 1.179, dating to the fourth-third centuries BCE) and that “Israelites” or the “people of Israel” would have been a more common insider self-designation, by the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, we shall see, “Judeans” (not only for those from tribal Judah but also for those from the more extended sense of Israel, including Samaria and Galilee) could be used both as a self-designation and as an external categorization. Do see Elliott 2007. Self-designations sometimes differ from one person to the next, as do external categorizations.

Westar Spring 2016 Harland, Climbing the Ethnic Ladder 82

82

literary imaginations of the elites, and sometimes there was a competitive dimension to representations of, or interactions with, other ethnic peoples. Here I argue that certain elite authors belonging to ethnic minorities (Israelites or Judeans in this case study) demonstrate at least two main strategies for positioning one’s own ethnic group on a higher and more favourable rung on an ethnic ladder. These strategies are not exclusive of one another, as both are sometimes encountered in one and the same author depending on rhetorical situations and other factors.

On the one hand, the process sometimes entailed adoption of a widely accepted hegemonic ladder and knocking some other people down to a lower rung on that ladder, like the lowest rung the Skythians occupy in an Athenian ethnic hierarchy that Lucian reflects. So subjects of culturally hegemonic powers could jostle for a position by taking on the categories or representations of the dominant ethnic group, as when the Syrian Lucian accepts the external categorization “barbarian” (literally one who babbles and does not speak Greek–with pejorative implications) but then takes care to argue for a higher position for Syrians in comparison with Skythians.2

On the other hand, a second strategy was also possible, as when an author belonging to what we would consider an ethnic minority formulated an entirely different hierarchy in which the author’s own ethnic group was at the pinnacle, thereby implying a lower status for Greeks, Romans, and other peoples. The social and cultural interactions we witness when considering such ethnic ladders are part and parcel of the ways in which members of specific peoples, including minorities, identified themselves and expressed belonging together in interaction with others.

Defining the Ethnic Ladder: Social Scientific Insights

Sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists interested in how ethnic groups formulate and maintain a sense of belonging together often emphasize two interrelated factors: internal identifications by members of the group (the ingroup) and external categorizations or stereotypes formulated by outsiders (outgroups). It is the interplay between the self-understandings of members in the group and reactions to the viewpoints of outsiders that make the process of identification and the development of self-understanding so dynamic.3

2 On the origins and use of the concept of the “barbarian,” which played an important role

in Athenian and Greek self-definition beginning in the Persian period (fifth century BCE), see Edith Hall 1991; Jonathan Hall 1997; Jonathan Hall 2002.

3 My use of “identification” and related categories rather than “identity” is indebted to the critical observations of Rogers Brubaker 2004 [2000]. On internal self-definitions and external categorizations or stereotypes, see especially Richard Jenkins 1994 (cf. Harland 2009, though at the time I employed the less precise theoretical category of “identity”).


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It is the latter of the two factors–external categorizations or stereotypes–that are so instrumental in understanding socially shared representations within a particular society that result in the ranking of specific ethnic groups. These representations are what Louk Hagendoorn and others call an “ethnic hierarchy” or what I am explaining here with the image of an “ethnic ladder” (Hagendoorn 1995; Hagendoorn et al. 1998). As Hagendoorn explains:

In a multi-ethnic context, each group will have stereotypes about several outgroups [outsiders] accentuating negative differences from the ingroup [insiders]. Outgroups will be placed further away from or further below the ingroup, the larger and more important these differences are. This means that the process of differentiation unavoidably entails a rank-ordering. In this way stereotypes generate an ethnic hierarchy (Hagendoorn 1993, 36).

Hagendoorn clarifies that the main differences between insiders and outsiders that come forward in this process are cultural (e.g. practices) and socio-economic (e.g. status) (Hagendoorn 1995). In some respects, the rankings reflect the degree to which members of one people choose to maintain social distance from members of another, and social distance here pertains to the acceptance or rejection of outgroup members as marriage partners, neighbours, friends, classmates, or workmates, for instance (Hagendoorn 1995). Contact with members of ethnic groups that are placed lower on the hegemonic hierarchy than one’s own group would be considered undesirable in this way and contact with those higher would be desirable for status implications (Hagendoorn 1995, 205). One of the results is that “ethnic groups at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy are rejected by dominant ethnic groups as well as by other ethnic minorities” (Hagendoorn 1995, 222).

A particular ethnic hierarchy or ladder may reflect priorities of the upper echelons of a culturally hegemonic or politically powerful group. Yet studies by Hagendoorn and others show that the process of intergroup interactions sometimes results in the hierarchy being taken on and shared by subordinate ethnic groups, even though such minorities may initially be placed low in the hegemonic ranking (Hagendoorn 1995; Hagendoorn et.al. 1998). So, in some cases, both the majority and minorities in a particular society may have consensual rankings of specific ethnic groups or peoples while, simultaneously, minority groups still struggle with one another for a more favourable position on lower rungs of the ladder. However, in other cases minorities may sometimes construct their own alternative hierarchies of peoples in a way that benefits their own people’s status (Hagendoorn 1993, Hagendoorn 1995; Hagendoorn et.al. 1998). We will encounter both of these processes in the ancient context.


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Since the ancient Mediterranean can be characterized as an honour culture, the position of certain peoples in relation to others was often expressed in terms synonymous with “honour,” “dishonour,” and “shame.” Thus John M.G. Barclay’s (2004) notion of an “honour scale” in his excellent study of Josephus’ Against Apion fits with ancient categories and also parallels quite closely the social scientific category of an “ethnic hierarchy” or my metaphor of an “ethnic ladder.”

Picturing a ladder may help us to visualize the sort of interactions that take place as some participants in the competition seek to move up the ladder, metaphorically or rhetorically climbing over others or knocking others down to a lower rung or off the ladder altogether. Quite often culturally hegemonic groups (e.g. Athenians in Lucian’s passage) stay firmly on the top rung, even as certain participants compete with other ostensibly “lesser” competitors for a higher position on the lower rungs (e.g. Syrians vs. Skythians, Judeans vs. Egyptians, Egyptians vs. Judeans, Judeans vs. Syrians, Judeans vs. Samaritans). Sometimes those competing for lower rungs rhetorically or socially ally themselves with those at the top–the politically or culturally powerful–as a strategy to move up, as we shall soon see.

Judeans’ and Egyptians’ Starting Position on the Hegemonic Ladder

Constructing an Ethnic Ladder Why would the likes of Philo, Paul, and Josephus feel a need to jostle for a higher

position for Israelites or Judeans on a commonly shared ethnic ladder or to assert an alternative method of ranking peoples? Why would the relative position of Judeans be connected with that of another people such as the Egyptians? In order to answer these questions, a few words about how such ethnic ladders were constructed in antiquity is in order before I explain the relatively low starting position of Judeans and Egyptians on common hegemonic ladders.

There seem to have been two main interrelated theoretical ideas circulating among Greek and Roman literary elites that informed the construction of ethnic hierarchies and that served to rank different ethnic groups. First of all, there was the notion of geographical distance from a centre, with Rome or Athens or Persepolis, for instance, as the cultural centre and a supposed degradation of honour, culture and society as one got further away. The Greek historian Herodotos, who employs the language of honour, shows an awareness of this concept when he explains and critiques the tendency of the Persians (in relation to Greeks and others) in the fifth century:

They honour (τιµῶσι) most highly those who live closest to them, next those who are next closest, and so on, assigning honour by this reasoning. Those


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who live farthest away they consider least honorable of all. For they think that they are the best of all people in every respect and that others rightly cling to some virtue (ἀρετῆς) until those who live farthest away are the worst (κακίστους εἶναι; Herodotos, History 1.134.2; trans. adapted from LCL).

Still, it is important to at least note exceptional cases when this widely held notion of distance from a centre was critiqued or turned on its head, as when far off peoples (e.g. Skythians, Egyptians) were considered particularly noble and good, a reverse ethnocentrism of sorts.4 Thus, for instance, (imaginary) Hyperboreans to the north and Ethiopians to the extreme south could be considered special, which was sometimes expressed in terms of them having a very close relationship with the gods (cf. Romm 1992, 45-81). Ephoros of Kyme (fourth century BCE), who is followed to some degree by the geographer Strabo (first century), advocated such a positive approach to describing far-off peoples such as the Skythians precisely in reaction to the usual negative approach (see Strabo, Geography 7.3.7-9; 15.1-57; cf. Romm 1992, 94–104).

From another angle, it seems that Eratosthenes of Cyrene (third century BCE), challenged the normal Greek-barbarian dichotomy and emphasized the measure of “virtue” (ἀρετή) or “vice” (κακία) independent of distance from a centre in describing the relative position of different peoples in the grand scheme of things (Strabo, Geography 1.4.9; cf. Almagor 2005; Vliet 2003; Varro = Stern 1974-84, nos. 72a-d).5 It should be clarified that even a challenger of the ethnocentric approach–like Eratosthenes–was assuming an ethnic ladder, albeit a ladder with different criteria for positioning peoples on the rungs. In assessing the so-called “barbarian” peoples based on virtue, Eratosthenes happened to place Indians, Romans and Carthaginians on a high rung as “refined” or “urbane” (ἀστεῖος) barbarians, for example (Strabo, Geography 1.4.9). Yet attempts to counter the more prevalent view show just how widespread the geographical notion was. Furthermore, some authors such as Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch directly countered such apparent positivity regarding the customs of “barbarians,” including Egyptian customs as described positively by Herodotos and others.6

A second main factor that could play a role in constructing rankings on an ethnic ladder pertains to the ways in which certain ancient authors stressed the importance of environmental factors, as explained by Benjamin Isaac (2004, 55-168). The climate,

4 Cf. Hartog 1988; Dudko 2001; Wells 1999, 99-121; Herodotus, History 4.1-36, 46-82, 99-117. 5 Fictional narratives, such as the Life of Apollonios of Tyana, likewise reflect ethnographic

traditions that favoured barbarian wisdom, as the case of the gymnosophists illustrates (cf. Harland 2011).

6 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 1.1-3; Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotos 857C-E. Cf. Berthelot 2000, 195-196.


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natural features and geographical terrain of a place were often considered instrumental in shaping the physical and mental characteristics of a people. A very common expression of this was that a harsher (e.g. cold) environment and climate created tough, courageous, and superior people. Whereas a softer (i.e. temperate) environment created soft, effeminate or slavish people, although in this view the latter could, nonetheless, also be intelligent, depending on a particular author’s spin on the idea. Sometimes the contrast was between Europe (the west) and Asia (the east) and, especially with Roman expansion northwards, between the north and the south (cf. Romm 1992, 45-81).

Apparently, this environmental notion first sees systematic expression in the Greek work Airs, Waters, Places (ca. 400 BCE). Yet the notion continues to echo through literature of the Hellenistic and Roman eras, as Isaac (2004, 82-102) shows. From the Greek, hegemonic perspective Athens, Attica, or Greece were considered a hard environment that created a superior people. Closely related to this environmental factor was the notion that characteristics deriving from the environment would be inherited and passed on to later generations. Of course, the authors that engaged in this sort of reasoning and constructed such stereotypes did not approach this in a scientific way at all, since often broad generalizations about geography and climate were made without necessarily having any reliable information about the more distant places in question. So the notion that Athens or some cultural centre or capital was the hub of civilization often lurked in the background here too, and the environmental factor may, therefore, have been subordinate to the geographical notion I explained earlier.

Judeans

The tendency to emphasize the relative inferiority of non-Greek or non-Roman peoples can be seen in literature about people from Israel or Judea, but it is not peculiar to this people. Isaac’s study (2004) surveys Greek and Roman negative stereotypes about Persians, Phoenicians, Syrians, Egyptians, Gauls, Germans, and Judeans, for instance.7 Mixed in with the negative stereotypes, however, could be positive descriptions on certain points and even stories of interconnections between different peoples, as Erich Gruen’s Rethinking the Other (2011) emphasizes. So we should not imagine that the negative relations that occupy us primarily here were the only side to the story. In fact, in many respects the perspectives of certain Greek or Roman authors towards particular peoples (such as Judeans and Egyptians) could in some respects be described as ambivalent, involving both admiration and denigration, and it of course also depended on who was talking and in what situation.

7 For further studies of Roman or Greek perspectives on other peoples, see, for instance,

Momigliano 1975.


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Still, to understand why Judeans or some other subordinated ethnic group would seek to assert a higher position–to move up the socially shared ethnic ladder or to push others down–it is the negative characterizations that are particularly important. It should be noted that it is precisely negative portrayals of Judeans and Judean customs that sometimes dovetail with actual negative social relations and occasional violent incidents at a local level (e.g. persecutions), not only against Judeans but also against others who chose to adopt some cultural practices of the Judeans (e.g. Christ-devotees).8 When Judeans or foreigners who adopted the Judean god were accused of human sacrifice or cannibalism or when Judeans were characterized as “debased and much lower than reptiles (or: beasts; ἑρπετῶν),” this was in essence a way of saying that they were at the bottom of the ethnic ladder, or even beneath the lowest rung: they were uncivilized even among “barbarians” according to such a view.9 It is important to remember that Judeans or Christ-devotees were not the only minorities subjected to such treatment.

A brief summary of some negative characterizations (the positive stereotypes are not our focus here)10 will help to explain the recurring Greek or Roman hegemonic positioning of peoples from Judea or Israel low on the ladder which led certain Judean authors to assert, at times, alternative positions on that same ladder and, at other times, to construct an alternative ladder. Here I will focus on cases where it is clear that certain ancient authors had some awareness of something resembling what social scientists label “ethnic hierarchies” (ethnic ladders), namely commonly shared social representations that ranked different peoples relative to one another.

On the Greek side, Apollonios Molon (ca. 70s BCE), whose work we know only through Josephus’ rhetorical attack on Apion (Against Apion), clearly positions Judeans low on the ladder even in relation to other “barbarians.” According to Josephus, this Greek rhetor from Alabanda in Caria characterized Judeans as “atheists and haters of humankind” (ἀθέους καὶ µισανθρώπους), claiming that Judeans were “the stupidest of all barbarians” (ἀφυεστάτους εἶναι τῶν βαρβάρων) (Josephus, Against Apion 2.148; cf. 2.258). When Josephus summarizes things, he speaks of the “Molons” that “rail against us as the lowest of humankind” (φαυλοτάτους ἀνθρώπων λοιδοροῦσιν) (Against Apion 2.236). A couple of centuries later, Aelius Aristides from Smyrna (ca. 160s-170s CE) similarly claims that the “impiety” of those who live in Palestine is such “that they do

8 See, for instance, Stanley 1996 and Barclay 1996 on conflicts between Greeks and Judeans

in Asia Minor in the first century BCE (cf. Harland 2013, 215-221). 9 Cf. Harland 2009, 161-181; Kleomedes, de Modu Circulari 2.1.91 in FGrHist F 121R = Stern

1974-84, no. 333. 10 On positive Greek and Roman views of Judeans and Judean customs, see, for instance,

Feldman 1993; Feldman 1996.


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not recognize their betters (i.e. the gods of others)” and that, in this way, they have “seceded from the Greeks or rather from all the better people (µᾶλλον δὲ καὶ πάντων τῶν κρειττόνων)” (Orations 46 = Stern 1974-84, no. 371). These are examples of Greeks (albeit Greeks from Asia Minor rather than from Athens) claiming a low position for Judeans in a hierarchy of peoples. In terms of Judeans’ relative position on the ladder, some Roman authors place them low down and side-by-side with Syrians and other easterners, with both being stereotyped as having the character traits of slaves (cf. Cicero, On the Consular Provinces 5.10-12 = Stern 1974-84, no. 70).

The fact that a senatorial Roman like Tacitus (ca. 110 CE) was working with a commonly held ranking of ethnic groups with Judeans placed low becomes clear at several points in his discussion of Judeans (Tacitus, Histories 5.1-13). It is perhaps most obvious when he alludes to the shared, low position of Judeans in the varying ethnic hierarchies of different ruling powers: Tacitus claims that Assyrians, Medes, and Persians alike “regarded [Judeans] as the most despised (despectissima) of their subjects.” Similarly, the Hellenistic ruler Antiochos failed to improve “this most repulsive people (taeterrimam gentem)” in his attempt to introduce Greek ways, according to Tacitus (Hist. 5.8.2). Tacitus attributes this low ranking, in some respects, to the way in which Judeans supposedly inverted proper ways of honouring the gods as defined from an elite Roman perspective: “The Judeans regard as profane all that we consider sacred; on the other hand, they permit everything that we consider impure” (Hist. 5.4.1). We will soon see that similar accusations of inverting or distorting proper modes of honouring deities were made against other ethnic groups too, including Egyptians (by Greeks, Romans, and Judeans alike) and non-Judean peoples generally (by Judeans like Paul).

Egyptians Tacitus’ summary of ancient debates regarding the origins of people in Judea

tends to suggest that Judeans were, in fact, Egyptians—though diseased outcasts even among the Egyptians–with the assumption being that Egyptians themselves would be low in Roman elite representations of an ethnic ladder (cf. Berthelot 2000, 196-202). Elite Greek and Roman evaluations of Egypt and Egyptians–as with Judeans–could vary significantly from one author to the next, but there is a sense in which the term ambivalence might help us to understand the situation best for Greeks and Romans outside of Egypt looking in. On the one hand, Egypt was considered very ancient, with records of kings, cults, wisdom, and institutions going back well beyond those of many peoples, including the Greeks themselves (cf. Aristotle, Politics 1329b; Herodotos, History 2). Egyptians were often considered the first to have organized ritual honours for gods within temples. In the ancient world, antiquity–that is, oldness–was highly valued and respected, and so Egypt was in a position to be respected to the point that some scholars


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somewhat accurately speak of Greek and Roman Egyptomania, at least with respect to certain aspects of Egyptian culture in the Roman period such as priestly wisdom and what some Greeks might positively label “magic” (see Fowden 1986, 13-44; Frankfurter 1998, 217-221; Harland 2011). In his novel, Heliodoros expects his Greek-speaking readers to identify with the notion that “Greeks find all Egyptian lore and legend irresistibly attractive” (Ethiopian Story 2.27). Long before this, Herodotos–a Greek from Halikarnassos in Asia Minor–could in the fifth century express at length (Histories, book 2) how impressed he was by Egyptian customs and myth, and could argue that the Greeks derived many of their gods and cults from the more ancient Egyptians (e.g. Herodotos, History 2.145-146). But there were of course detractors against Herodotos’ approach, who accused him of attributing Greek culture to “barbarians,” which brings us to the negative side of the portrayal (cf. Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotos 12-13, 19; Lucian, A True Story).

On the other hand, average native Egyptian people and their practices could be viewed quite negatively, and so this people is often placed low on the ethnic ladder when many Greek and Roman authors express opinions regarding the position of various peoples in relation to their own people. As we will see with Philo and Josephus, Judeans could have their own particular reasons for adopting a similar approach, in part because inhabitants of Israel were often thought to have originated as an inferior sub-group of Egyptians and, therefore, there was a felt need to strongly assert differentiation and superiority in relation to Egyptians specifically.

Alongside positive evaluations of Egyptian cults and culture, there were several standard negative stereotypes about native Egyptian people espoused by certain members of the Greek and Roman literary elites, as Isaac (2004, 352-370) explains.11 These same stereotypes are sometimes echoed in Judean evaluations of Egyptians as we will soon see. We have to remember that we are witnessing just some literary elite perspectives on native Egyptians which may or may not have been reflected in the general populace’s approach, as was also the case with stereotypes about Judeans. There are several recurring themes in the various authors who comment negatively about Egypt or its people, including the notion that Egyptians are:

• dishonest, deceitful, crafty or cunning (Aeschylus, fragment 373 [µηχανή]; Eustathios, Od. 1.149.14 citing Kratinos fragment 378 [αἰγυπτιάζειν]; Anonymous, de Physiognomonia 9, 14 = André 1981; cf. Isaac 2004, 157);

11 On these stereotypes of Egyptians, see also Reinhold 1980; Smelik and Hemelrijk 1984;

Rowlandson 2013.


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• material, greedy, lustful, or particularly subject to the passions (Plato, Republic 435c-436a [φιλοχρήµατον]; Plato, Laws 747C-D; Aeschylus, Supplices 742 [µάργος]; Anonymous, de Physiognomonia 9);

• arrogant, disloyal, or rebellious (Quintus Curtius, Histories of Alexander the Great 4.1.30; Seneca, Of Consolation to Mother Helvia, Dial. 12 [11].19.6; Tacitus, Histories 1.11);

• hostile towards outsiders or foreigners (Plato, Laws 953E; extremely expressed in terms of human sacrifice in Isocrates, Busiris); and,

• superstitious, particularly with respect to the apparent animalistic nature of their gods.

To cite a familiar (if grating) senatorial voice, Tacitus says that although Egypt is useful for its produce, it is subject to “civil strife and sudden disturbances because of the fanaticism and superstition of its inhabitants, who are ignorant of laws and unacquainted with civil magistrates” (Tacitus, Histories 1.11; trans. adapted from LCL; cf. Histories 4.81).

Tacitus’ complaint about “superstition” (superstitio) here–a term that simply means that the people in question did not subscribe to the imperial elites’ modes of honouring deities at Rome itself–leads us to a key component in Greek and, moreso, Roman criticism of Egyptians. One of the most widely held stereotypes of Egyptians from the elite perspective was that they engaged in improper, even despicable, modes of honouring the gods (Smelik and Hemelrijk 1984). It is important to note at the outset, however, that disparaging comments by the literary elites regarding Egyptians’ worship of deities in animal form do not mean that Egyptian gods such as Isis and Sarapis and Hellenized or Romanized cults for them were not to some extent popular throughout the Greek and Roman worlds–for they certainly were.12

Here comments by the Roman Cicero (ca. 106-43 BCE) and the Greek Plutarch (ca. 45-120 CE) may be used to indicate the sort of characterizations that circulated in some elite circles, characterizations that are also echoed in Philo, Paul, and Josephus. Cicero questions: “Who does not know of the custom of the Egyptians? Their minds are infected with degraded superstitions and they would sooner submit to any torment than injure an ibis or asp or cat or dog or crocodile, and even if they have accidentally done something like this there is no penalty from which they would recoil” (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.78; trans. adapted from LCL; cf. Cicero, On the Republic 3.9.14). Elsewhere Cicero disparages the “monstrous doctrines of the magians [of Persia] and the insane (dementia) mythology of Egypt, and also their popular beliefs” (Cicero, On the Nature of

12 See Dunand 1973; Bricault 2005; Orlin 2008; Orlin 2010.


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the Gods 1.16.43; cf. 1.29.81; 1.36.101; 3.19.47). Plutarch of Chaironea, whose fondness for the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris is clear, nonetheless states that:

the great majority of the Egyptians, in doing service to the animals themselves and in treating them as gods, have not only filled their sacred offices with ridicule and derision, but this is the least of what is wrong with their silly (ἀβελτερίας) practices. A terrible belief develops which plunges the weak and innocent into pure superstition (δεισιδαιµονίαν), and in the case of the more cynical and bold, goes off into atheistic (ἀθέους) and beastly (θηριώδεις) thinking (Isis and Osiris 379E; trans. adapted from LCL).

So the native Egyptian practice of symbolically presenting deities in the form of animals and showing respect to such animals was considered a sign of an inferior people, in part because the Egyptians were inverting or confusing the assumed hierarchy that placed gods above humans and humans well above animals. This suggested that Egyptians were, themselves, inferior to the animals they worshipped, from the Greek and Roman elite perspective: Egyptians were bestial, moreso than human, was the implication. This put Egyptians at the bottom of (or below) the ladder of human ethnic groups. Having cited Cicero and Plutarch as examples, it is important to note that not all of the literary elites were equally as negative on this point. The Greek authors Herodotos and Diodoros of Sicily, for instance, describe Egyptian animal cults in neutral or even positive terms (Herodotos, Histories 2.65-70; Diodoros, Library of History 1.83.1).

This brief sketch of some common stereotypes about Egyptians may provide a basis for us to proceed. The tendency to place Judeans along with Egyptians or others low down on at least Greek and Roman elite representations of an ethnic ladder will be important for understanding rhetorical strategies adopted by the likes of Philo, Paul, and Josephus.

Climbing the Ladder or Building a New One – Philo, Paul, and Josephus

a) Philo (writing in the 20s-40s CE) It is important to begin by noting ethnic designations Philo of Alexandria (ca. 25

BCE-50 CE) uses to identify himself and others with some connection to Israel or Syria-Palestine, as this will help us understand Philo’s positioning of peoples on an ethnic ladder or perhaps more than one ladder.13 As Koen Goudriaan (1992, 80-81) points out, Philo seems to reserve the ethnic category “Hebrews” (Ἑβραῖοι, derived from the

13 For studies on Philo’s ethnic self-understanding, see Mendelson 1988; Niehoff 2001.


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Septuagint) for personages of the past (cf. Josephus, Antiquities 1-10), particularly biblical characters but also the likes of the translators of the Septuagint, so this term is often encountered in Philo’s biblical interpretive works but not very often elsewhere. It is noteworthy that the tendency of Philo contrasts to Paul’s and Josephus’ occasional self-identification (Phil 3:5; War 1.3) or identification of other contemporaries (2 Cor 11:22) as “Hebrews,” so we should not necessarily expect consistency in ethnic designations from one person to the next. Philo prefers the term “Judeans” (Ἰουδαῖοι) for contemporaries with whom he identifies, especially in the two works pertaining to the aftermath of the Alexandrian troubles in 38-41 CE, but this terminology is not typically used by Philo for those of the biblical past (cf. Goudriaan 1992, 81).

It is important to remember that Philo was a highly educated Judean trained in Hellenistic philosophy and rhetoric, so it is natural to find him both identifying as Judean and/or (more indirectly) as Greek depending on rhetorical or social circumstances. So there are times when Philo seems to assume an identification of himself or other Greek-speaking educated Judeans generally with “Greeks” as a superior people; multiple ethnic identifications were of course possible here as elsewhere (cf. Esler 2003, 49; Louy 2012). This latter point is best seen in the Hellenized Philo’s alignment with Greek and Roman hegemonic ethnic hierarchies, as I discuss below. Hellenizing “Romans,” too, could sometimes be subsumed within Philo’s category of “Greeks” as implied by a passage in the Embassy to Gaius (147), which I cite below.

Before analyzing Philo’s ethnic stereotyping and ranking of Egyptians specifically, it is important to note some other indications of ethnic ladders and to consider non-Judean nations within Philo’s thinking. David T. Runia’s (2013) excellent study convincingly argues that, although the opposition of Judeans (“Jews” in Runia’s terms) and non-Judeans is quite consistently important to Philo’s thinking, Philo (unlike Paul) does not develop very consistent terminology for this dichotomy.14 Still, in his interpretation of biblical materials, for instance, Philo reveals his own tendency–based in part on his biblical sources–to place the people of Israel at the height of all peoples. Thus in his story of Abraham, Philo summarily speaks of Hebrews or Judeans as “the most dear to God of all peoples (ἐθνῶν τὸ θεοφιλέστατον), which in my view has received the gift of priestly services and prophecy on behalf of all of humanity” (On Abraham 98; cf. Runia

14 Philo uses the singular “nation” or “people” (ἔθνος) 195 times, with many of these being

used in reference to the Judean people specifically, and the plural “nations” or “peoples” (ἔθνη) 92 times (Runia 2013, 31). Cf. Goudriaan 1992, 84.


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2013, 37).15 Unlike Paul (whose usage derives, in part, from the Septuagint), Philo here and elsewhere does not reserve the designation “the peoples” (τὰ ἔθνη) for non-Judeans. Nonetheless, in Philo’s biography of Moses, Philo does on this occasion reflect usage of the Septuagint translation of the Bible in having the prophet Balaam state (on behalf of the God of the Hebrews) that “I will not be able to harm the people (λαόν; i.e. Hebrews), who will dwell alone, not being included with other nations (ἐτέροις ἔθνέσιν)” (Life of Moses 1.278; cf. 1.290).

Another key passage about the relative position of ethnic groups in relation to Judeans occurs in the Life of Moses (2.17-44). Here Philo asserts the superiority of the Judean people and its customs in relation to all other peoples, both “Greeks and barbarians.” In the process, Philo refers to specific groups, including Athenians and Lakedaimonians (for Greeks) and Egyptians and Skythians (for barbarians). Then he states that:

We may fairly say that those from east to west, from every country, people and city, show an aversion to foreign customs (χώρα καὶ ἔθνος καὶ πόλις, τῶν ζενικῶν νοµίµων), and think that they will enhance honour for their own by shοwing dishonour for those of other countries. It is not so with our customs. They attract and draw the attention of everyone: barbarians, Greeks, inhabitants of the mainland and islands, peoples (ἔθνη) of the east and the west, of Europe and of Asia, and of the whole world from end to end (Life of Moses 2.19-20, trans. adapted from LCL; cf. Josephus, Against Apion 2.168, 281-286).

Leaving aside how such claims may or may not relate to reality, Philo quite clearly asserts the highest of positions for Judeans and their cultural practices in relation to all ethnic groups. It is important to note that Philo frequently uses “Greeks and barbarians” in a non-pejorative sense in order to refer to “every nation” or “everyone”; at other times “barbarians” carries a derogatory meaning as in some passages I discuss here; furthermore there are also neutral or positive uses of the term, as when Philo takes on hegemonic, ethnographic discourses in categorizing people from Syria-Palestine as “barbarians” but with a subversive twist that I discuss below.16

15 The sentiment of this passage aligns in some ways with Paul’s statement (Rom 9:1-5),

cited below, regarding the fact that the Israelite’s high status in relation to other peoples derives from the gifts which the Israelite god gave to this specific people.

16 Examples of the usage: On the Creation 128 (non-pejorative reference to astrologers among “Greeks and barbarians”); On Drunkenness 193 (on the tendency of “everyone” to make judgements); On the Confusion of Tongues 6 (illustration that those who speak a common language are more likely to speak to others who speak that language, using “Greeks” and “barbarians” as examples), 190 (non-pejorative reference to the origin of “Greek and barbarian languages”); On


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In an interesting turn, it is in the same section that Philo takes on a common Greek (and Roman) hegemonic categorization in speaking of the original language of the Bible–described as “Chaldean” by Philo–as a “barbarian” language in contrast to Greek (Life of Moses 2.27). This categorization may be an exception for Philo, if Katell Berthelot’s (2011) argument that Philo would more consistently place Judeans with Greeks and not barbarians in the dichotomy is correct (cf. Runia 2013, 41). However, there is one other significant discussion where Philo speaks of wise men among the Greeks and wise men among barbarous peoples (in a manner similar to ethnographic passages in contemporary authors).17 In his list of barbarian examples he includes Persian magians, Indian gymnosophists, and, finally, Judean Essenes (Every Good Man is Free 73-75). Philo’s approach may sometimes be comparable to what Paul seems to do on the one occasion in Romans where he does use the term “barbarian,” though there is little to work with in Paul’s case (see below).

Abraham 136 (“everyone”), 184 (positive reference to “barbarians” who were critics of child-sacrifice as practiced simply because it was a custom), 267 (“everyone” able to notice the beauty of artistic pieces); On Joseph 30 (speaking of hesitancy among Greeks and barbarians to interact with one another), 134 (speaking of similar dream experiences by different peoples); Life of Moses 2.12 (claiming that Moses was the best lawgiver among all peoples, both Greeks and barbarians), 2.18-20 (stating that no nation among the Greeks or barbarians respects the customs of the other, except those of the Judeans); Decalogue 153 (“everyone” tends to engage in war due to desire); Special Laws 1.211 (“everyone”); 1.313 (speaking of the practice of sacrificing sons and daughters among some barbarian peoples); 2.44 (speaking positively of those who practice wisdom among both Greek and barbarian peoples); 2.165 (speaking of all Greeks and barbarians acknowledging a father of the gods); 3.163 (pejorative reference to barbarians not having a sense of civilized education); 4.120 (non-pejorative reference to the lawgivers among Greeks and barbarians); On Rewards and Punishments 165 (Greece and the barbarian world; i.e. “everywhere”); Every Good Man is Free 73-75 (Greece and the barbarian world, including Syria-Palestine); 94 (Alexander the Great demonstrates barbarian wisdom to Greeks); 98 (“everyone”); 138 (“everywhere”); On the Contemplative Life 21 (goodness exists “everywhere”), 48 (“everyone” beyond the Judean therapeutists–representative of Judean wisdom–have a penchant for luxurious living); Embassy to Gaius 102 (Gaius caused problems “everywhere”); 141 (Tiberius prevented war “everywhere”); 145 (Augustus improved things “everywhere”); 147 (Augustus civilized barbarian nations); 162 (Gaius chose hypocritical Alexandrians from among “everyone”); 292 (“noone” dared set up images in the Judean temple except Gaius); On Providence 2.15 (“everywhere”); 2.66 (barbarian peoples are inferior to Greeks); 2.68 (barbarians unintelligent due to the habitat in which they live). “Barbarian” and its derivatives occur 53 times within Philo’s writings; on Louy’s (2012, 6) count there are 43 “whole world” or “everyone” references, 7 derogatory uses, and 2 positive uses. See also Berthelot 2011.

17 Diogenes Laertius critiques ethnographical traditions (such as the one that seems to inform Philo's approach) that presented barbarians as a source of wisdom (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 1.1-3). In particular, Herodotos was sometimes accused of presenting Egyptian wisdom in too positive a light (see Berthelot 2000, 195-196).


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Philo somewhat consistently portrays the Greeks in a neutral or positive manner, with the Greeks in some cases being placed at the height of human civilization (cf. Goudriaan 1992, 82). An overall Greek hegemonic hierarchy of ethnic groups is clear when Philo points–in On Providence–to the irony that while the lands of the barbarians are more fertile than those of Greece, this apparent superiority is “counterbalanced by the inferiority (ἐλαττοῦται) of those who are fed by the produce.” For “Greece alone can be truly said to produce humanity” in its pursuit of true knowledge (On Providence 2.66). There are hints that Philo adopts Greek environmental reasoning (as in Airs, Waters, Places) for positing this intellectual inferiority of barbarians and relegating these peoples to a lower position on the ethnic ladder (see On Providence 2.68).

Philo’s use of the binary categories of “Greeks” and “barbarians” and his alignment with hegemonic ethnic hierarchies on more than one occasion also become clear in his Embassy to Gaius. There he critiques Gaius by praising Augustus, who:

brought all the cities into freedom, who led disorder into order and brought civilization and harmony to unsociable and beast-like peoples (ἄµικτα ἔθνη καὶ θηριώδη), who expanded Greece with numerous new Greeces and hellenized the barbarian world (τὴν δὲ βάρβαρον) in its most important regions (Embassy to Gaius 147; trans. adapted from LCL).

Here Philo adopts a positive characterization of the Greeks, who are portrayed as a civilizing influence (via the actions of a Roman emperor). Elsewhere it is clear that Philo employs the term “barbarian” in a derogatory manner, sometimes in juxtaposition with Romans instead of Greeks (e.g. Special Laws 3.163; On Abraham 184; Embassy to Gaius 116). So, as Runia (2013) also argues, it seems that there are two general oppositions that inform Philo’s approach to ranking contemporary ethnic groups: Judeans vs. other peoples, on the one hand, and Greeks vs. barbarians, on the other. At times educated Judeans appear to be categorized as Greeks when the Greek-educated Philo employs the latter dichotomy (see Berthelot 2011; cf. Runia 2013, 39-45). However, the two dichotomies are never fully mixed: for instance, we never find Philo expressly speaking of “Judeans and barbarians” (instead of “Greeks and barbarians”) even though his usage implies such thinking.18

18 Cf. Goudriaan 1992, 83. Do see 2 Macc 2:21, where the Judean author uses “barbarian”

to describe the (presumably partially Greek) armies of king Antiochos, but perhaps they are envisioned as Syrians or Phoenicians. Also note the continued use of the term in that work, including 2 Macc 10:4, where enemy nations generally are described as barbarous, and 2 Macc 13:9, where Antiochos Eupator is described as becoming barbarous (cf. 2 Macc 15:2). In Psalm 113:1 (LXX), Egyptians are described as “barbarian,” which may align better with Philo’s approach to Egyptians, although he does not use the actual term in contrast to Judeans (cf. Ezekiel 21:31 [LXX]).


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Among specific ethnic groups mentioned by Philo, Egyptians are most prevalent.19 This is due, in large part, to Philo’s own context as a Greek-speaking Judean settled in Alexandria in Egypt under Roman rule. But it also has something to do with a very long and difficult history of relations between people associated with Israel and the people of Egypt which goes back to stories of the Exodus (as we shall also see in the discussion of Josephus). Philo himself lived at a time when ethnic rivalries were at a fever-pitch between at least three different groups in Alexandria itself: Greek Alexandrians, native Egyptians, and Judeans. These rivalries were, in part, due to the way in which the Roman authorities had reorganized Egypt, including the division of the population into a three-fold political hierarchy of Roman citizens at the top, Greek citizens of the cities below, and the native Egyptians at the bottom, with the latter (but not the former two) being subject to a poll tax (laographia). Furthermore, there was a Roman preference for granting the privileges of Greek, Alexandrian citizenship only to Greeks to the exclusion of other settled immigrants and especially to the exclusion of native Egyptians themselves.20 One of the consequences of this situation was a tendency for people on either side of a conflict to categorize opponents as “Egyptians” or accuse adversaries of living like or having an equivalent status of “Egyptians,” with attendent derogatory implications (e.g. Philo calling Alexandrians “Egyptians,” Josephus calling Apion an “Egyptian,” Isidoros calling Judeans “Egyptians,” as in CPJ II 156c).21 We know about the rivalries involving Judeans primarily because, from 38-41 CE and following, there were significant incidents of violence involving both Judeans and other inhabitants of Alexandria, violence that also entailed the destruction of Judean places of prayer and significant injury or loss of life on both sides (see Philo’s Against Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius). This is not the place to survey the nature and causes of these incidents, which have been dealt with extensively within scholarship.22 Rather, I want to consider some of Philo’s negative stereotypes about Egyptians to see how Philo elevates Judeans above the Egyptians on the ethnic ladder while also aligning himself with some Greek or Roman perspectives in the process, something we will also witness in the case of Josephus.

Philo’s negative ethnic stereotypes about Egyptians come to the fore in documents that deal directly with the aftermath of 38 CE, but they are also found

19 For Philo’s perspectives on Egyptians specifically, see, for instance, Mendelson 1988, 116-

122; Pearce 1998. 20 Cf. Alston 1997; Pearce 1998, 80-82; Rowlandson 2013, 219-224. 21 Cf. Pearce 1998, 87; Rowlandson 2013, 221. 22 See Barclay 1996, 48-91; Schäfer 1997, 136-162; Gambetti 2009.


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scattered throughout his writings.23 Although Philo aligns himself with Roman imperial perspectives in many ways, he nonetheless blames the imperial prefect in charge during the riots, Flaccus, for allowing Alexandrians and Egyptians to target Judeans. In his writing Against Flaccus, Philo draws on several common Greek and Roman characterizations of Egyptians that echo elsewhere. These stereotypes show how Philo in some respects adopts aspects of the hegemonic ethnic ladder in order to bring Judeans to a higher rung in relation to Egyptians specifically.

First of all, in Philo’s view, Egyptians are by nature “rebellious” and favour “sedition” (στάσις). They “are naturally excited by quite small and ordinary occurrences” and accustomed “to blow up the tiniest spark into grave seditions” (Flaccus 17-18). In connection with a reputation for rebellion, Philo laments that Judeans were unfairly treated as the equivalent of Egyptians when the Roman authorities sought to collect the Judeans’ weapons to prevent a potential revolt, as the Romans had previously done with the Egyptians who “often revolted” (Flaccus 93). Philo paints a picture of inferior, seditious Egyptians and superior, loyal Judeans, as when he speaks of the Judeans’ habit of honouring emperors and the imperial family (see Flaccus 48-49). This notion that Judeans should not be treated on a par with the lowly Egyptians also comes across clearly when Philo complains that Judeans were punished with the method used for native Egyptians, rather than the method used for punishing Alexandrian Greeks, as had previously been the procedure: “Alexandrian Judeans. . . in this respect fared worse than their inferiors and were treated like Egyptians of the lowest rank and guilty of the greatest violations” (Flaccus 78-80). We are here seeing one side of a struggle among (at least partially) marginalized ethnic minorities to secure a higher position within the context of the Greek city of Alexandria under Roman rule.

A second main characterization of Egyptians that is also common to Josephus is that they were prone to “jealousy” or “envy” (φθόνος) in relation to their betters–namely the Judeans in this case. Philo explains that it was an incident involving the visit of Agrippa I–received as a Judean king by the Alexandrian Judeans–that sparked the Alexandrian Egyptians “jealousy” and “innate hostility (ἀπέχθειαν) to the Judeans” as they “considered that any good luck to others was misfortune to themselves” (Flaccus 29; cf. Embassy to Gaius 166-170, 205 on “Egyptian venom” aimed at Judeans).

A third stereotype about Egyptians pertains to Philo’s characterization of their approach to the gods. On the one hand, Philo frequently (in at least five writings) complains of the “atheistic” or “godless” (ἄθεος) Egyptians who were guided by bodily and earthly “passions” (ἐπιθυµίαι) and, therefore, chose to worship earthly things

23 On Philo’s anti-Egyptian perspective, see Pearce 1998; Niehoff 2001; Horst 2003, 17-18,

48, 105-106, 121, 172.


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rather than the true God.24 Yet it is with respect to the focus on animal worship specifically that Philo clearly shares common ground with Greek and Roman negative characterizations of Egyptians as an inferior people. According to Philo, for instance, the emperor Gaius turned to the Alexandrians (here evidently though not expressly categorized as Egyptians) specifically in order to seek divine honours because “the Alexandrians are adepts at flattery . . . How much reverence is paid by them to the concept of god is shown by their having allowed it to be shared by the indigenous ibises and venomous snakes and many other ferocious wild beasts” (see Embassy to Gaius 161-166 generally; cf. Wisdom of Solomon 12:23-27 and 15:18-19; Sibylline Oracles 3.29-34; Letter of Aristeas 137-138, perhaps also reflecting Alexandrian Judean perspectives).

Elsewhere, in the Decalogue, Philo clarifies the peculiarity of this trait of the Egyptians. He also expands on the critique of the worship of animals–a critique that is also shared by Greek and Roman authors who place Egyptians low on the ladder:

the Egyptians are rightly charged not only on the count to which every country is liable, but also on another peculiar to themselves. For in addition to wooden and other images, they have advanced to divine honours irrational animals, bulls, rams and goats, and invented for each some fabulous legend of wonder. . . But actually the Egyptians have gone to a further excess and chosen the fiercest and most savage of wild animals–lions and crocodiles and among reptiles the venomous asp–all of which they dignify with temples, sacred precincts, sacrifices, assemblies, processions and the like. . . What could be more ridiculous than all this? Indeed foreigners on their first arrival in Egypt–before the delusion of the land has registered in their minds–are likely to die laughing at this (Decalogue 76-80; trans. adapted from LCL).

Moreover, this tendency to worship animals is seen to align closely with the supposed stupidity of the Egyptians (see Contemplative Life 8-9), as well as their passions as mentioned earlier. Many of these representations of Egyptians are shared by the Greek and Roman authors we discussed earlier. We shall soon see slight echoes of such views concerning animal worship in a letter of Paul as well.

b) Paul (writing ca. 50-64 CE) A comparison of Paul’s ranking of ethnic groups or peoples with Philo’s and

Josephus’ approaches is complicated by the genre of our sources and the rhetorical

24 Embassy to Gaius 161; Who is the Heir of Divine Things 203; Allegorical Interpretation 3.212;

On Flight and Finding 180; Joseph 254; Moses 2.194-196. On the idea that Egyptians, moreso than other peoples, were guided by the earthly and bodily “passions,” see also: Allegorical Interpretation 3.38; On Dreams 2.255; On the Preliminary Studies 85; On the Preliminary Studies 20.


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situations. Whereas some writings I employ for Philo and Josephus are quite explicitly concerned with addressing the position of Judeans in relation to other specific peoples, especially Egyptians, Paul’s letters vary from having almost no explicit references to specific ethnic groups at all (e.g. 2 Corinthians; Philippians) to having a near obsession with the generic category of “peoples” or “nations” (ἔθνη), traditionally rendered “Gentiles.” This is a term which occurs fourty-five times in the authentic letters (especially in Galatians and Romans). This is by no means the place to engage the massive question of Paul and the Judean law with respect to the so called Gentiles or “god-fearers,” nor Paul’s relation to “Judaism,” and I will not even pretend to survey parts of the history of scholarship on these often theologically-laden topics.25

Instead, I want to consider what categories Paul uses when he identifies himself or identifies others as belonging to specific or generic peoples or ethnic groups, and I want to consider any signs of the strategies he uses to position different peoples–including the group(s) with whom he identifies–in relation to one another. Moreover, Paul’s own categorizations and hierarchies, like many other things, are dependent on the situation he addresses in a particular letter–they are rhetorically contingent. So, most obviously, we should not expect Paul to spend as much time zeroing in on the faults of the “Greeks” or “peoples” when dealing with a situation where those who did not adopt specific Judean ancestral customs (i.e. circumcision) were in some sense considered inferior (Galatia). On the other hand, we might expect a more assertive emphasis on the superior position of Judeans as God’s people in a situation where Greeks were looking down on those who followed Judean food customs (Rome). The rhetorically contingent nature of ethnic stereotyping and ranking will also become very clear in the case of Josephus, who switches from a positive portrayal of “Egyptians” to a negative one depending on his rhetorical or cultural aims.

Overall, Paul’s stances are complex. There are a very few places where his viewpoint seems to reflect the partial adoption of commonly held hegemonic ladders, many places where he assumes or asserts the place of “Judeans” or “Israelites” at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of peoples, and some other places where his rhetoric implies a lessening of distinctions between ethnic groups, at least among members of groups devoted to the Judean god and that god’s Messiah (Christ). Moreover, despite the equalizing rhetoric that occurs now and again (e.g. Gal 3:28; Rom 2:11), there is a sense in which the superior position of Israelites or Judeans in relation to all other peoples is taken for granted by Paul (as also by Philo and Josephus) on a regular basis. In order to

25 For a recent discussion of “the peoples” or “the gentiles” (τά ἐθνή) with bibliography,

see Rosen-Zvi and Ophir 2015, although I am not convinced by their overall theory in that article. For recent bibliography and an overview of the traditional problems associated with “the gentiles” in Paul’s thinking, see Donaldson 1997; Donaldson 2007


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understand what is usually taken as equalizing or “egalitarian” rhetoric, it is perhaps best to think of the process of Greeks (or those from other peoples) joining a Pauline group as the equivalent of “foreigners” adopting worship of the Israelite god and, therefore, of overcoming some of the central shortcomings of their non-Judean ancestral customs (e.g. idolatry and fornication) as represented in the stereotypes Paul sometimes espouses. Those Greeks or peoples who turn to worship the Israelite god, adopting Judean customs, are in some sense treated differently and associated with the Judean people despite origins among other peoples. These members can then benefit in some way from an elevation of Judeans and Judean customs, even if they were not from Judea in the first place, since they had adopted both worship of the Judean god and at least some other Judean practices, including a place for Judean scriptures or its stories Wendt 2016).

The first and most obvious thing to note is that Paul, like Philo and Josephus, clearly identifies himself using ethnic and geographic descriptors for those connected in some way with Israel, Palestine or its component parts or its temple (e.g. Judah or Judea, Galilee): “Judean,” “Israelite” (or simply “Israel”), and “Hebrew.”26 This despite the fact that Paul’s letters themselves put on display a Greek-speaking Israelite who was highly educated in Hellenistic rhetoric and modes of communication, for instance.

Not surprisingly in light of what we have seen with Philo and Josephus, several places where Paul self-identifies also begin to indicate the high position he gives to his own people in relation to others. Paul’s ethnic strategy, so to speak, is less concerned to compete with other ethnic groups that were commonly placed low along with Judeans (e.g. Egyptians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Phrygians) than it is to assert an alternative to the hegemonic ladder of the Greek or Roman literary elites, an alternative with Israelites or Judeans on the top rung and well above all others. This is in some sense an inversion of the usual hierarchy as a barbarian group becomes the superior people, a technique we sometimes (though not always) witness in the cases of Philo and Josephus as well.

So, in writing to Christ-devotees at the Roman colony of Philippi, Paul claims that he has reason to be confident in human terms because he comes “from the people of Israel” (ἐκ γένους Ἰσραήλ) and is “a Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Ἑβραῖος ἐξ Ἑβραίων; cf. Josephus, War 1.3), implying a superior status for these identifications in comparison with other ethnic identifications–presumably including the identifications of most of his addressees, who, likely, would self-identify differently as “Philippians” or

26 Cf. Elliott 2007, 141-146. For Paul’s implied identifications of himself or his kin with

“Israel,” sometimes citing the Judean scripture, see Rom 9:6; 9:27-31; 10:19-21; 11:2; 11:7; 11:25-26; 1 Cor 10:18; 2 Cor 3:7; 2:13; Gal 6:16; Phil 3:5. Here I am more concerned with passages where Paul is more explicitly concerned with identifying himself. For Paul’s self-identification as “Judean,” see Gal 2:15; Rom 9:24; 1 Cor 9:20.


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“Macedonians” or “Greeks” or “Romans.” This despite the fact that Paul claims he also counts his status as Israelite and Hebrew as shit (σκύβαλα) in comparison with the superior status of “knowing Christ” (Phil 3:4-6). Similarly, when faced with competition at Corinth, Paul playfully and angrily boasts that, like the “super-apostles,” he too is a “Hebrew” and an “Israelite” and, by implication, not to be considered inferior as belonging to some lesser people than his opponents (2 Cor 11:21-23).

When dealing with a situation at Rome where, it seems, non-Judeans are looking down on those who choose to follow Judean ancestral customs (at least food customs as discussed in Romans 14-15), Paul clearly places his fleshly kin (τῶν συγενῶν µου κατὰ σάρκα), the “Israelites,” highest among peoples due to what the Israelite god gave them: the covenants, the law, the promises, the patriarchs, the Messiah (Rom 9:3-5). This positioning aligns with Paul’s continuing argument–in part due to the specific situation at Rome–that Judeans are first and, by implication, foremost: “to the Judean first and also to the Greek (Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕληνι)” (e.g. 1:16; 2:9-11). Here, like Caroline Johnson Hodge (2007, 137-148) and others, I take Paul’s “first” or “foremost” (πρῶτον) to have a hierarchical sense instead of–or as well as–a temporal one; it is important to remember the tendency among people in the ancient world to think that older or earlier is better or superior, as we will also see with Josephus (Rom 11:11-24).27 In other words, Judeans are in this rhetorical context placed higher on Paul’s ethnic ladder than Greeks. The image of Judeans as the original tree and branches, and the Greeks or peoples as branches grafted on later (and more easily broken off) fits with this priority for Judeans, as Hodge (2007, 145-147) also notes. Of course, at the same time Paul is also concerned to posit that there is in some other sense “no difference between a Judean and a Greek” in terms of potential adoption or inclusion in God’s people if people “call” on the Lord or are “baptized into Christ” (Rom 10:12; cf. Rom 3:1-18, 22; Gal 3:28). The lack of distinction also relates to Paul’s notion that both Judean and Greek are equally condemnable and equally saveable. In this respect I am in agreement with Hodges (2007, 146) point that, in Paul’s letter to Rome, Judeans and Greeks (or the peoples):

are separate but hierarchically related peoples. Paul’s olive tree metaphor does not fit with a conception of one unified group of Christ-followers, free of ethnic affiliations. Instead, it enables Paul to describe an affiliation of connected but separate ethnic peoples, all of whom are now loyal to the God of Israel.

27 Cf. Cranfield 1975, 91.


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Even in his letter to those at Galatia, where uncircumcized non-Judeans’ membership is at issue and where Paul is emphasizing his principal aim of including “the peoples” without requiring circumcision, there are still clear signs of Paul’s general characterization of non-Judeans as “failures” or “sinners” (Gal 2:15). Such incidental phrasing implies a placement of Judeans at the top of the ladder, despite his assertion in this same letter that there is “neither Judean nor Greek” among those who are initiated into his own groups (Gal 3:28). So some of Paul’s identifications clearly assert or imply the superiority of the people of Israel or Judeans even though he does not clearly reveal a ranking for specific groups, tending instead to generalize about the inferior “peoples” or “nations” (ἔθνη) from which some turned to the superior ethnic god of the Israelites.28

Unlike the writings of Philo and Josephus, where there is significant material on the Egyptians, Paul makes very few specific ethnic categorizations that others would use of themselves (but I will return to some soon). Instead, in keeping with the Septuagint’s terminological distinction (e.g. Exod 33:16) between God’s “people” (λάος) and the rest of the nations (τὰ ἔθνη), Paul tends to clump together all non-Israelite peoples into the category of “the peoples” (τὰ ἔθνη), traditionally rendered “the Gentiles” in translations of the New Testament. In significant ways, Paul’s characterization of the “peoples” often draws on common discourses found among Judean literary elites concerning the inferiority of ethnic groups beyond the Israelites.29 Frequently, this inferiority is expressed by way of certain Judean stereotypes about the behavioural tendencies or common failures (“sins”) of these other peoples. The two most important ones are that non-Judean peoples tended towards: (1) improper relations to their gods and rejection of the “true God” in the form of honouring created objects, creatures, or “images” (εἴδωλα; 1 Cor 12:2), namely “idolatry;”30 and, (2) improper sexual behaviours or “fornication” (πορνεία; see 1 Thess 4:5; 1 Cor 5:1; 6:12-20; 12:2; Rom 1:18-32; cf. Wisdom of Solomon 13-14).31 The two faults could be closely related, as when the Wisdom of Solomon states

28 In this respect I do not agree with latter point in Rosen-Zvi and Ophir’s (2015, 26) claim

that, for Paul, “The Greeks who are baptized in Christ must abandon their ethnic gods and are left without a new one.” They are left with “new one” but without the entrance requirement of circumcision.

29 Cf. Stowers 2011; Stowers 1994, 90-97, 107-109, 275-277; Hodge 2007, 43-66; contrast Stanley 2012.

30 Although there are times when Paul does note the dangers of Israelites themselves engaging in worship of images or idols (εἰδωλολατρία; 1 Cor 10:1-22), the negative focus is usually on other peoples.

31 In later centuries, these tendencies came to be associated with the idea of a Noachic covenant: namely the notion that God required Noah’s non-Israelite descendents to at least refrain from sexual perversion and from worshiping created objects rather than the creator, and to adopt some other basic norms (e.g. not stealing or murdering; cf. Novak 1983).


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that “the idea of idols was the beginning of fornication” (Wis 14:12-13). This is a logic that is echoed by Paul but with the twist that God hands non-Judeans over to sexual perversion because of their idolatry which is a rejection of the true God (cf. Rom 1:22-25; cf. Hodge 2007, 51). This idea of non-Judean peoples’ inherent tendencies which result in alienation from the true God is what likely underlies Paul’s summary statement about his own ethnic group in relation to all others when, in Galatians, he uses the phrase “we ourselves, who are Judeans by birth and not failures from among the peoples (ἡµεῖς φύσει Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ οὐκ ἐξ ἐθνῶν ἁµαρτωλοί)” (Gal 2:15).

Paul’s assumption of these stereotypes about non-Judeans results in a generally negative portrayal of “the peoples” unless they had “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God” (ἐπεστρέψατε πρὸς τὸν θεὸν ἀπὸ τῶν εἰδώλων; 1 Thess 1:9): in other words, that they adopted worship of Israel’s ethnic God, rejected worship of their own ancestral deities, and were initiated into groups devoted to the Israelite god’s Messiah. I would suggest this is the context in which to understand Paul’s repeated comments to those at Rome about there being “no difference” between Judean and Greek and his comment to the Galatians that, for those baptized into Christ, there is “neither Judean nor Greek” (Gal 3:28; cf. Hodge 2007, 140-141).

Beyond Paul’s stereotyped generalizations about non-Judeans, there are a few more specific ethnic identifications that he makes now and again. Thus, for instance, there is his passing reference to the “mindless (ἀνόητοι) Galatians” (Gal 1:11) but without further clarification of what other stereotypes concerning this category of potentially “barbarian” people may be in mind in the event that Paul is referring to “Celts” rather than merely Greek inhabitants of cities in Galatia.32 We have already witnessed the common stereotype that Egyptians, too, were “mindless” or stupid. Nor is there much to work with in Paul’s reference to “Macedonians” (2 Cor 9:2).

Unlike Philo and Josephus, Paul does not explicitly denigrate “Egyptians” in lifting up the Judeans. However, there are hints of comparable discourses regarding Egyptians, as when Paul characterizes the failure of other peoples to infer from nature the prime importance of the creator God of the Israelites. Paul does so, in part, by speaking of the process of the peoples exchanging “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles (εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων καὶ ἑρπετῶν; Rom 1:23). The final three are most significant here, since they suggest that Paul has recognizable negative assessments about Egyptians at the top of his mind. We have already seen Philo aligning himself with common elite Greek and

32 Strabo describes the Gauls (Celts) as extremely war-like but also impulsive and naive, the

latter perhaps being related to Paul’s notion of Galatians (Celts) being mindless or stupid (Strabo, Geography 5.32.4-5; cf. Vitruvius 6.1.4; Isaac 2004, 417).


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Roman disdain for Egyptians (and soon will with Josephus) precisely with respect to that people’s penchant for worshiping the lowest of animals, including reptiles. So this may be a hint that Paul too sometimes adopted the commonly accepted ethnic ladder in positioning Egyptians low on the rungs as a strategy to place Judeans–usually also placed low on the hegemonic ladder–higher than a people (Egyptians) with whom they were sometimes identified. We will see this identification with Egyptians in different stories concerning the supposed Egyptian origins of Israelite people, as recorded by Josephus.

There are further signs of Paul’s adoption of Greek or Roman elite approaches to categorizing other peoples. Paul clearly shows an awareness and, in certain respects, acceptance of common Greek perspectives which divided humanity into “Greeks,” on the one hand, and “barbarians,” on the other. Of course, this division mirrors Paul’s own more common opposition between Israelites or Judeans, on the one hand, and every other people, on the other. In other words, the Judean category of “the peoples” is functionally similar to the Greek category of “the barbarians” (usually encompassing Judeans from the Greek point of view). Both reflect ingroup language for some other people(s) and not terms that anyone would use to identify themselves unless they temporarily adopted the perspective of the ostensibly dominant or superior ethnic group. It seems that both dichotomies are employed by Paul at least occasionally and for certain aims. Just before his argument in the letter to those at Rome concerning the responsibility of non-Israelites to recognize the creator from God’s creation, Paul states that “I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, to the wise and the mindless” ( Ἕλησίν τε καὶ βαρβάροις, σοφοῖς τε καὶ ἀνοήτοις ὀφειλέτης εἰµί·) (Romans 1:14).33 The derogatory implications for the barbarians seems clear in their pairing with mindlessness, while the Greeks are paired with wisdom in a traditional manner reflective of the Greek hegemonic ladder. It is possible that Paul, like Lucian in our opening passage and Philo as well (Life of Moses 2.27), is temporarily or playfully adopting the Greek or Roman categorization of Judeans as barbarians (cf. 1 Cor 1-4 in the juxtaposition of Greek “wisdom” and supposed “foolishness”), but the following argument concerning salvation “to the Judean first and also to the Greek” suggests rather than he is working with a three-fold division of Israelites (superior), Greeks (inferior, at least until they adopt the Israelite god), and barbarians (most inferior). He is, in a sense, mixing his usual Judeans-and-peoples dichotomy with the Greek-and-barbarians dichotomy to create a hybrid ethnic hierarchy.

33 Paul’s only other use of the term “barbarian” does not seem to have this negative

connotation. In 1 Cor 14:11 he employs the term simply to designate someone who does not speak someone else’s language.


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This brings us to Paul’s specific references to “Greeks,” which occur regularly only in his letter to those at Rome and occasionally in his letter to those in Galatia and those at Corinth (Rom 1:14, 16; 2:9; 3:9; 10:12; Gal 2:3; 3:28; 1 Cor 1-4). While “the peoples” was not an ethnic self-designation but rather an external label for those who were not Judeans or Israelites, “Greeks” was an ethnic self-designation. However, it was a more general one that would often play a secondary role after ethnically identifying oneself by one’s city of origin (e.g. “Athenian” or “Ephesian” would be a more common self-designation than “Greek” would be as the inscriptions clearly show).

Paul’s usage of “Greeks” in the letter to Rome, however, suggests fluidity between his use of the generic “peoples” category and his use of “Greeks,” for in the letter it seems clear that Paul uses these two terms almost interchangeably. A possible and momentary exception seems evident when he states that his overall goal is to “reap some harvest among you [those at Rome] as well as among the rest of the peoples,” which is immediately followed by the duo of “Greeks” and “barbarians” thereby implying that the “peoples” includes more than just the Greeks whom he addresses (Rom 1:13-14). Still, that Paul usually employs “Greeks” and “peoples” synonymously seems clear in the ongoing argument concerning the “Judean first and also the Greek” which is interspersed with his reversion to the generic term “peoples” for the Greeks at Rome who are his main focus. This suggests a likelihood that when Paul employs “peoples” (ἔθνη) he does indeed usually have in mind “Greeks” specifically, in part because he is most active in cities where inhabitants spoke Greek and might self-identify (though secondarily) as “Greeks” after other more specific ethnic identifications (Athenians, Ephesians, Thessalonicans, Macedonians, etc.). A more specific cultural context seems to be in mind when Paul generalizes about the “Greeks” who “seek wisdom” in his letter to those at Corinth (1 Cor 1-4). There he seems to have in mind those aligning themselves with Greek philosophers among the literary elites moreso than Greeks as an ethnic category.

So many of my previous observations concerning Paul’s stereotypes about the “peoples” especially apply to the “Greeks.” In other words, often Greeks are placed beneath Israelites or Judeans on Paul’s alternative ethnic ladder, and Paul seems to have little interest in parsing out who among the “peoples” should be placed lower than some other in part because his encounters were primarily with Greek-speaking inhabitants. This notwithstanding the implications of his use of “barbarians” on one occasion and his suggestive references to animal worship–with Egyptians likely at top of mind–as the epitome of bad behaviour by a specific ethnic group from among the “peoples.” Also this does not exclude Paul’s modified, neither-Judean-nor-Greek perspective on those among the peoples who adopted the Judean god and were baptized “into Christ,” where the expectation was they would need to continue working to reject both the idolatry and


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sexual misconduct associated with their ethnic origins (e.g. 1 Thess 4; 1 Cor 6:12-20; 1 Cor 10:14-22; Rom 1:18-32; Gal 5:19-24).

c) Josephus (writing in the 90s CE) Of the authors we consider here, Josephus is the one that most directly confronts

and counters negative stereotypes about Judeans by Greek, Roman and Egyptian authors. When it comes to looking at the ways in which a highly-educated, Hellenistic Judean might position his own people in relation to others, Josephus’ rhetorical attack Against Apion provides plenty to work with, as we will see presently.

In terms of self-understanding, Josephus emphasizes his origin from a priestly family of Jerusalem (Life 1.1; War 1.3), and so in some respects we are getting a perspective from the heart of the Judean elite under Roman rule (even though Josephus is sometimes viewed as a bit of a turncoat due to his interactions with Romans during and after in the Judean war). Josephus self-identifies as both a “Hebrew” (War 1.3) and a “Judean” (Antiquities 1.4) depending on the circumstances, and he prefers the designations “Israelites” and “Hebrews” (rather than “Judeans”) for those of the biblical past (see Antiquities 1-10), much like Philo.

Although many ethnic groups or peoples appear in Josephus’ Against Apion, most prominent is his sustained interest in Egyptians and in positioning Judeans in relation to this other people who were sometimes categorized primarily as barbarians by many literate Greeks and Romans. On this topic, we are fortunate to have the excellent article and commentary by John M.G. Barclay (2004, 2007), who provides many insights into Josephus’ approach to Egyptians and other peoples. I am indebted to Barclay whose contributions inform my own perspective on Against Apion, though Barclay is not directly concerned with the social scientific notion of ethnic hierarchies, as I am here.34

One of the most fascinating things about Josephus’ refutation of his ostensibly Egyptian opponent (Apion), for our purposes, is how the work reflects variations on each of the two main strategies that minorities could employ in categorizing and ranking other peoples. In the process, Josephus is attempting to counter what he considers an “Egyptian” viewpoint which places Judeans at the bottom of the ladder while he also attempts to refute common “Greek” perspectives that may dismiss Judeans as inferior “barbarians.” In other words, we witness Josephus’ construction or representation of two different ethnic ladders, with the rhetorical situation or aim determining the appearance of a particular ladder.

34 For other useful studies of Josephus’ perspective on other ethnic groups, see Berthelot

2000; McLaren 2013.


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In fact, the very structure of the first part of Josephus’ work is, in many respects, founded on these two approaches that we have been encountering elsewhere in this chapter, though with different twists. In his first main section of Against Apion (1.6-160), Josephus’ main aim is to demonstrate the antiquity and, therefore, superiority of the Judean people by appealing to very old, non-Greek sources that do make reference to the people of Judah or Israel. Here Josephus will be largely rejecting the Greek hegemonic ethnic ladder, where Greeks are at the top and all others below, with barbarian nations at the bottom. Instead, Josephus portrays peoples who were usually considered “barbarians” by Greeks (see 1.58)–Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Babylonians or Chaldeans–as the oldest and most reliable sources of knowledge and history, even more reliable than Greek historical sources.35 Josephus needs to approach things this way because, he must admit, there are very few early attestations of the Judeans in Greek historians but many in non-Greek, eastern sources, and here Josephus is still concerned with establishing the antiquity of the Judeans (as he also does in his earlier work on Judean Antiquities). When it comes to evaluating a people and its customs, “the older, the better” is the principle at work not only for Josephus but also for his audience and adversaries alike. Josephus’ discussion of these non-Greek peoples’ documentations rings of the “wise barbarian” theme that we have encountered elsewhere, with an inversion of the hegemonic ladder that results in a placement of Greeks lower down on the ladder, in large part because Greek societies, cultures, record-keeping, and historiography can be portrayed as new (“from yesterday or the day before”) and therefore inferior (1.6-7). It is important to note, however, that Josephus only ranks these other “barbarian” peoples highly in order to give the top rung of the ladder to the best barbarians of all, the Judean people (although he does not use the term barbarians here), and for Judean record-keeping and customs (which is expressed early in 1.29-43 and spelled out more fully in the final section of the second book, in 2.145-296). Even in

35 As Barclay (2007, 41) notes, Josephus uses the term “barbarian(s)” 44 or more times in his

works, including 6 times in Against Apion (1.58, 116, 161, 201; 2.148, 282). As with Philo, Josephus’ employs the term in a variety of ways: as a somewhat neutral designation for non-Greeks, a specific non-Greek people, or “everyone” else (Against Apion 1.116; 2.282; War 1.258, 261-262, 264, 268 [Arabians], 322 [Syrians]; War 5.17; Antiquities 1.93, 107; 4.12; 8.284); as a derogatory term implying the uncivilized nature of the people in question (Against Apion 2.148; War 1.255; 4.45-46 [in the mouth of Vespasian about Judeans]; Antiquities 14.341); as a comparative (contrasting with Greek) with implications of inferiority (Against Apion 1.161; War 6.199-200; Antiquities 11.299); and, here, as an ironic designation for non-Greeks when such “barbarians” may be shown to be superior or wise (Against Apion 1.58; cf. Antiquities 14.188). In the Judean War, Josephus speaks of having written an earlier version in his native tongue (Aramaic) “for the barbarians of the interior” (War 1.3) who are later defined as Parthians, Babylonians, remote tribes of Arabia beyond the Euphrates, and inhabitants of Adiabene (War 1.6).


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the first section of book one, however, there are points where Josephus begins to hint at his other main strategy, which involves demonstrating that Israelites are not descendents of diseased or rebellious Egyptians (as others suggested) and that Egyptians are in fact inferior to Judeans (e.g. 1.104).

It is in the second main section (Against Apion 1.219-2.296) that this other strategy becomes very clear. There Josephus aims to establish a high place for Judeans by combatting those he categorizes negatively as “Egyptians,” primarily though not solely Apion, a Greek-speaking author who may or may not have self-identified as “Egyptian” (see 2.28-31; Jones 2005). In order to establish a higher position for Judeans by negatively characterizing “Egyptians,” Josephus draws on common Greek and Roman ethnographic stereotypes concerning the supposed inferiority of Egyptians and Egyptian customs. In other words, he adopts many aspects of Greek and Roman hegemonic ladders. At the same time, Josephus needs to deal carefully with claims (attested in Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sources alike) that Judeans or Hebrews or Israelites are, themselves, originally diseased or rebellious outcasts from among the Egyptian people (cf. 1.278). Like Philo, Josephus needs to bring Judeans up the ladder by carefully distancing Judeans from “low-down” Egyptians and by allying himself with certain Greek or Roman elite perspectives (while at the same time rejecting other aspects of these same perspectives, aspects which were detrimental to Judeans’ status relative to other peoples).

A key component in Josephus’ strategy in this second section is to focus on what Greeks, Romans and others alike felt was most disdainful about Egyptians and their customs, as I outlined earlier, especially their apparent treatment of animals as gods. In adopting this focus, Josephus is also taking on Greek and Roman negative stereotypes that positioned Egyptians near the bottom of the ethnic ladder (or below it) because they resorted to worshipping animals, implying the Egyptians’ inferiority not only to all other peoples but also to the very animals they worshipped as gods (cf. Against Apion 2.66, 139). All of this is a retorsion meant to counter negative stereotypes about Judeans that, ostensibly, had an origin among Egyptians (1.219), including the idea that Judeans continued an ancestral tradition which combined mistreatment of all other people, destruction of the holy places of others’ gods (as in Lysimachos: see 1.309), and worship of an animal–an ass (as in Apion: see 2.80-81). Josephus also tries to turn a commonly encountered Greek and Roman stereotype that anyone from the East is likely to have the character of a menial slave away from Judeans and onto Egyptians specifically (2.124-134). However, even these stereotypes about Judeans are found in what a modern scholar recognizes as Greek and Roman–not native Egyptian–sources, so Josephus needs to be carefully selective in his adoption of Roman or Greek categorizations.


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This overall approach of Josephus is spelled out quite clearly in Josephus’ introductory contrast of Egyptian and Judean customs, which he simultaneously uses to explain why Egyptians, out of envy, choose to malign Judeans and to put Judeans low down in their own ethnic hierarchies:

It was Egyptians who initiated the slanders (βλασφηµίων) against us, and certain people who wanted to gratify them attempted to twist the truth, neither admitting the arrival of our ancestors in Egypt as it actually took place, nor truthfully recounting their departure (ἔξοδον). They had many reasons for hate and envy (τοῦ µισεῖν καὶ φθονεῖν): . . . Οur piety (εὐσεβείας) differs from what is customary among them to the same degree that the nature of God stands removed from irrational animals (ζῴων ἀλόγων). It is their common ancestral tradition (πάτριον) to consider these [animals] gods, but they differ from one another in the honors (ἐν ταῖς τιµαῖς) they pay them in their own particular ways. Empty-headed (κοῦφοι) and utterly mindless (ἀνόητοι) people, accustomed from the beginning to depraved opinions about gods, they did not succeed in imitating the dignity of our discourses about God (θεολογίας), but envied us (ἐφθόνησαν) when they saw us emulated by many. Some of their number reached such a level of mindlessness and pettiness (ἀνοίας καὶ µικροψυχίας) that they did not hesitate to contradict even their ancient records. But they also did not notice, in the blindness of their passion (τυφλότητος τοῦ πάθους), that what they wrote contradicted themselves (Against Apion 2.223-226; trans. adapted from Barclay).

Since this is Josephus’ overall summary of the many examples he gives from various authors infected by the thinking of “Egyptians” (principally Apion but also many others–Manetho, Chaeremon, and Lysimachos among them), we need not recite many other examples of “Egyptian” accusations against Judeans from the remainder of the work. The point here is that we clearly see Josephus struggling to gain a higher position for his own people (Judeans, Hebrews, Israelites) by distancing that people from another ethnic minority (Egyptians), a minority that is pushed lower down (or off) the ladder using commonly shared stereotypes from a Greek or Roman hegemonic perspective.

Josephus aligns himself with the Greek and Roman disdain for Egyptians and Egyptian cultural customs, particularly regarding worship of animals. Josephus also aligns himself and his people with both Romans and Greeks in other ways that are detrimental to the status of Egyptians, as when he speaks positively of the Roman imperial tendency to disallow native Egyptians from citizen rights, whether Alexandrian (i.e. Greek) or Roman rights (2.41), and when he juxtaposes Judean disdain for Egyptians with the assertion that “we neither hate nor envy” Greeks (2.123). Here there are clear


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similarities with Philo. Finally, Josephus is also careful to explain (at the end of this passage) that although he earlier (in the first section) used Egyptian records as reliable signs of the antiquity of the Judeans, Egyptians like Apion who struggled to place Judeans low on the ethnic ladder were not fully understanding their own records, which instead pointed to the superiority of Judeans and Judean ways.

The final section of Josephus’ Against Apion then positively portrays the superior Judean people who, contrary to claims by Apion and others, follow their own customs more faithfully than any other people (2.150) and put forward a model for other peoples to follow, including the “wisest of the Greeks” (2.168, 281-286, 295; cf. Philo, Life of Moses 2.19-20). The implications of the latter, of course, include the notion that Judeans were placed higher on the ethnic ladder than even the Greeks, who themselves would claim the prime position on the ladder. Josephus, like Philo and Paul in some respects, both adopts and subverts certain elements of Greek and Roman ethnic rankings. Sometimes Josephus engages in ethnic categorizations that echo those of elite Greeks and Romans and at other times he goes a different way, all of this depending on the rhetorical situation at hand. Bibliography Almagor, E. 2005. “Who is a Barbarian? The Barbarians in the Ethnological and Cultural

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1

Thoughts on Future Direction for the God Seminar

David Galston With Jeffrey Robbins assuming the Chair for the Seminar on God and the Human Future, it is an appropriate time to consider what the seminar has accomplished and what might be on the horizon. I want to suggest three directives for the seminar as it approaches this new stage, but first I want to review the results of previous meetings.

The God Question

When the original Jesus Seminar was started, Robert Funk opened the first meeting with these inviting words, "We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise." That enterprise consisted of asking what Jesus really said, and Funk knew that such a question "borders on the sacred, even abuts blasphemy."1

The God Seminar, by contrast, does not have a singular and clear question. What lies before the seminar in the God question are the particularities of systems of thought embedded in contextual politics, philosophies, and sciences. There is no one named God to find underneath the accretions of dogma. God rather is that dogma, that is, its expressions and experiences in human history, both inclusive and exclusive, both unifying and diversifying, both manufactured and disbanded with human hands. The "voice of God" is the human voice caught up in symbol systems that convince of some things and betray other things. God as experience is both the present system and its potentiality, both what is present and what is absent. God is perpetually the faint paradox of being and nothing.

It is against this background that God remains sincerely a far more difficult question than Jesus. God involves not only history but also sociology, psychology, politics, cosmology, philosophy, economics, physics, poetry, song and any other number of aspects that compose being human and being human in society. It is possible to view Jesus in the context of history, but we have to accept God as the complex of history.

Future paths of the God Seminar remain in the complex we call God and in the question of whether, somehow, that complex or set of complexes remains profitable for the human future. It can be put another way. What "mythologies" (mythical matrixes) are best critiqued and left to the study of history, and what mythologies presently best support – or we think best support, insofar as theology is the address of humanity – the address of our collective futures?

1 For the full address, see Forum 1, 1 (1985), 7-12.

Westar Fall 2016 Galston, Future Direction 2

Where We Have Been

A review of what the Seminar on God and the Human Future has accomplished so far might help identify discussion points for future endeavors. The first meeting of the seminar was in San Diego, November 2014, in the context of the SBL/AAR. The seminar wanted to link itself to the Jesus Seminar, which held meetings from 1985-1998 and produced the controversial but well-received The Five Gospels (1993), and to the Paul Seminar, which met from 1993-2001 and produced The Authentic Letters of Paul (2010). The God Seminar received papers from Hal Tausig on the rhetoric of Jesus and from Art Dewey on the rhetoric of Paul. At that meeting, the inaugural members of the seminar introduced several discussion papers that have been recently published in the Forum (5,2, 2016).

The San Diego meeting expressed the conviction to found the God Seminar on sound historical research evident in the Jesus and Paul seminars but not to limit the God Seminar to a "history of God" (history of systems of thought) approach. In place, the biblical seminars of Westar would act as a launching point for the new Seminar on God and the Human Future.

The next meeting of the God Seminar was in Santa Rosa, 2015. The seminar focused on the work of John D. Caputo. It received two important concepts into its deliberations: the unconditional and the weakness of God (weak theology). The unconditional is a Tillichian word that Caputo creatively combines with Jacques Derrida's concept of the undeconstructible. Out of an existentialist background and upon an ontological foundation, Tillich's concept of the unconditional can be expressed in his affirmation of the Protestant Principle: that any conditional element posed as an absolute element must be protested against. The trouble is that all human history and all historical experience is composed of conditional (or finite) elements. The concept of God, for Tillich, is by contrast not a conditional element, and whenever a conditional element is posed as God, the correct theological response is atheism. The unconditional, however, is always beyond or outside the condition; it is always the call to the conditional from its potential. In this way, and in Derridean terms, it is the undeconstructible that calls the constructed to deconstruction.

When Caputo talks of the undeconstructible, he indicates how human historical and linguistic experience is always subject to deconstruction. There is never a final interpretation to it all. As Caputo rightly puts it, a final interpretation is not an interpretation but a dogma. Yet in Derrida’s thinking, which holds a similar spirit with Tillich, the undeconstructible is nevertheless always “there” in its absence. It is the promise outside or beyond or implicit in what is deconstructible. Every “act of the “law” is deconstructible, and sometimes necessarily deconstructed, but the promise of the law


is justice; justice is the call of the law, the absence that aims the law even though its presence is never actual. Justice is the weakness of the law; it’s undeconstructible element that insists without existing. Justice is the weakness of the law because its only power is to insist in the face of being ignored.

The weakness of God lies in the instance of God, that is, in the non-existence of God who insists in calling us out of nothingness. The unconditional calls to the conditional, but the call is weak insofar as the conditional easily overpowers the unconditional and substitutes itself for the unconditional. These last are not Caputo’s words, but they do highlight the weakness of God and the idea of weak theology: that God as the absence of the undeconstructible insists and that concepts of power, absoluteness, and purity betray this insistence. The Apostle Paul holds something of this idea when, in the Corinthian correspondence, the foolishness of God is held in contrast to human wisdom. Paul insists that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom” (I Cor. 2:25). Unfortunately, as Caputo points out, the weakness of God apparent in this foolishness ends up being even too wise for Paul. What Paul gives in chapter 1 of Corinthians he takes away in chapter 2. With the combination of Derrida and Tillich, Caputo appropriately brought our seminar to recognizing the need to review Tillich, particularly on the 50th anniversary year of his death, in Atlanta, 2015.

At the Atlanta meeting, the seminar welcomed Russell Re Manning and focused on his edited book, Retrieving the Radical Tillich. It is interesting that our deliberations brought focus to Tillich’s The Socialist Decision and the critique that the early Tillich aimed at the myth of origin. For Tillich, when the technical side of reason breaks down the romantic side – when reason as calculation overpowers reason as imagination – the response from the romantic side is the myth of origin: the supreme romantic idea of purity and power. In response, to critique the myth of origin is to issue the prophetic voice. Even in the early Tillich, we can understand how the myth of origin manifests the condition of a given time and how the prophet response is the protesting voice of the unconditional. In this act, Tillich upheld a neo-orthodox form of theology that gained popularity at that time, but he held this theology with a sophistication that included the nuances of cultural and political considerations. Theology, for Tillich, takes the shape of a struggle in culture between its inside and outside spirit (between the fact of its condition and the promise of the unconditional).

Several papers and comments highlighted the paradoxical and sometime disappointing aspects of Tillich’s thought, but also highlighted the several ways in which his theology indulges in ambiguities, the indistinct borders between culture and theology, and the embeddedness of theology in contemporary culture. The theme or, better, combination of God and culture destabilizes the concept of God, which complemented the Santa Rosa focus on the weakness of God, and allowed the seminar


to consider the question of the plasticity of God (or of Being). There was some debate over whether “plasticity” implies a foundational substance or a constructive and deconstructive liberty without foundation.

The seminar gathered for its third meeting at Santa Rosa in March of 2016. The invited guest was Richard Kearney of Boston College. Focus was placed on Kearney’s book, Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Against the background of Tillich and Derrida and considering the idea of the weakness and insistence of God, Kearney’s notion of returning to God after the deconstruction of God was especially appropriate. A second focal point of the seminar was Brandon Scott’s recent book on The Real Paul and Scott’s reflections on the God of the real Paul.

The third seminar was possibly the most controversial to this point among the participating scholars. There was a minor but important clash between the discipline of historical critical study and the imaginative poetics of theological reflection. Kearney presented the idea of hospitality in which the divine happens whenever the strange(r) is invited to participate in the familiar. Kearney referred to the Genesis 18:1-15 story where Abraham and Sarah welcome three strangers at the Oaks of Mamre with gifts of hospitality. In this encounter the strangers are converted to allies with the motivation, on the part of Abraham and Sarah, likely being fear. However, fear is overcome with an act of trust, and the strange(r) becomes the bearer of good news. Anatheism is about what remains after the death of God. The Oaks of Mamre story suggestion that what remains after the death of God is a new religious ethic of responsive and risk-taking compassion that overcomes hostility with hospitality.

In many ways Scott’s presentation on the God of Paul complemented Kearney’s presentation on anatheism. In both cases, the “God” in question is the not the typical transcendental figure of purity and righteousness. In Paul, God accepts the ungodly, even moves to make the ungodly righteous, through the image of God becoming a curse (on the cross) for us (the gentiles or nations). To Paul, Abraham’s righteousness is not the reason for Abraham’s justification before God. In other words, it is not by his religious credentials that Abraham is righteous before God. It is rather by the act of trusting the righteousness of God that Abraham is exemplary. Out of, and despite, Abraham’s weakness (impotence), he nevertheless trusts the faithfulness of God. An anatheistic theme is present in this understanding to the degree that Abraham is a figure who risks trust, which is an act that Kearney highlighted when a stranger is trusted and when hostility becomes hospitality.

The controversy of the Santa Rosa meeting arose around a question about how liberally a biblical metaphor can be employed separate from a biblical-critical understanding. If a biblical text does not hold a metaphor as a modern theologian might imagine the metaphor, is the theologian justified in employing the metaphor in a


disconnected and abstract way? In a way, this returned the plasticity question: how plastic is the Bible? It was in his response to Kearney that Scott raised his difficulty with theologians and their seemingly liberal use of biblical metaphors without historical-critical grounding. We might note that this is an historic point of tension between biblical the philosophical theology, and it is not the case that the seminar solved this problem. It might be argued that such a question is and may always remain outstanding, but the seminar did conclude on a conciliatory note where a balance was struck.

The Horizon

The issues of the God Seminar to date have largely rested on the concepts of the unconditional, the undeconstructible, and the impact of the other as stranger upon the familiar as the conditional. The second element, which is distinct from the firsts, is the plasticity of the conditional. In the second emphasis, the conditional is the location of the renewal (the being) of theology without a necessary outside or other or unconditional call. The interesting tension in these to emphases, to my mind, is the struggle between the elements of neo-orthodoxy, where God is the other, and the elements of post-structuralism where God is the present order of the production of things. In the second paradigm, the theologian creatively uses theology against itself as an act of transgression to open the horizon to new forms. It might be correct to say, again as I see it, that the first option – though not neo-orthodoxy per se – holds God as absence and the second holds God as transformation. Yet, in a sense as well, the two elements go together, for absence is the call of transformation.

Considering this short reflection, the God Seminar can re-direct the absence-transformation paradigm in different ways. I want to suggest in that three directions seem to define the present challenges of theology and raise questions about the future value theology might hold.

The first new direction is Process Theology where the question about the cosmos can be raised. The God Seminar cannot simply present Process thought in a traditional and often literalistic way. The cosmos of the early 20th Century is no longer the same cosmos today. Process though help to the concept of intentionality in its unique word “concrescence.” In place of “insistence” the Process word is “persuasion,” and concrescence is the occasion of persuasion in any given moment (or “event”). In Process Theology God is not omnipotent and cannot be coercive, but God can persuade a more complex reality as it arises from a less complex one. As a single cell becomes through the process of evolution, the difference between becoming more complex and becoming less complex or remaining static is persuasion. God permeates the cosmos as a type of persuasive energy. The temptation in Process thought is to relate God to the becoming of the universe through persuasion, which does not suggest power but does suggest


purpose or intention (telos). In contrast several expressions of cosmology today insist that there is no apparent purpose to the universe and that, as far as can be determine, the cosmos will simply burn out. This, at least in part, raises the question of the value of religion in the midst of a purposeless cosmos. The only form of theology that raises these questions at the cosmic level involves process thought. I am suggesting that this avenue of thought needs to be explored.

A second avenue opens as a follow up to the investment placed in Tillichian thought. That avenue is Cultural Theology. Here I think post-structuralist forms of theology (related to the construction of cultural mythologies concerning gender and race, for example) need to be raised and re-examined. The 19th and 20th Century efforts in cultural theology indicated that it is not possible to live outside mythologies. The question is which ones work better, but the post-structuralist insight concerned how mythology are constructed and how they can also be deconstructed, even deliberately so. It seems to me that this insight must be brought to bear on the question of the future value of religion. In other words, can religion carry constructive mythologies that are of value to the human experience? I believe this form of question will bring the seminar into the murky waters of religion and politics as well as religion and violence. These key questions need to be explored as one of the streams of the God Seminar. It involves the deconstruction of the power of religion and the re-evaluation of its value.

A third avenue of inquiry I believe is found in theological non-Realism. Non-Realism concerns the understanding of religion as a human project: that is, as both a projection and as an inspiration. The key statement is that religion is a human creation, but the key point of controversy is that as such religion has no referent. In other words, religion is only imagination projected as “real” in linguistic (objectifying) acts. Religion holds power only to the degree that the linguistic act of objectivity is socially accepted, but once that project is pierced, religion collapses into nothingness. Non-Realism holds that the postmodern experience of God consists of the collapse of religion into the secular where its traces are evident only in social attitudes. We can in this mode of though understand the deep influence of David Hume and his notion that religion is a consequence of projecting the association of ideas.

Non-Realism is likely at heart one of the most “psychological” examinations of theology today. It seeks to understand religion at the level of the psyche as an element involved in the experience (and interpretation) of the world. Because in non-Realism religion is a human creation, the question is always about what form of life (Wittgenstein) religion can take. In non-Realism, religion is a project of life, but it can also be a hindrance to life when its value misinterpreted objectively (that is, as realism). The horizon project has no value when it is out of control. But when it is conscious, religion becomes something like “spirituality,” and the popular condition of religion in


postmodern times takes the expression “spiritual but not religious.” It seems to me an important question and avenue of thought is also present for the seminar in non-Realism, which is the question about the psychological nature and value of religion.

Succinct Conclusion

These three areas of study might invite several theologians and philosophers of diverse backgrounds and expertise. These areas of study may direct the seminar to some pivotal and socially significant questions concerning the future of religion, the value of religion, and the responsibility of humanity for the forms religion takes among us. Secondly, they might convince the public, as much as the university, of the academic value of the story of religion.

The Seminar on God and the Human Future committed itself in 2016 to the study of the varieties of post-theism. Considering this, it can be recalled how Robert Funk once said that God is the oncoming future. This seminar might profitably proceed based on pursuing the nature of that oncoming future and if varieties of post-theism should be a significant part of it.

(Do not reproduce, cite, or distribute without the author’s consent)

9

Keri Day, PhD Associate Professor of Theological and Social Ethics Brite Divinity School, TCU Note to Readers of Seminar: The musings I have provided below reflect shifting lines of inquiry associated with my unfolding project rather than a publishable essay. In particular, I envision that my project on the black sacred has implications for how traditional theological ideas such as God or the Trinity are thought and imagined, although I do not directly or substantively explore these implications in this piece. My talk will draw from these notes. Introduction

Black religious scholar Charles Long contends that the plurality of African-American religious experiences has yet to be captured in traditional theological modes. In large part, this problem is bound up with privileging theoria as the starting point in

describing and legitimating doctrine and “proper” religious experience in Christian theology. This epistemological orientation however misses the ways in which black religious experience has been lived in and through the flesh of black people. As Long asserts, African-American religious experience is rooted in “the absurd meaning of their [black] bodies.”1 For Long, religion involves the body through a full array of structures, expressions, experiences, behaviors and modes of thought. For African Americans, it was through their flesh and the meanings of their flesh that the oppressed came to be controlled in the context of modernity. African American religion then entailed an enfleshment as they attempted to move from their second creation as objects of Western history back to their first creation as subjects, as fully human. What I infer from Long is that in order to speak about black religious experience, it involves a focus on how black bodies have experienced cultural contact and conflict with the West and the ways in which the West has signified upon their bodies in order to legitimate particular meanings associated with black life (such as black bodies as primitive, non-rational, criminal, and so forth). However, black bodies and black life were always signifying upon the signifiers. Moreover, black people’s assertion of their humanity was always lived in and through their flesh first. As a result, African-American theologies have turned to concrete lived experience, both material and reflective, as a way to get underneath the plural modes of religious experience and their meanings. Turning to enfleshment within African-American religion has sought to create pressure on the study of Christian theology in fruitful ways that do not over-determine the interpretation of black religious life solely through using systematized accounts of Christian theology.

Taking my cue from Long, I want to think about the “more” of black religious experience, experiences that have yet to be rationalized or systematized in Christian theology in the West. In particular, I want to proffer a way of thinking about

Westar Spring 2016 Day, Musings 10

(Do not reproduce, cite, or distribute without the author’s consent) Spirit/black flesh through a somatic-centered Afro-Pentecostalism. A somatic-centered Afro-Pentecostalism departure point is about the celebration of enfleshment, how the Spirt moves in and through marginalized flesh such as black flesh in envisaging beloved communities marked by radical alterity and belonging. I am not interested in theorizing the Spirit in relation to speculative trinitarianism or Christology, which for me, involves theorizing Spirit in relation to belief. My conversation moves in and beyond thinking Spirit on the spectrum of “belief vs. unbelief.” Instead, I turn to the complex narrative of the Azusa Street Revival and the problems this revival creates in terms of Western theological epistemologies of God, Salvation, the Ecshaton, and more. Azusa nods in the direction of how black enfleshment of the Spirit produces alternate patterns of intimacy, eros, and belonging that expand, contract, and even implode dominant doctrinal categories, beliefs and modes of sociality in the West. A somatic-centered Afro-Pentecostalism is a methodology and a sensibility, a way of reading with, against, and beyond orthodoxy, a way to demonstrate how the category of belief itself delimits a faith that is enacted and enfleshed between and among different bodies, opening up to alternate theological orientations grounded in somatic possibilities for love, justice, and radical embrace. Historically, the category of belief in the project of Western theology has often led to violence and violation, stipulating what has been understood as properly Christian identity and agency in contrast to what is not. Theology has been about whiteness and whiteness is a way to think the world, a violent encounter, and an acceptance of violence and violation as a way of life, as quotidian and axiomatic. To use J. Kameron Carter’s words, theology has functioned as cultural property of the West.2 Theology as cultural property of the West attempts to force subaltern black religious experiences into a systematic coherence and conceptual clarity, which imprisons and violates the diverse, cacophonous nature of such religious experiences and meanings. Azusa cuts against this Western theological propensity of domesticating, violating, and “violencing” black religious experiences. Troubling Orthodoxy: Azusa

Started in 1906 by an illiterate, itinerate black clergyman, William Seymour, along with black washerwomen and black janitors in Los Angeles, California, the Azusa Street revival was an intergenerational, interreligious, interracial, and global movement. Women and men preached to each other, prayed together, and laid hands on one another. Children danced, shouted, and prophesied with audacious conviction and agency. Chinese, Mexican, German, Irish, and African Americans testified and worshiped together, often greeting each other by declaring, “I am saved, sanctified, and prejudiced removed.”3 Lasting for three years, this revival’s enfleshment of an expanded sociality can be contrasted to the dominant ecclesial and juridical institutions of the day that upheld racial apartheid and white superiority. This revival drew


(Do not reproduce, cite, or distribute without the author’s consent) thousands of people from around the world, as people sought to be initiated into an experience of the Spirit that was simultaneously social and political in character.

I will argue that a somatic-centered Afro-Pentecostalism a la Azusa provides an alternate way of reading black flesh and Spirit, a de-colonial reading that brackets doctrinal and creedal formulations as first-order movements in reflecting on the meanings of Spirit/black flesh. But first, what do I mean by Pentecostalism, a term rife with contestation and diverse meanings? For much of Pentecostal scholarship in the West (i.e. Amos Yong and Cheryl Sanders), Pentecostalism is understood as a valence of Protestant Christianity, operating within the horizon of Christian theology. Pentecostalism in theological literature has simply been seen as a focus on pneumatology, holding the indwelling of the Trinitarian Spirit at the center of its understanding of Christian piety and transformation.4 But should we read early Afro-Pentecostalism a la Azusa within the horizon of Christian theology and its basic interpretive categories? Early Afro-Pentecostals at Azusa Street certainly use Christian materials but is all that is happening here an inflection and emphasis on an aspect within the system of Christian theology, being pneumatology and glossalalia? I want to answer these questions with a loud “no.” These are the questions my talk will address.

The After-life of Azusa: The Specter of Black Flesh/Spirit

Afro-Pentecostalism a la Azusa allows me to think black flesh/Spirit together. And the after-life of Azusa continues to persist in spectral form by haunting and unsettling Christian theology and its categorical distinctions in the present, distinctions which necessarily involve projects of violence and violation upon subaltern religious experiences. After offering a distinction between flesh and body as well as the problematic genealogies of “flesh” associated with Christian thought, I will discuss how Azusa and its ecstatics/erotics of black flesh haunt Christian theology in spectral form, insisting that black religious experiences be freed up from both theological and secularist epistemologies and structures, thus able to forge new theological knowledge and practices oriented toward alterity. The Future of the Black Sacred: Language of Poiesis & Somatic Imaginaries Finally, I will turn to a discussion on the future of the black sacred. The black sacred entails envisioning futures through the language of poiesis. In Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant does not describe poetics as simply about a style of writing but also modes knowing, being, and acting in the world. For black religious experiences, poetics is an approach and process which acknowledges the discontinuities and opacity that black sacred experiences often bring due to the ways in which marginalized histories have been disrupted and shattered. Black flesh/Spirit then must be grasped poetically as a relation, an endless becoming. This relation, as being-in-the-world, is manifold,


(Do not reproduce, cite, or distribute without the author’s consent) dynamic, indeterminate, not fully known, given to opacity, known through utterances but not fully utterable. But this indeterminacy is not a weakness, as systematized accounts of theology often presume. Instead, we can imagine this indeterminacy through a poetics. Following Glissant, poetics is a practice of engaging the world, in engaging what is not fully known, what is opaque, silent, and indeterminate in order to risk being transformed by such unsayability and unknowability.5 This practice engages what is not fully known even as this unknowability whispers and utters the contours of an alternate world. Poiesis is about such creative making in the world and in thought, to use Mayra Rivera’s words. We can never fully grasp Spirit/black flesh but we can imagine it through a poetics. This language of poiesis makes way for somatic imaginaries. As discussed, the ways in which Spirit moves in and through black flesh and by extension all flesh at Azusa births forth somatic possibilities toward transformation. These somatic possibilities cannot be fully captured in pre-given Western systematized accounts (in the language of theory), as these systematized accounts are modes of cognition that attempt to repress the uncouth, wild, and unruly excesses of of experience and imagination. Spirit/black flesh contains an excess, a plentitude of meanings, which cannot be domesticated into systematic and categorical coherence. This excess which grounds somatic imaginaries enunciates an expanded sociality, an alternate way of being together grounded in radical alterity, marked by loving, living and desiring each other. The future of the black sacred is about a togetherness that is imagined through somatic imaginaries which centralize Spirit/black flesh. At Azusa, participants believed that one needed to be in the world as an agent of radical alterity, which is about a somatic openness to others while establishing one’s own claim to move through the world differently. As Ashon Crawley intimates, alterity is about how one thinks and enfleshes the relation of difference. Systematized accounts of theology and their categories obtain and think difference by way of its exclusion, as difference is interpreted as an aberration of what is “pure,” normative, or virtuous. In contrast, radical alterity disrupts and ruptures this way of “thinking difference.”6 Difference is not something to be excluded or excised from pure thought or practice. Instead, the relation of difference is thought and embodied diasporically. As Glissant intimates, diasporic epistemologies have always acknowledged multiplicity in unity, a plentitude of meanings that can exist together, enlarging and dilating our view of ourselves, others and the world. This way of thinking and valuing difference is a spirited fleshly practice that enacts love, life and possibilities as a critique to a violent, violating world that seeks to expunge difference and consequently contract a sense of togetherness and expanded sociality. We must turn to the language of poiesis to imagine this excess, this plentitude of meanings and modes of togetherness associated with the black sacred such as Azusa. Through such poetic imaginings, we might “conjure other worlds, other bodies.”7 When


(Do not reproduce, cite, or distribute without the author’s consent) I speak of other bodies, I use Rivera’s understanding of “glorious bodies” as “bodies we cannot see, relationships not yet perceived, ways of life few can dream.”8 If “bodies” are discursive creations, then bodies can be discursively remade and re-articulated in new ways, according to new relationships. Glorious bodies are new ways of naming and valuing flesh, relationships and social ways of being together that perhaps can only be imagined and spoken about through a poetics.

1 Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publisher, 1998), 26.

2 Theology as cultural property of the West is a term that J. Kameron Carter employs in his book, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Carter foregrounds the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and places Christianity at the center of this Western colonial, cultural production.

3 Cheryl Sanders, Saints in Exile: A Holiness-Pentecostal in African American Religion and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67.

4 Classical studies in Pentecostalism describe Pentecostalism as a 20th century denomination grounded in a doctrinal distinction surrounding the Spirit, holiness, sanctification, and glossallalia. For example, Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Penecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century describes Pentecostalism’s origins pre-Azusa and primarily interprets Pentecostalism in relation to doctrinal distinctions and dogma.

5 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 159.

6 Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 86-87.

7 Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 115 8 Ibid.

15

Chapter 5 — Draft The Surreal Presence (Négritude’s Messy Poetics) Bidault, looking like a communion wafer dipped in shit . . .

— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

there is so much the west is unable to digest / finds / unthinkable / does not wish to / perhaps cannot / assimilate without itself changing . . . / so perhaps ritual provides a way through the thicket of impossibles . . . / I am committed to a retaining an ambivalence of the sacred object

— M. NourbeSe Philip, “Wor(l)ds Interrupted”

Theory of blackness is the theory of the surreal presence.

— Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance”

Fecopoetics :: “There is so Much the West is Unable to Digest”

I’m stuck in the mess of a communion wafer dipped in shit. It’s a mess that’s

been messing with me, has had me all messed up. This chapter is an attempt to understand that shit, to understand that mess, that mass, to come to some sort of initial terms with the poetics of that mess. An aesthetics of fleshly mess—I call it a fecopoetics—négritude (a French neologism that I bring into English as “blackness”; more on this in a moment) names that effort. I want to think about négritude “in the wake” of the mess it finds itself in.1 But I also want to think about blackness as its own kind of mess, the mess of generativity itself, an absolute excessiveness. I think here about blackness as a mess that exceeds the mess it finds itself in and that even exceeds itself. Négritude’s a mess, a runny mess, in this way. It is a placeholder for what’s on the run, what’s in fugitive motion. Errancy. Wandering. Runaway flesh, runaway tongues, speaking in tongues.

What if blackpoetics is a runaway poetics, a négritudinous practice that aspires towards alternative wor(l)ds on the run? What if blackpoetics is the practice of what this

1 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press,

2016).

Westar Fall 2016 Carter, Surreal Presence 16

world can’t hold, what roams the earth in haptic messiness, constituting deregulated communions? What if négritude ain’t clean, has no answers, eschewing the very carceral concept of the answer? What if blackness questions because it is a question? I’ve been trying to figure out how to even pose these questions, the question of blackness in its messy, messed up performance of a quest(ion)ing poetics. Fanon got close (“And now my final prayer, O my body, make me one who ever questions . . .”), maybe his teacher Aimé Césaire got closer (speaking of Césaire Fred Moten once mused, “Négritude is the univer-shall; What shall blackness become?”).2 In this chapter, I too make an approach, try to think with, try get with the poetics of the mess, the messy question of blackness—that excessive, excremental, serially extraceremonial quest(ion) of négritude. I want to think with Césaire (and some others too) as he thinks about this shit: “[Georges] Bidault, looking like a communion wafer dipped in shit.”

It goes back to when I first read Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and his Discourse on Colonialism, two texts that themselves were trying to come to terms with the mess, with how in being messed with blackness was messing with stuff, practicing the alternative. Reading these texts took me into the world of mid-1930s Paris. It was then and there that a group of “evolved” students from various French colonies gathered to express amongst themselves their disfavor of and resistance to French colonialism. Among them were Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi (they’d eventually become partners), Léopold Senghor (who would become the future president of Senegal) and Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana. We might think of this “black gathering” as an early “sense lab” or an undercommon commune or maybe even something akin to those bedouin wanders that Nathaniel Mackey serializes in his poems “Mu” and “Song of the Andoumboulou.” I think of them as experimentalizers of a new term that was about to make its entry into a diasporic lexicon. Négritude is the name this band of anticolonial itinerants gave what they were doing—or what was doing or working on or messing with them.

As a neologism, négritude debuted in the pages of L’étudiant noir, an ephemeral periodical started by this Paris group as part of their political-artistic endeavors for an understanding of le négre—a term whose semantic range stretches from “the slave” to “the negro” to “the nigger” if not “nigga”—unmoored from the negative connotations surrounding this term in French culture. We might therefore say that as a concept négritude is an emanation of this diasporic study collective; it is both conditioned by this particular practice of sociality and conceptually a figure of it. More a verb than a noun, more a practice than a static idea, a term both of black performance (Saidiya Hartman and Gregson Davis might say) and nonperformance (Fred Moten following Sora Han

2 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; look the essay where Fred says this.


might say), négritude indexes life-escaped and always escaping, life on the run, on the move or in wandering, fugitive motion from colonialism’s dictates and French imperial state holds. A locution then for “freedom as marronage,” négritude is against ownership.3 It bespeaks life irreducible to and yet unthinkable apart from the wounds of colonial dispossession—all in the interest, as Suzanne Césaire put it, of “the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic” where we find “the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness.”4 The zone of the négritudinous indicates an otherwise congregationality. It indicates another kind of mass. Lingering with Suzanne Césaire a bit more, négritude is a messy mass of “unprecedented communions.” Parahuman futures.

My interest here is in a dimension of Aimé Césaire’s stamp on the négritude concept; namely, how within his poetics négritude or blackness refigures the sacred, unmooring it from sovereignty generally and from the would-be bodily coherence of the self-possessed and self-determining subject of Enlightenment or secular humanism. This is the subject of colonial whiteness. The refiguring of the sacred that I have in view with respect to négritude and that I want to think about takes place precisely through the “surrealism” of black life itself, a surrealism bound up with le negre, the one identified as black and who within the terms of the brutalities of colonization and racialization is deemed deficient, unable to perform as a proper body, unable strictly speaking to even be a body, the one unable to figure as a rationally self-determining subject and thus unable to represent the universal. A threat to universality and thus figuring as a “horizon of death,” le negre, the black, is without a body.5 Or as Denise Ferreira da Silva has put it, those so figured are “nobodies.”6

Black nobodiness, ante-categorical thingliness, and thus bodily nonperformance bears in Césaire’s poetics the name négritude, which in its performative nonperformance exposes, I argue in what follows, the logic of Christian theology that animates a secular, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernity and thus that underwrites the French imperial state and its practices of secular whiteness. More still, as the political-aesthetic exposure of a Christian imaginary underwriting colonization-as-racialization, négritude provides an angle from which to understand French imperialism, along with the supporting apparatus of the state, as a claim to being a body. But this claim of bodily coherence works by way of a series uncohering settler-colonial brutalities against flesh.

3 The book Freedom as Marronage. 4 Suzanne Césaire, quoted by Robin D. G. Kelly in “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,”

introductory essay to Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 15–16. 5 For more on colonial-racial other as a “horizon of death,” see Denise da Silva, Toward a

Global Idea of Race. 6 Silva’s “Nobodies” piece.


As an aesthetics of and “a permanent readiness for the Marvelous” that exceeds every Kantian injunction or any Enlightenment (categorical) imperative to be a body, négritude reveals whiteness as a god-term, the god-term of a God-Man, the would-be convergence of divinity and humanity to stand erect as a coherent and therefore a ruling or mastering body (politic). To put this in terms that W. E. B. Du Bois offers, colonial-imperial transcendence, with its “will to rule the earth, forever and ever. Amen.” is nothing less than “the religion of whiteness crashing upon the shores of our times.”7

The critique of colonialism offered by Césaire opens onto a similar type of claim. He intuited that the vision of Western Man or the humanism that was the basis of whiteness’s trepassive transcendence, its practice of sovereignty, is but “Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity=civilization, paganism=savagery, from which there could not be ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes” (33). These equations, he says, makes “Europe . . . indefensible.” But to stop with such a statement as this is “in itself . . . not [yet] serious. What is serious” is that the very idea of “‘Europe’ is morally, spiritually indefensible” (32). I find this latter claim, which Césaire says is more serious, indeed to be provocative and worthy of interrogation. What is the precise nature of the spiritual constitution, of the spiritual indefensibility of the idea of “Europe” and of Western Man more broadly? How it colonialism and racialization indefensible at the level of or as a brutal practice of spirit?

Working between aspects of Discourse on Colonialism and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, I engage Césaire’s poetics of négritude as clearing the way for the development of an analytic of colonialism precisely as suffused with certain theological protocols—“Christian pedantry,” as Césaire calls them—even as his négritudinous poetics enacts an alternative pedagogy of the sacred. This alternative pedagogy moves in directions that anticipate Édouard Glissant, whose “poetics of relation” entails “a modern form of the sacred” where within the terms of Relation “the sacred is of us, of this network, of our wandering, of our errantry”; Nathaniel Mackey, whose intertwined poems “Mu” and “Song of the Andoumboulou” enact a “recursiveness” or an “incantatory insistence” that amounts to an otherwise “liturgy and libation [of] repeated ritual sip, a form of sonic observance aiming to undo the obstruction it reports”; M. NourbeSe Philip, whose poetics of Silence “is committed to a retaining an ambivalence of the sacred object.”8

More specifically, I argue that Césaire’s distinct insight lay in his consideration of the specific theo-political contours of the concept of the body—its functioning both at

7 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Water 8 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 16, 56; Mackey, Splay Anthem, pg?; M. NourbeSe Philip,

Wor(l)ds Interrupted.


the scale of the individual and of the state—as a figure of sovereignty, rule(s), propriety, and propertied ownership. That is to say, Césaire’s elaboration of négritude opens up the question of the theological protocols of the body’s production, its coming into being as a cultural text, even as négritude itself swerves from and is not of the body. A practice of errancy, négritude moves as flesh, in the body’s break(down). A kind of unsettled compost given to new arrangements or fungible compositions, negritudinous flesh cannot help but decompose the body. As such, flesh is better understood along Glissantian lines as “baroque assemblages,” “that open and mysterious poetic necessity.”9 Flesh “exhausts no territory;” it “sets roots only in the sacred of the air and evanescence.”10 Négritudinous flesh, which is to say blackness, is an atmospheric condition. Its home is “the commonplace,” an “undercommons” of impossible completion, operative at the interval between what Nathaniel Mackey speaks of under the rubric of “breath and precarity” and that Ashon Crawley and Peter Sloterdigj theorize under the rubric of pneuma or spirit and as a “pneumatic pact.” Pneumatography is a blackpoetics of flesh. And so is négritude.

In staging my argument in these terms, I draw deeply on Hortense J. Spillers’ vital distinction between “body” and “flesh”:

But I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.11

The body then is the yield of a series of cultural and biopolitical “maneuvers sequenced in blood.”12 These maneuvers indicate a series of violences against that which is deemed chaotic, unsettled or lacking order on the one hand but which on the other hand is desirable because it can produce and reproduce value. This terrain for expropriation,

9 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 10 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 208. 11 Spillers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” 12 Ibid.


subjected to cultural and biopolitical maneuver, is what Spillers calls flesh, a kind of oceanic and deregulated materiality, the body’s ether.13 And yet, at the same time, as Alexander Weheliye has recently argued following both Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, flesh is always already the body’s undoing, its would-be apocalypse, harbinger of an-other world, a (re)turn to earth. In this way, flesh is to be understood as otherworldly, what this world has been brutally build on top of this one, witness that the world that claims to be all that there is in fact is not all there is. Things might be otherwise. Flesh witnesses to possibility, the alternative that indeed already is, even if overshadowed by monumental ideas and ideals—like “democracy” and “markets” and even “freedom” and “progress”—of this world. As otherworldly matter or the materiality of an alternative worldliness, flesh harbingers what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “Plenum,” that “Canvas Infinita” . . . “that [un-organizes], [un-forms], [un-thinks] the world” and where the multiplicity of “existing . . . chases away the dominant fantasies of a kind of knowing that can only determine itself if with iron hinges of universal reason.” These irons of universal reason, which poetics moves through and against, work conjunctively with or as epistemological support for the irons of the settler (to chain-link fence in land) and irongs of the colonial enslaver (to shackle of flesh). Vestibular to Man and his not-quite-human and nonhuman others, and in its anteriority to the body, flesh portends the end of the world (of Man); it is life otherwise.

I consider négritude as already functioning within something like Spillers’ body-flesh distinction; that is to say, négritude is (a)kin to fungible, generative flesh, or is a flesh-practice. More specifically, I read Césaire as providing insight into the religio-secular ceremony, the liturgical or ritual ceremony, of death-for-purposes-of-securing-life that grounds the body concept even as he poeticizes négritude as ante- (and not simply anti-) ceremony or extraceremonial and excremental to the ceremony of the body. It’s this ceremony that I want to scrutinize, for it is my contention that in this ceremony what is at stake is nothing less than the violence of ownership itself, a violence enacted as whiteness’ corporeal liturgy that renders blackness delectable or consumable. Such consumption is a technology of death by which whiteness figures as bodily capacity, as comportment to and within the time of the state-body politic. Eucharistic consumption, by which I mean a kind of violent ecstatics of trepassive wandering into lands on the one hand and the theft of labor on the other, is what discursively brings the body online and it what is constantly reenacted, alas as masterly humanism, to maintain the body (politic)’s “real presence.”14

13 See J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether.” 14 See Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: States of Debility/Capacity/Disability (Duke University

Press, forthcoming) Check with Puar to see if I may reference her this way.


In the next section of this essay I argue that Césaire finds a vantage of analysis on this problem by reading the eucharistic injunction given by St. Paul as the words of Christ at the last supper—“Take, eat, this is my body . . . ”—as a social and cultural text, a figure through which to understand what he witnessed of the political deliberations in the French National Assembly on the occasion of his visits there in the aftermath of World War II. The Christian eucharist provided a script of imperial statecraft, a script of the machinations of the Enlightenment subject and the production and sustaining of the sovereign body through ownership. Functioning as a kind of cultural ritual of state, the eucharist within colonial discourse, Césaire suggests, yields a chrismated, sacramental, or holy body, a redeemed and redeeming, capacitated and abled able body (of whiteness). Such a body claims the here and the now; it claims the real and thus claims to be real. It claims the onto-theological field of what’s real; it claims “real presence” for itself. Négritude is in part an analytic of this problem, a vantage from which to understand the Christian eucharistic liturgy’s discursive implication in whiteness as a colonial practice of cannibalistic consumption wherein blackness figures as debilitation and expenditure, as what buttresses but must be expelled from and then reincorporated back into normative time in the very quest to establish the normative as such, the body. Paying particular attention to the statement by Césaire that headlines the epigraphs of this chapter (“[Georges] Bidault, looking like a communion wafer dipped in shit . . .”), I work out this part of my argument about the ceremonial consumption and digestion of black life to mythify Man’s body (politic) as real by way of an engagement with Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

Following this, I turn from a consideration of modernity as a structure of colonial consumption to the vantage that makes possible this insight—négritude itself. That is, I consider négritude as a poetics of those alternative socialites that remain indigestible even as they are subjected to engulfment for purposes of standing up the body as normative form, as “real presence.” This indigestibility, what I speak of following Fred Moten as “the surreal presence,” is at the heart of the poetics of négritude that Césaire develops in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. I follow Césaire’s meditation, his quest(ion)ing after négritude, in key moments of his Notebook, coupling them with M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetics in her brief but powerful essay, “Wor(l)ds Interrupted”. I read this essay as extending Césaire’s negritude project (she actually invokes both Césaire and the notion of negritude) to elaborate her poetics. Perhaps its better to say that between Césaire and Philip, what becomes clear is that négritude, which is to say blackness, belongs neither to Césaire nor Philip. Moving against ownership and therefore against the logic of a body, blackness is unpossessable; following Sarah Jane Cervenak and Sora Han, it encodes a “paraphilosophy” of “parapossession,” indeed, of spirit possession. All of which is to say that between Césaire and Philip (whose Zong! is


the focus of the next and final chapter of this book), négritude figures as a blackpoetics whose extraceremonial aesthetic practice redoes ritual in its moving through the colonial pageantry of the body. Négritude proffers rituals of parapossessivity, rituals that take up the excremental, the “indigestible,” and the “unthinkable” as “[providing] a way through the thicket of impossibles,” rituals, as Philip puts it, “committed to a retaining of the ambivalence of the sacred object” in the practices of flesh.

Eucharistic Violence // “A Communion Wafer Dipped in Shit”

Let’s consider Cesaire’s statements more directly. The problem of the liturgy of

the body emerges in a passage in Discourse on Colonialism that has gone generally unremarked upon in the critical literature but that anchors this meditation. It is a passage that, I argue,

The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013

doi 10.1215/00382876-2345189 © 2013 Duke University Press

J. Kameron Carter

Paratheological Blackness

The Ghost of Paratheology

What happens to the concept and practices of blackness when thought in relationship to the con-cept and indeed invention of religion? What kinds of pressures does blackness place on the religious and theological constitution of the modern world? This issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly collects a wide-ranging ensemble of essays under the theme “Religion and the Futures of Blackness” that all in their own way clarify, amplify, and press these questions. Together they represent a certain kind of experimentation in black studies predicated on a claim that blackness is a disruption or distur-bance from inside modernity’s social logic and organization, its “loophole of retreat” as the slave girl Harriet Jacobs might say.

But more is at stake. Although not speaking univocally, these essays nevertheless circulate around a particular claim about modernity and black studies. Given the modern world’s consti-tution not just as an ontological but as an onto-theological formation, indeed, as a formation of (onto-)political theology and given its coming-to-be within a planetary logic of spatialized rule that quickly modulated into spatialized-as-racialized

23

590 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Fall 2013

rule while mediated by the symbols and practices of Christianity and its “religious” others, the essays collected here foreground the need for critical black theory to attend to questions of religion and the theological in its ongo-ing work. And of course, that object is the modern world itself and its ani-mating logic of purity and sovereignty or rule, mastery, and governance. One is hard pressed to find a better guide into the study of the modern world than Nahum Chandler, who approaches it as a study of a distinct historical unfolding of the ontological problem of purity. In his elaboration of W. E. B. Du Bois as a thinker of this problem, he observes:

The enunciation of Africanist figures in discourses of the Negro emerges in a hierarchically ordered field in which the question of the status of the so-called Negro is quite indissolubly linked to a presupposition of the homogeneity and purity of the so-called European or its derivatives. . . . This situation, or more precisely problematization, yields for African American thinkers what I call the problem of purity, or the problem of pure being. To inhabit such a discur-sive formation, perhaps in a structurally contestatory fashion, one cannot . . . simply declare in turn the status (as prior, for example) of a neutral space or position. One must displace or attempt to displace the distinction in question. This necessity is perhaps all the more astringent when the distinction in ques-tion is a claim for a pure origin, a pure identity, an ultimate ground of identi-fication. Such a displacement can be made general or decisive only through the movement of the productive elaboration of difference—as articulation—perhaps even according to necessity as the performative announcement of a differential figure. (Chandler 2009: 349–50)

The essays collected here are experimental movements, “performative announcement[s] of a differential figure,” the figure of blackness. As such, blackness is a movement of the between (more on this below), an interstitial drama on the outskirts of the order of purity. It is an improvisatory move-ment of doubleness, a fugitive announcement in and against the grain of the modern world’s ontotheological investment in pure being, or pristine ori-gins, and of the modern world’s orchestrations of value, rule, and gover-nance (i.e., sovereignty) in the project or the ongoing exercise of inscribing pure being. Blackness is, to invoke Chandler once again, “paraontological” (2006: 41). In relationship to the order of pure being, blackness is a ghosting, not merely of the Euro-American subject who has been assigned a privileged position within the order of the purity, an order which has also sought to be a global order, a globally purifying order. Beyond presupposing “a certain preconstituted or nonconstituted subject . . . at the origin, as the origin, of the system in question” (Chandler 2000: 262), “the very particularity of the

Westar Fall 2016 Carter, Paratheological Blackness 24

Carter • Paratheological Blackness 591

African American situation is what sets in motion, or calls for, a form of supra-inhabitation of thought or demands that a certain meta-perspective take shape right in the midst of experience, self-consciousness, or the par-ticularities of existence. It solicits the development of a paraontological dis-course” (41). Such a ghostly discourse is the discourse of blackness, which registers as a certain sonic criminality or noise within or even “music libel against” (adapting HaCohen 2012) ontology or the thought and practice of purity or pure being. Thus, while blackness is a problem for thought, it is also the possibility of thought—thought and existence otherwise, an other-wise than being.

But if blackness is precisely this paraontological ghosting of purity, if it is an insurgent subjectivity of “in-sovereign” resistance, to borrow a recent formulation from Fred Moten, to the theopolitical constitution of modern sovereignty, then in this introductory essay I want to extend these formula-tions to suggest that blackness can and should be thought of as a paratheo-logical ghosting of modernity as a practice of (onto-)political theology. It is situated in appositional—and not merely oppositional—juxtaposition to modernity’s theological protocols, whose scripts are often hidden under the veil of what has come to be called the secular. Many works point to black-ness as the paratheological ghosting of modernity as a regime of political theology, a ghosting of the wounds of black “pornotroped” flesh (Spillers 2003a: 206), and that yet harnesses the potentialities of such flesh precisely from within the death scene of modernity. Though there are many examples of this, some of the most prominent are Du Bois’s appositional refunctioning of the theological throughout his corpus, including in Souls of Black Folk (1903) and in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), which begins with a “credo” that signifies on a religious creed such as the Apostles’ Creed and ends with a “Hymn to the Peoples” that itself is a prayer within which he announces “the Anarchy of Empire”(1996: 622–23); Octavia Butler’s novels, which interrogate and resignify the religious and the theological (Wild Seed [1980] is but one example of many one might consider in her literary corpus); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), that story of the ghosting of 124 Bluestone Road and its interrogation of religion and slavery and its refunctioning of death in the story by way of black maternity, the horizon of absolute life.

Thinking with Hortense Spillers

Through my invocation above of Spillers’s notion of the potentialities of black pornotroped flesh (2003a: 206), I am signaling what I see in her work as latent paratheological gestures, gestures internal to the black radical tradition.



I want to develop this claim a little more, though a fuller explication of it must await another occasion.1

Spillers’s celebrated essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An Ameri-can Grammar Book,” which among other things points to the theological underpinnings of slavery and early modern colonialism, is also important regarding the paratheological. Here Spillers calls attention to the “ungen-dering” transformation that “turned personality into property” (2003a: 225). This transformation was a kind of transubstantiation. Bringing up this notion, with all of its religious, even theological, connotations in this con-text, is quite apposite, for Spillers picks up on the operations of religion within the “age of conquest.” This comes out in her analysis of that crucial fifteenth-century text by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441–1448.2

In this text the Portuguese narrator gives voice to a form of Christian-ity tethered to Europe—not to some sort of “natural” Europe that was already in place, a “Europe (in theory),” as Roberto Dainotto (2007) has put it, but to a Europe that was in fact being born precisely in this moment—and that “[transformed] the ‘pagan’ of Guinea (as Africa was then called) into the ‘ugly’” (Spillers 2003a: 212). This empire of the skin or “politics of melanin,” as Spillers calls it (213), is “an intimate choreography . . . between the ‘faith-less’ and the ‘ugly’” (212). In what did this bestial faithlessness consist that justified the enslaved transportation of Africans to Europe? According to Zurara’s chronicle, it consisted in a lack: “They had no knowledge of bread and wine” (Zurara, quoted in Spillers 2003a: 212). Which is to say, they lacked the Eucharist or the body of Christ, or as Willie James Jennings puts it in his essay in this issue, they lacked “the traditions of race men.” But more must be said, for the Guinean lack of the eucharistic body entailed a lack of the body proper or the lack of a proper body (politic). There was, in other words, in Zurara’s Christian view the lack of the signs of civilization and thus proper rule. The absence of civilization as tied to the absent eucharistic body rendered the African body as an absence, as a void within reality, as voided reality, as oxymoronically the reality of a void or the reality of a nonre-ality. In short, what the Guineans lacked was proper order; they were thus in need of sovereignty so that they might “appear” within the order of things.

What must not be lost sight of is that the lack of which the Portu-guese chronicler speaks at root is the articulation of a religious and ulti-mately a theological lack.3 To go back to the chronicler’s declaration: “They had no knowledge of bread and wine.” This epistemological and ultimately ontological absence, this void of being or being as void on the part of the



Guineans, is at the heart of the gathering winds that will circulate hurri-cane-like and out of control in a process that Spillers will designate in her text as “ungendering” or “pornotroping.” These terms, as Alex Weheliye (2008) explicates in his reflections on Spillers’s work, foreground the link between slavery and sexuality, between suffering and (black) humanity, or more properly within the terms of Spillers’s text, between suffering and black flesh, particularly, black female flesh inasmuch as the black female slave has been the ultimate slave due to a capturing within the logic and practices of property and value of the maternal function.

And yet, as Spillers notes, even within the pornotroped production of black flesh, even within the processes of the unmaking of “personality into property,” there is possibility. “We might say that the slave ship, its crew, and its human-as-cargo stand for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibil-ity that is not interrupted, not ‘counted’/‘accounted,’ or differentiated” (Spillers 2003a: 215). The “passage,” then, in “Middle Passage” is sheer pos-sibility and potentiality, while the “middle” in “Middle Passage” is—in its refusal of stabilization from either shore, the shores of beginnings or those of destiny—existence in the middle itself. That is, it names existence as exis-tence between, where the “between” here connotes a “scene of dissimulation,” a scene, Nahum Chandler tells us, that does not “organize its own coher-ence” within a logic of being or stability, that is, within an ontology (Chandler 1993: 27). So understood, “between” is “the opening of difference itself. . . . [It is that] mutuality in difference, as difference [that] disrupts the logic of a sta-ble boundary, an oppositional logic, that would authorize the assumption or production of terms [or identities] self-identical to themselves” (27). It is pos-sibility from the outside that is on the inside, as Moten puts it in his essay in this issue. In yet another unlikely coming together, this time though not between W. E. B. Du Bois and Karl Barth (see Carter 2012) but between Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who came of age under Nazism and in resistance to it after his sojourn through Harlem and the Caribbean or more simply the “Black Atlantic,” we find a convergence wherein blackness is understood pre-cisely as between or as the force of relationality. Glissant (1997) theorizes this under the notion of a “poetics of relation,” Bonhoeffer (1997) under the notion of analogy of relations (analogia relationis). As did Glissant and as does Chandler as evidenced in his explication of the Du Bois–derived notion of “between,” so too does Bonhoeffer understand that the human is relational-ity as such and that the force of relationality is the force of thought. Relation-ality is not so much antilogical or of an anti-Logos as it is antelogical or of an



ante-Logos or what he theorizes as a “counter word” or “counter Logos [Gegen-logos]” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 302, 305). Such a counterword is a word beyond “the Word of Man” (see Wynter 1989) but as a disturbance from within that word. Such a word is an insurgent word of resistance with respect to any logocentricism or regime of a Logos.4 Or in light of Chandler we can say that “between” is both a problem for (logocentric) thought as well as its ante- and thus counterlogical possibility. We might think of “between,” to draw on another of Spillers’s powerful formulations, as that interstitial drama that marks the paradoxical subject position that is a nonsubject position, the sub-ject position of nonbeing: “Under this particular historical order black female and black male are absolutely equal” (Spillers 2003b: 156). And thus, between is blackness, paradoxical blackness, paraontological blackness.

In light of Spillers’s work, blackness is a necessary engagement with modernity’s God terms, a refusal of the God terms, of the would-be divinity, of the claim to unlimited power, of white masculinity. Spillers writes: “The fact of domination is alterable only to the extent that the dominated subject recognizes the potential power of its own ‘double-consciousness.’ The subject is certainly seen, but she also sees. It is this return of the gaze that negotiates at every point a space for living, and it is the latter that we must willingly name the counter-power, the counter-mythology” (Spillers 2003b: 163). Reso-nating with the notion of a counter-Logos, Spillers’s notion of countermythol-ogy is the articulation of a critically insurgent agency that cuts through theo-logical protocols of racialization, which cannot be severed from the protocols of gender and sexualization or from the capturing of maternity within patri-archy. This I want to suggest is the paratheological moment of her thought.

But this is something that is also at work in Spillers’s (2003c) essay “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon,” which revisits themes from her Brandeis University dissertation “Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon” (Spillers 1974). Once again the force of the paratheological is evident. That is to say, we come to see that the “between” is also a movement of escape, a fugitivity from within modernity, a “between” that recomposes that ontotheological formation or that forma-tion of political theology called modernity. This recomposition occurs under the force of relationality, under the force of blackness as passageway, or under the force of existence from the middle. In “Moving on Down the Line,” Spill-ers notes that “by 1794, the year of Samuel Magaw’s [sermon] to the [African Church of] Philadelphia; by 1810, the year of William Miller’s schizophrenic [sermonic] embrace and denial of Africa, the black person in the United States is already adrift between two vast continents, both in his body and



brain” (2003c: 262). Spillers contends that such black “kerygmatic religion,” as she calls it, must not be dismissed by a contemporary audience inasmuch as it points to the moment of (middle) passage within the wound of slavery and its afterlives, the passage that animates black critical thought:

Because a contemporary audience has no ready analogy with which to gauge the impact of kerygmatic religion, the worldview purported by certain of these sermons appears alien, and perhaps “ambivalence,” as the controlling meta-phor of my own conceptual narrative, is nothing more than a different term for emotional distance. But if by ambivalence we might mean the abeyance of closure, or break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another, as in the radical disjuncture between “African” and “American,” then ambivalence remains not only the privileged and arbi-trary judgment of a postmodernist imperative, but also a strategy that names the new cultural situation as a wounding. (Spillers 2003c: 262)

But as a wounding, as Spillers also makes clear, the new cultural situ-ation as itself a religious situation—and what this means I will explicate momentarily when I turn to Richard Wright—is one in which “a posture of critical insurgency must be achieved. It cannot be assumed. Essentially [then], the test of belief that is crucial to our purposes here has less to do with the Word of God, or words pertaining to God, than with the words and texts of human community in their liberational and enslaving power, refracted in the Gospel” (Spillers 2003c: 262–63). Arguably, what Spillers is point-ing to is a mode of insurgent agency, a critical subjectivity, what here I am calling blackness, hollowed out from within the ontotheological struc-tures of a racialized and racializing modernity, a subject position, in short, that paratheologically operates in the passage as such, from the middle, or between all shores of stability. Such a mode of existence, far from being trapped in social death, is “mystical” and stateless with respect to the order of things. It enacts what Moten in this volume theorizes as a “mysticism in the flesh.” Mystical blackness, then, is a way of elaborating the this-worldly potentialities of the flesh in which can be constituted a multitude, a different organizing of the social, or as Spillers says, a “‘critical mass’ differentiated from others that surround it” (2003c: 257), that is to say, differentiated from the normalized body (politic) that surrounds it. This critical mass or multi-tude is the enactment of a new form of social organization, of community, of life together. But how community is to be understood here and how life together is to be grasped, or how what Frantz Fanon sought to delineate as a “new humanity” is to be thought, must be carefully outlined.



To elaborate this we might turn briefly to Zora Neale Hurston. In her brilliant explication of Hurston’s autobiographical writings in relation to her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, literary scholar Samira Kawash warns against the dangers of the modern ideal of community. Within this ideal, there is the “attempt to realize community through the operation of a rule of identity and commonality” with its seductive “promise of harmony and unity,” all the while hiding “the violence that is couched in the guise of secu-rity and commonality” (Kawash 1997: 206). Kawash reads Hurston’s writ-ings as struggling “to open life to the ‘ontological dislocations’ of accident, contact, proximity, and chance” (207). In this regard, Hurston’s artistic ren-dering of community and indeed of blackness is paraontological. Operating from the middle (passage), that is in the passage as such, hers is a discourse of escape or “cosmic upset and contagion” (201–5, 201). Kawash beautifully articulates the force of Hurston’s insight:

Contagion—whether good or bad—is accidental, it follows from touching. At the moment of contagion there is not intention to infect the other, to give the other something of the self. In this sense, contagion is giving without subject or object. . . . Contagion happens by accident, by proximity, by touch. One can-not foresee the trajectories contagion may take; one cannot predict the muta-tions that may be produced in its wake. . . . Hence, the together-touching of contagion is not from one (subject) to another (subject) but wells up in the between and the within, between one and another and within each. . . . [There-fore] the you and me of contagion are neither joined by essential identity nor separated by agonistic difference. We are rather singular and touching, together in our singularity. We cannot choose contagion; contagion is what happens to us. Equally, we are what happens in contagion. . . . Thus contagion is not another law of identity and difference but the lawlessness that the law [of sovereignty] always struggles to contain or exclude. (205)

What Kawash has delineated by way of Hurston is what may be called that fugitive or in-sovereign history of or within political theology.5

What is crucial for the present purposes is that Hurston’s writings make aspects of Spillers’s point before the fact; namely, that we are faced with a decision either to “read ‘community’ as homogenous memory and experi-ence, [as a] laying claim to a collective voice and [as] rendering an apparently unified and uniform narrative, or we might think of it as a content whose time and meaning are ‘discovered,’ but a meaning, in any case, that has not already been decided. In other words, ‘community,’ in the latter instance, becomes potentiality; an unfolding to be attended” (Spillers 2003c: 258). Fur-



ther still, both Hurston and Spillers—Spillers, in a way that I have sketched here; Hurston, in a way that I’ve only skimmed here—point to something like what I am starting to think about in this essay under the rubric of paratheo-logical blackness understood as insurgent movement within modernity’s pro-tocols of religious and theological sedimentation but yet a movement that is not reducible to those protocols inasmuch as it is a movement from the mid-dle, a fugitive movement of escape that exceeds the logic of sovereignty.

Richard Wright’s “When the World Was Red”

I want to use the remainder of this introductory essay to consider briefly one other figure whose thought may be understood as a movement of or experimentation in escape from within modernity’s ontotheological struc-tures of belief. This figure is Richard Wright. I am particularly interested in an unpublished short story Wright wrote in 1955 that he hoped, had his publisher given him a book contract, to publish in expanded form as the culminating novel in a trilogy of novels. He titled this proposed trilogy “Celebration of Life” and the final story in the trilogy “When the World Was Red.”6 As it turned out, Wright’s publisher did not contract his project and so Wright’s short story remains tucked away in the archives, having gone virtually unexamined in Wright studies.7

With “When the World Was Red,” Wright proposed an inquiry into modernity and its internal theopolitical and “theosocial” laws of the human.8 He sought to make a case for understanding modernity as a kind of religious formation, as a scene of the invention of religion and the birth of modern, Western man as the highest religious being (Homo religiosus) on the chain of (human) being. Wright’s story examines the disciplinary pro-cesses (to use a critical Foucauldian and Butlerian vocabulary) of sedimenta-tion, the processes that would rivet persons in place by way of religion. These disciplinary processes, as he sought to show in “When the World Was Red,” are processes of discipleship (and obedience, to use a theological vocabulary native to Christian soteriology or conversion discourse). At least fifty years ahead of its time with its effort to think about modernity at the interdisci-plinary, or perhaps the antedisciplinary, crossroads of the current fields of critical race studies, psychoanalysis, colonial and postcolonial studies, and finally religious and theological studies, Wright’s short story examines racial formation as a constantly mutating “mood” of intergenerational and psychosocial estrangement. Rooted in the racial (mestizo) origination of “man,” this mood was born of New World conquest and was inextricably



bound up with the invention of religion or religious man (Homo religiosus) to produce a new spatial or planetary order, an order of the West and its others.

Set in the context of Hernán Cortés’s sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas and his incursion into the Yucatan (present-day Mexico), Wright intended “When the World Was Red” to be an artistic inquiry into the psychic life of religion as it emerged from within the theopolitical consti-tution of modernity understood as a structure of rule or sovereignty. In their explication of the Western philosophical tradition on the problem of sover-eignty, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 67–136) make a strong case for this structure being split between those who rule and those who are ruled. This structure of rule, which quickly gave rise to international law, soon became a structure of racialization within which were born racially valorized and racially abjected identities. It quickly gave birth to what Spill-ers, as noted, called a pornotroped discourse of the flesh and a politics of melanin. Wright’s short story interrogates the birth of the modern world as a structure of estrangement whose production was mediated through reli-gious and, inside of this, theological thought forms.

What Wright is working to articulate in his short story cuts against the grain of how the category of religion is often considered. Foreshadowing what is only beginning to emerge in the critical scholarship on religion, Wright dramatizes religion’s formation inside of such global and social pro-cesses as colonization and racialization.9 He grasps that the operations by which religion and race have been naturalized inside of the invention of (modern) man are of a piece; they are two sides of the story of modern sover-eignty. “When the World Was Red” historicizes and thereby thinks through and between the racial invention of man by grappling with this invention precisely as part of the modern invention of religion in the early colonial con-text or within what Frank B. Wilderson III (2010) has called “a structure of antagonism.” Thus, the invention of religion has to do with the coming-to-be of (modern) man in relationship to his others. More specifically, this antagonis-tically structured arrangement arises as a mode of relation between (West-ern) man and his others that is nothing less than a hierarchy. It is an arrange-ment that values and thus evaluates cultic practices, now called “religious” practices. Within this hierarchical arrangement, cultic practices are judged as reflecting or bearing the signatures of truth (or not). And thus, they are judged as icons of (eternal) life (or death). Put differently, being interpreted hierarchically, cultic practices (now called religious practices) are evaluated within a structure of rule, an order of sovereignty. Religion, we might say then, is produced of the colonial encounter and is a feature of modern sover-



eignty. It is the name the colonizers granted the colonized, the name they granted their subordinate others within the order of (redemptive) sovereignty and as part of the machinery of the legitimation of the order of things.

Reflecting on Edward Said’s Orientalism, Gil Anidjar makes precisely the point I am trying to make, indeed, the point that Wright had been reck-oning with in the mid-1950s:

Colonizing the world since 1492, Christianity slowly granted other communi-ties and traditions, those it exploited or converted, massacred and “civilized,” enslaved and exterminated, new structures of authority and domination, new and newly negotiable configurations of power. It granted them the name it had only ever attributed to itself, the very name of “religion.” [But] it . . . did . . . this still in its own name, in the self-avowed name of Christianity, even if not always openly or even knowingly so. . . . It . . . did it all by determining the terms of ensuing negotiations, the terms of discourse, and chief among them was religion. (Anidjar 2008: 46)

And so, a certain crippled and crippling Christian imagination lay behind the production of the patriarchal order of man and his others and behind the production of the religion of man (the “true religion”) and his others (the other religions of the world or “world religions”). And if, as Anid-jar (2008: 47) also argues, it is the case that the distinction between reli-gion and the secular is also born/e with/in the making of man and his oth-ers, then the turn to the secular does not signal an escape from the rule of religion.10 It is a moment within the will to sovereignty—something else that Wright was coming to understand all too well.

Wright’s story may be read as an examination of precisely this struc-ture of rule-as-religion (and the secular), which governs the split between those who rule and those who are ruled, between those designated the living and those who Abdul JanMohamed (2005) in his recent study of Wright named “death-bound subjects.” Indeed, JanMohamed by way of Wright tells the story of modernity as a death scene. But what “When the World Was Red” clarifies—JanMohamed does not comment on this story—is that Wright grasped that modernity understood as a death scene has its condition of pos-sibility in early modern European colonialism (or the new spatial ordering of the planet) and in relation to chattel slavery and its afterlives. Indeed, Wright has echoes of lynching reverberate in his story of sixteenth-century con-quest. But further still and more to the point I am making in this essay, Wright wants to decode the discourse about “the gods” (let’s call this “the-ology”) or more specifically the discourse tied to belief in “the gods,” in the



making of modern subjectivities. His concern is with how the structures of belief connected to the dawning of modernity/coloniality yet mark the present and what futures or futurities there might be beyond the now.

What is Wright’s claim regarding “the gods”—both the Aztec gods and the Christian God—and about modernity as a structure of belief? His contention in “When the World Was Red” is that the so-called weakness of the Aztec gods (leading to the defeat of the Aztecs) was not the reason behind the conquering of the Aztec empire. By extension, the would-be righteous-ness and strength of the Christian god is insufficient to explain the military success of Cortés and his soldiers. Rather, as Lou Turner reads Wright’s story, the Aztec defeat and the European victory were the effect of a certain collision of peoples (Turner 2003: 168). Indeed, I want to follow Turner in his reading of Wright’s story as a microanalysis of the transformation of inner consciousness on the part of the Aztecs and Cortés and his soldiers alike. The transformation of consciousness—which, if Saidiya Hartman (2008) is right, the historical archive around colonialism (and to some degree even the history of chattel slavery, which emerges inside of the history of coloniality), has been unable to capture and cannot capture—is perhaps the vital fac-tor for Wright; it explains the defeat of the Aztecs and the conquest of the Europeans. “When the World Was Red” thus probes the transformation—or, to use a theological vocabulary, the conversion—that took place in the experience of the contact itself wherein the consciousness (individual and social) of both Aztec and conquistador was fundamentally altered. The con-tact moment of conversion and how it unfolded set in place a specific “mood,” as Wright calls it, that has become constitutive of the modern, an orientation into which we have been thrown.

Though Wright does not explain precisely what he means to convey with his “mood” concept, the term has Heideggerian valences, and we do know that Wright read Heidegger deeply as part of becoming acquainted with existentialism. Heidegger’s notion of Stimmung, which has been brought into English by a number of translators of Heidegger’s texts as “mood” and also as “attunement,” as Jonathan Flatley explains, “is directly related to [Heidegger’s] broader project” (Flatley 2008: 20). As Heidegger puts it in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “Moods [Bestimmungen] are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Moods are the how according to which one is in such and such a way” (quoted in Flatley 2008: 20–21). They indicate how we are in the world, how “things always appear to us as mattering or not mattering in some way” (21). And crucially, “any kind of political project must have the ‘making and



using’ of mood as part and parcel of the project; for, no matter how clever or correct the critique or achievable the project, collective action is impossible if people are not, so to speak, in the mood” (23).

With this Heideggerian and existential notion of mood in the back-ground, we can say that Wright’s “When the World Was Red” is an attempt to artistically render and thereby to “master [the] mood” of modernity (Hei-degger quoted in Flatley 2008: 23). The story portrays modernity’s mood as a tripartite, structuring mood of race/religion/coloniality, modernity as this structure of belief. Further still, the story seeks to dramatize this tripartite mood and its theological substrate and do so “by way of a counter-mood; [for] we are never free of moods” (Heidegger quoted in Flatley 2008: 23). Flatley also observes in his explication of Heidegger’s mood concept that moods and countermoods are produced out “of practices, situations, and encounters” (23). Therefore “one must come to know what kinds of practices, situations, or encounters . . . are capable of producing a counter-mood” (24). Wright writes the story of the mood of race/religion/coloniality or the mood of sover-eignty in the modern world from a countermood that will come to be called Black Power in the 1960s. Wright was thinking through this already in the preceding decade, most especially in Black Power, which was published in 1954, one year before he wrote “When the World Was Red.” Thus, it is the countermood of “black power” that gives Wright a vantage from which to interrogate the mood of modernity as a mood of racialization and as a struc-ture of belief. He is given to see that the mood of modernity and racializa-tion, the incubator inside of which a conversion of sorts has taken place, intergenerationally marks us. This mood is nothing less than the splitting up of the human according to an antagonism between Europeanization and non-Europeanization. This split, this mood understood as the split con-sciousness of “the human,” of man, is a strategy of planetary consciousness. This consciousness and mood would eventually come to bear the name “glo-balization.” Although Wright was certainly interested in the spectacular facts of conquest by way of the Moctezuma-Cortés encounter, he was more deeply interested in this mood. Or as Lou Turner puts it, inside “the new historico-racial schema originating out of [the colonial] encounter” was the “historico-religious schema produced by the encounter. . . . [The] two form a synthetic whole as the natural history of racial modernity” (Turner 2003: 175). It was this “natural history” that Wright was most interested in.

“When the World Was Red” tracks the moment of arising, then, of the “West [as a kind of] insane asylum” (Moten 2003: 39), of Western civi-lization as a strategy of global consciousness tied to a psychic strategy of



maximum exclusion through negative incorporation. Wright concludes his story about the problem of the psychic structure of racial formation by asking whether there can be a movement of escape from within the incar-ceral structures of racialization that constitute the modern world. In this regard, Wright’s story poses the fundamental question that the authors in this issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly confront and variously respond to.

But what of Wright’s own handling of this question in his attempts to theorize race and modernity? Although Wright himself does not formu-late a well-developed answer in “When the World Was Red,” he does ges-ture by way of a countermood of “black power” in a paratheological direc-tion at a crucial moment in the story. It is the only moment in the story in which a woman, an indigenous woman of color, appears. And her appear-ance, the appearance of black/nonwhite female flesh, has everything to do with the religiotheological problematic that Wright isolates in telling the story of when the world turned red as a blood-drenched dramaturgy of sac-rifice or atonement.

There are two sides to the problematic Wright tells. One concerns the place of religion among the Aztecs. What historical knowledge Wright acquired about the colonial incursion into the Yucatan probably came from his reading of William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and His-tory of the Conquest of Peru (Fabre 1990: 127). But Wright set himself the task not of telling the history of conquest but rather of telling what is ghostly inside of the history, what the official record of the archive works—some-times knowingly, but often unknowingly—to silence in an effort to contain the static or cacophony, we might say, of history. So understood, even when speaking officially the archive also records static, as it were, disturbances to history’s peace. For Wright, a central task of fiction, indeed of the artist, is to give form to that static, to give it a “blue-jazz” sound as it “[wells] up from [the] downstairs” of history, as Wright has his paratheologically named pro-tagonist of his 1953 novel The Outsider Cross Damon put it (2003: 178). Work-ing at the intersection of the historical and the fictive (see Hartman [2008: 12]), Wright produced “When the World Was Red” as counterhistory, as a kind of “blue-jazz” story meant to give form to what is ghostly inside the archive. He presents an Aztec leader, a Moctezuma, caught between “the social and religious principles of his culture and those of Western civiliza-tion at the time of Cortez’s expedition” (Fabre 1993: 430). Internal to Mocte-zuma’s world was a contradiction, Wright contends, between native religion and indigenous sovereignty that eventually was exploited in the moment of conquest. On the one hand, Aztec religion bound the people together



through the land, thus creating a community in which “the gods” mediated social relationships through the natural elements (i.e., the sky, the rain, the harvest, etc.) that represented them. And so the gods mediated community through nature. What we see here, to quote Wright, is that “in fact, in the days of Montezuma, there was no division between the sacred and the secu-lar: they were one. . . . Life was tribal, structured on the emotional sinews of family relations, and a man was owned as much by his tribe as the tribe owned him. No other kind of existence was conceivable, for there had not been, in Aztec memory, any other kind of living” (Wright 1955: 20). And yet, the gods also selected a leader, a Moctezuma, to lead the people as their sov-ereign. And “therefore, when Montezuma acted, he was executing the will of the gods” (20). But there is one more piece to the picture, as Wright paints it:

The cloud that blemished Montezuma’s emotional horizon concerned a vague prophecy that the Aztec kingdom was fated soon to end. Computation of the courses of the stars had told him that the Aztecs had once lived under a totally different dispensation, that they had once served another god, that their stately and bloody rituals of human sacrifice had once been forbidden. That legendary oracle had further stated their old god had been the one who had taught them the arts of civilization, and that, in a celestial war, the god had been defeated and driven from the land; both that that god, as he had departed eastward, had vowed that one day he would return and claim his own. So minutely had Montezuma and his priests calculated this prophesy, that they had determined the day and season of this god’s return. Hence, during April of every year, Montezuma and his priests anxiously scanned the skies, lis-tened intently to the rumblings of volcanoes, observed minutely the eddying of streams, tabulated the behavior of men, women, and children, and espe-cially that of animals,—seeking always for a clue as to when the old god would return and reestablish the sway of his rule. (Wright 1955: 21)

Eventually, the new gods, in the form of the conquistadors and the “God-man” Cortés, do come, and Moctezuma finds “his heart,” Wright says, “on both sides; his respect for the new gods filled him with guilt toward the old gods” (27). He tries to appease this guilt by offering human sacrifices to the old gods. Moctezuma’s hope is that with the old gods appeased through sac-rifice, Cortés and his soldiers, which is to say, the white gods, will suffer defeat in the battles to come and Moctezuma’s faith in the old gods will be restored. But defeat continued, and all the while Moctezuma becomes increasingly enthralled by the white gods. As the defeat deepened, Wright imagines Moctezuma as being kept alive by only “one motive . . . : the intense



interest he had in the manners and habits of the white soldiers. . . . They were men of another stamp. What precision they had! There was no finery, no glitter, no feathers, no color; their movements were functional, precise, full of dash and force, and Montezuma watched them with an envy charged with despair” (34).

As the story unfolds we witness a process by which Moctezuma’s vision of his old gods is shattered; concomitantly he comes to desire Cortés and all that Cortés represents. Moctezuma comes to see himself as inferior to Cortés and his men, and Moctezuma is ultimately alienated from himself even as he is becoming alienated from the land he is losing to the conquis-tadores. Geographic alienation and psychic alienation are within the same (religious) economy. And yet the process that Wright is literarily portraying is one by which Moctezuma comes to desire conversion, to be “saved,” which is to say, to be like Cortés or become white. Wright is trying to open a psycho-political window onto the processes of racialization and thus onto the birth of racialized—both nonwhite and white—subjectivities. As such he is dra-matizing Moctezuma’s entry into the consciousness of “race” that is being born in this moment. Through Cortés’s dialogue with Moctezuma and his explication of Christian doctrine, particularly Christological doctrine or the doctrine of the identity of Jesus Christ, Wright represents how the power and the word of God were sutured, as Sylvia Wynter (1989) explains, to the word or the Logos of man. In this, Wright attempts to portray white racial consciousness as a form of divinization and as constitutive of the mood of modernity. Wright offers an analytic of race, by way of its representation in the superiority of Cortés and as coded through the superiority of the white gods, that interpreted racial formation and racialization as a kind of replace-ment theology, as a political theology of sovereignty or rule. Racialization does divinizing—and demonizing—work in the constitution of modern identity. Literary scholar Jared Hickman writes:

Racial discourse . . . exemplifies the modern metacosmic imagination: it is the prototypical attempt to articulate a “global” conception of life in which ultimate sense is derived from the process of defining—or divining—the meanings of the human diversity of the planet. Launching this claim man-dates recourse to a largely metacritical and historiographical mode. A prelimi-nary effort must be made to strip away the scholarly scaffolding surrounding “race,” which, until recently, has . . . tended to ensconce the term firmly in a narrative of “secularization” and the rise of “science” that ultimately opposes—even as it acknowledges continuities between—racial thinking and religion, particularly Christian universalism. (Hickman 2010: 156–57)



Wright’s story, especially the dialogue between Moctezuma and Cortés, exemplifies Hickman’s point. In the dialogue, Moctezuma enters into a kind of homosocial desire for Cortés, to become (like) him and access his power; Cortés enters into a kind of God consciousness, to be (in his imagination, at least) “sicut deus” or “like God,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1997: 111–14) might say, in the accomplishment of whiteness.

But perhaps what is most important in the dialogue between Mocte-zuma and Cortés on the intricacies of Christian theology is the translator. This translator is “Marina”—also known as Malintzín and La Malinche—“the native woman whom the Spaniards had picked up”; she “did the inter-preting” (1955: 30), no doubt as their “forced” consort.11 She is rapeable flesh for them and as such their translator, the index of the simultaneity of plea-sure and violence at the site of language. Under these terms, she makes her fleeting appearance in the midst of the patriarchal dialogue at the heart of the story. As mentioned above, this is the only time that a woman appears in the story, though as translator/interpreter she is everywhere present to it as its invisible or nonexistent but fleshy and hermeneutical condition of possi-bility. In short, she is the unacknowledged site of Wright’s countermood of black (masculine) power that makes possible his countermythological gaze back onto the racial order. She is the condition of possibility of Wright’s emerging theory of race and modernity. As a kind of refused “mariological” figure, one through whom the racial sons of god and the sons of men are born, this woman-of-color-as-translator invaginates the story, as it were. She is its disavowed but enabling potentiality and yet its witness to the colonial/racial wound of the modern world, its bruising of the flesh.

Paratheological Folds, or Futures of Blackness

I want to draw this essay to a conclusion by elaborating this point. In saying that Marina is the invaginating force of Wright’s paratheological story, I am inflecting Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the fold, which he elaborated in relation to Michel Foucault’s and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought (see Deleuze 1988, 1992). What is crucial for my purposes is that Deleuze’s notion of the fold provided him a way to talk about subjectivity. That is, the notion of the fold provided him a way of talking about one’s relation to oneself, even one’s affective relation to oneself, as a technique of mastering or containing the swarm or what can proliferate out of the hatcheries of one’s being. It is a technique of dominating one’s self, and thus of “having” oneself (under con-trol) by contracting the self. Self-mastery thus activates a kind of (mastering)



subjectivity. But this activation of subjectivity as a possessing, owning, or “having” of oneself through containment of the swarm, as it were, or the pos-sible proliferations of the self, is a folding of that which is outside inside. By way of “When the World Was Red,” I want to suggest that the outside that is folded in, or the inside that is itself a fold of the outside, is the sea, that “oce-anic feeling” that emerges in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents between “religious sentiment” (“a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, oceanic”) and childhood helplessness (Freud 2005: 36, 47–48). It is the Atlantic. It is the Middle Passage, that in relation to which modern subjectivities—we can now say modern masculin-ized subjectivities—emerge. Indeed, with its Latin origins from marinus, Marina’s name (like marine) means “from the sea.” And thus in fact as Derek Walcott (1987) has said, “The Sea Is History.” But to gloss Walcott, we must say that history is a fold, a particular type of fold. It is a certain trajectory that flows from coloniality and from the scene of the sea. It is that trajectory that refuses becoming, that refuses the invaginated instability and impurity of the sea, in the interest of activating a mastering or “having” subjectivity.12 This trajectory is the history of being, as it were, in refusal of the “between.” In Wright’s story, Marina is she who is to be mastered, the flesh to be mas-tered, in the colonial pleat or fold of history. In fact, I want to suggest that she is the fold of the fold of history; history’s double(-consciousness), its repressed maternal function and material condition of possibility. She is the fold that interanimates history, particularly, the subjectivities of Moctezuma and Cor-tés. Thus, Marina is the force internal to their homo- and theosocial history of desire.

To return to Spillers we can say that, as a figure of the middle, or of the between, or as the (sexual) passage between Moctezuma and Cortés, Marina is the “middle passage” of the text that is “When the World Was Red.” She is its invisible “American grammar book,” the hidden grammatology of the text, even to Wright’s own black masculinist voice. She is the text’s flesh, the flesh out of which modernity as a scene of racial/sexual subjection is both produced and folded or reproduced. As the silent/silenced condition of the modern/colonial world’s coming to be, she is its “pornotroped” wound, but also by way of Spillers, its paratheological potentiality and possibility toward futures that are oceanic, that are not final.

It is precisely this potentiality that Wright, in trying to escape racial incarceration at the midpoint of the twentieth century, is brought face-to-face with, though his overdetermined masculinity left him at a loss as to what to do with the figure of Marina, that is, with the maternal function. He remains



uncertain about how to think from the intersection of race and sexuality in the making of the modern world and its protocols of sovereignty. Indeed, though gesturing to this intersection, he did not know how to enact a move-ment wholly from the middle of the sea, from Marina’s flesh, from the Mid-dle Passage as potentiality. That is, he can think only of Marina, to use Cross Damon’s language, in terms of “woman as body of woman” (Wright 2003: 54). He is caught, as Nathaniel Mackey might say, within “certain constraints that racialized dichotomy and the grid of expectations help keep in place” (2005: 242).

And yet what is important about Wright’s thought, at least for me, is not just its limitations but its experimentalism, its paraontological groping, its hopeful reaching out to execute a paratheological artistry of the self, one that must confront the oceanic or the “heritage of the mother,” to take up “the ‘power’ of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within” (Spillers 2003a: 228). Wright’s black power writings of the mid-1950s, of which “When the World Was Red” is a part, were feeling their way, to gloss Mackey one more time, toward “post-expectant futures” (2005: 216). Wright’s artistry was an experiment in “blue-jazz” unfolding, an exercise in counterfolding modernity’s ontotheological protocols of racialization and thus in having life speak through death. What I am calling here Wright’s counterfolding artistry, or his effort paratheologi-cally to rethink and reperform blackness, is something like what Deleuze with his fractal ontology of becoming might call “superfolding.” The “super-fold,” Deleuze says, signals that “unlimited finity” that would free life itself into its manifold possibilities (1988: 131). The superfold is life that wells up, in Wright’s language, “blue-jazz”-like from history’s “downstairs,” from the death scene (1953: 178). It is that “affirmation not of, but out of death” (Moten 2003: 209). It is these possibilities of life or the futures of/that is blackness that the essays collected here hold open.

Notes

I am grateful to my graduate student and research assistant SueJeanne Koh for her editorial assistance in helping put together this issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. She has been invaluable. I have also benefited from conversations with Priscilla Wald, Fred Moten, and Riz-vana Bradley on aspects of this essay. And finally, parts of this paper were presented as talks given at the University of Chicago (February 2013) and Yale University (March 2013). Conversa-tions with Robert Gooding-Williams during my visit to the University of Chicago were partic-ularly generative for my continued thinking about sovereignty, religion, and theology in rela-tionship to the black radical tradition. 1 I have all but completed an essay—“The Question of the Flesh: A Theological Inter-

locution with Hortense Spillers”—that develops this argument.



2 For a wide-ranging theological analysis of Zurara’s Chronicle, see Jennings (2010). 3 In the next section of this essay, I address more directly the distinction and relation-

ship between religion and theology. 4 To read Bonhoeffer in this way is to reckon with his blackness, if I may risk such a

heterodox thought for Bonhoeffer studies and theological studies, or his having been seized by an in-sovereign blackness, by the “between,” by the force of relationality, that renegade movement of the futures of blackness.

5 It is precisely this fugitive history that is the subject of my forthcoming work The Color of Sovereignty: A Fugitive History of Political Theology.

6 Wright (1955) detailed his “Celebration of Life” project in a letter to Ed Aswell, his publisher at McGraw-Hill, and appended his short story “When the World Was Red” to the letter. The letter is part of the Richard Wright Papers at Yale University’s Bei-necke Library.

7 I treat Wright’s “Celebration” project, generally, and “When the World was Red,” par-ticularly and in relationship to modern political theology, in my forthcoming work The Color of Sovereignty. Two important engagements with Wright’s “Celebration” project and “When the World Was Red” are Fabre (1993) and Turner (2003). In her examination of Wright’s journalistic writings, including Black Power (1954), written during the same period as “When the World Was Red,” literary scholar Eve Dunbar (2012) makes a strong case regarding Wright’s effort to find a space of existence “between nation and world.”

8 The word theosocial I borrow from my colleague Priscilla Wald. 9 See for example, Chidester (1996), King (1999), Dubuisson (2003), Masuzawa (2005),

and Josephson (2012). 10 “Christianity invented the distinction between religious and secular, and thus made

religion. It made religion the problem—rather than itself. . . . The two terms, religious and secular, are therefore not simply masks for one another. Rather, they function together as strategic devices and as mechanisms of obfuscation and self-blinding, doing so in such a way that it remains difficult, if not impossible, to extricate them from each other as if by fiat” (Anidjar 2008: 47).

11 For more on the complex figure of Marina/Malintzín/La Malinche, see Gloria Anzal-dúa (1987), Mary Louise Pratt (1993), and Lanyon (2000). I have placed “forced” in scare quotes to gesture to the complexity of what it meant for Marina to be Cortés’ collabora-tor and lover. While recognizing the overarching symbolic role that Marina has taken on in relation to womanhood in Chicano/a culture, Pratt notes that there is debate as to the meaning of her symbolism and how to interpret her relationship with Cortés. Should her collaboration with him be interpreted “as the passion-driven acts of a woman in love; as the inevitable playing out of female subordination; as revenge on the society that devalued and objectified her; as political strategy linked to her own lust for power; as an archetypal manifestation of female treachery and woman’s inconstancy” (Pratt 1993: 860)? As for Anzaldúa, she sees her as the betrayed rather than the betrayer. “Not me sold out my people but they me,” Anzaldúa (1987: 21–22) repeats three times, a sentiment that aligns more with the events as they likely unfolded his-torically: as a slave, La Malinche had little choice in beginning a sexual relationship with Cortés or serving as his translator. After her own people gave her, and twenty other women, as gifts to the Spanish expedition, her survival depended on her ability to



make herself indispensable to Cortés. And yet, La Malinche is not reduced to the abuse meted out to her. She becomes a fold, as it were, for Anzaldúa herself, a site for the gen-eration of thought. Indeed, La Malinche is the Indian woman and “the Indian woman in me,” Anzaldúa says, “is the shadow: La Chingada, Tlazotleotl, Coatlicue. They are what we hear wailing for their lost daughters” (1987: 22). What I am suggesting in my reading of Wright’s story is that Marina is a kind of fold for him too, a feminine fold, the fold of the “female within,” as Spillers puts it (2003a: 228), though he can only grope toward and reproduce her subjection in an attempt to stage his own escape from the cage that is modern racialization through an overdetermined black masculinism.

12 My use of invaginate in this sentence has moved away from Deleuze’s sense of the out-side on the inside and more in the direction of Moten’s use of it as informed by Jacques Derrida, who speaks of it as a “principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasiti-cal economy. In the code of set theories . . . I would speak of a sort of participation with-out belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form by invagination an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of such division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless” (Derrida quoted in Moten 2003: 258n5).

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