A Race Apart? Jews, Gentiles, Christians

By David F. Wright

[David F. Wright is Professor of Patristic and Reformed Christianity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.

This is article two in a four-part series “The Making of the Early Christians,” delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 5-8, 2002.]

Seldom do Christians, even in Baptist churches, think of themselves as a baptismal community, that is, as a community whose Christian identity finds definitive focus in the experience of baptism and what leads up to it and follows from it. By what kinds of terms, then, would Christians classify themselves as a social or corporate reality? The word “community” has been used by some. Most Christians would disown categories such as “club,” “society” or “association,” which are colorless and inadequate. “Fellowship” might have some supporters, as would “family.” And then there are more activist terms like “movement” or even “army.” Very few would propose “people” as in “Christian people,” and hardly any would think of Christians as a “race.” In a letter addressed to “the exiles of the Dispersion” in northern Asia Minor Peter told his readers, “You are a chosen race [γένος], a royal priesthood, a holy nation [ἔθνος], a people [λάος] for God’s own possession” (1 Pet. 2:9). Each of these four designations is pregnant with suggestiveness of its own, but they all express the important early Christian conviction that Christians in any one place or region belonged to a people, the people of God, which constituted a new corporate presence. This self-consciousness became a significant feature of the remarkable confidence of the Christians in the first three centuries. This article pursues this dimension of the making of the early Christians.

If one holds that Constantine’s conversion and then patronage of the church had at least something to do with his perception of the strength or potential of Christianity in the empire (which seems a reasonable position to hold), this strength cannot have been a matter of statistics alone—total numbers as a percentage of the population of the empire. It must have included the cohesiveness of the empirewide church as a whole, with a unifying framework of mutual recognition and leadership that gave reality to its sense of being a single and distinctive people, with a unique divine destiny.

Including Gentiles

The first conflict that the Jesus movement encountered in clarifying its identity was in breaking out of the swaddling clothes of its matrix in Judaism, which was in essence an ethnic religion. The outcome of those first-generation controversies over the inclusion of Gentiles still retains a critically important place in Christian history, unparalleled by any subsequent dispute. All believers since then are beneficiaries of that pioneer crossing of the frontier between Jew and non-Jew. All Christians stand eternally indebted to those Jewish believers in Jesus who came to acknowledge that “God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). Without such obedience to Cornelius’s heavenly vision in Caesarea, Jesus’ followers might have remained no more than a variety of reform Judaism.

The early church could never forget the rock from whence it was hewn, and this was an abiding awareness that gave a missionary edge to all its activities. For all the remarkable growth of the church in the early centuries, explicit mission strategies or obvious missionary enterprises are barely discernible. Yet a continuing sense that Peter, Paul, and other apostles had successfully vindicated the mission to the Gentiles—a sense that was kept alive in part by continuing controversies with Jewish people—instilled an all-pervasive missionary ethos into patristic Christianity. Temporal and geographical proximity to Jerusalem no doubt helped, as did the prebaptismal catechesis that told the story of salvation history from the beginning to the present.

The crucial point is that, once the first boundary had been breached, no other boundary—religious, racial, cultural, linguistic, or geographical—possessed any sanctity. Christianity could tolerate no “no-go” areas. This point is emphasized not only because it was influential in the making of the early Christians, but also because some believers in Western Christianity seem to be turning their backs on the missionary imperative, without whose vigor in earlier centuries they would not now exist. Christianity, after all, was indigenous in only one setting—first-century Palestinian Judaism. Everywhere else, from Antioch and Alexandria to Argentina and America, it arrived by cross-cultural translation. To lose sight of this fact is to run the risk of absolutizing some later inculturated expression of Christian faith, as when, for example, Celtic spirituality is presented as indigenous to parts of the British Isles. It is even more disastrous in an age of religious pluralism to abandon mission to adherents of other faiths, selfishly content to go on enjoying for ourselves the Christian legacy of earlier missionary achievements.

All One in Baptism

The earliest sense in primitive Christianity of being a new people highlighted its inclusiveness. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor freeman, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). This verse is preceded by these words: “All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (v. 27). Baptism was a single gate for all; it was the great leveler. And following verse 28 are the words, “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise” (v. 29)—the promise of blessing for all the families of the earth. The parallel text in Colossians 3:11, “no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all,” is similarly preceded by what would become, if it was not already, a major baptismal image of stripping off one’s old self and clothing oneself with the new (vv. 9–10). To the same effect, Paul wrote, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13).

Not surprisingly in the earliest decades this note of inclusiveness focused on the grafting in, to use Paul’s image in Romans 11, of branches of a wild olive tree on to a cultivated olive tree, from which some of the natural branches had been cut out because of their barrenness. But in time a sharper emphasis on the distinctiveness of the new people, over against both Jews and Gentiles, came to the fore. The way was prepared by that distancing between Christian Jews and the rest of Judaism which took place in the last years of the first century and early decades of the second. Christian apologetic to the Jews with deplorable speed became barbed with polemical offensiveness, which found expression in an argument that distinguished between two streams in the history of Israel from the beginning—the faithful, obedient people of God—and the rebellious, stiff-necked and disbelieving Israelites, whose successors were the Jews who killed Christ and persecuted Christians.

This was a tendency “to antedate the rejection of the Jews and the emergence of the Church to the beginning of revealed history.”[1] In this context some Christian writers claimed (wrongly) not only that Christians are “the true Israel” but also that they are the original people of God. The irony was that inflated pretensions of this nature were often taken over from Jewish apologists, who had asserted, for example, that the world had been created for the sake of the Jews, whom all history, past, present, and future, must serve.[2]

The Third Race

Soon there developed the view that set Christians apart from the Gentile world as well as the Jewish, as a third people or “race.” The earliest extant apology by a Christian writer is that of Aristides, written around A.D. 125. It survives in different recensions. The Greek version, addressing the emperor, declares that “there are three classes of human beings in the world: the worshippers of the gods acknowledged among you, and Jews, and Christians.” The Syriac text, generally thought to be superior, divides humankind into four classes: barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians.[3] It is surely noteworthy that as early as this a Christian apologist felt able to elevate the Christians to such a level of comparison. The rest of the work gives summary accounts of the religions of the groups, coming last to the Christians, who “have come nearer to truth and genuine knowledge than the rest of the nations.”[4] Aristides then gave an attractive portrayal of how Christians live, as well as a brief report of their genealogy from Christ.

The unknown author of what is known as the Epistle to Diognetus, composed perhaps half a century after Aristides’ apology, works with a similar threefold classification, but without numbering. “I have noticed, my lord Diognetus, the deep interest you have been showing in Christianity…. You would like to know what God Christians believe in, and what sort of cult they practise … since they reject the deities revered by the Greeks no less than they disclaim the superstitions professed by the Jews…. Also, you are puzzled as to why this new breed [γένος] of men, or at least this novel manner of life, has only come into our lives recently, instead of much earlier.”[5]

Along similar lines Clement of Alexandria quoted from a lost and most probably apocryphal work known as the Kerygma Petrou (the “Missionary Preaching of Peter”), which may have appeared early in the second century. Peter’s message was, “Worship the one God not as the Greeks do, nor as Jews worship him, but worship him in a new way, by Christ…. [God] made a new covenant with us, for what belonged to the Greeks and Jews is old. But we, who worship him in a new way [καινῶς] by a third form [γένει] are Christians.”[6] According to Harnack, whose discussion of the third way of Christianity remains fundamental after a century (the first edition of The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries was published in German in 1902), this extract from the Kerygma Petrou is the earliest to enumerate the distinctiveness of Christianity as the third “race” after the Greeks and Jews.[7] All three witnesses cited identify the third way of the Christians as a distinctive form of worship.

Christians were no different from Jews in their rejection of all the cults of Greco-Roman paganism. The writings of the Christian apologists draw a sharp line between Greco-Roman religion, which was idolatrous and totally reprehensible, and the wisdom of Greek philosophy, toward which most of them adopted a more discriminating attitude. But pagan observers were far more mystified by Christian worship than by Jewish worship, for at least the Jews had a temple with an altar and a priesthood, and used a modest minimum of sacred vessels and objects, even in the local synagogue. True, they utterly forbade visual representations of God, but at least their cult was not totally immaterial—unlike those puzzling Christians, those ἄθεοι (atheists, literally “non-god people”), who had no temple, shrine, sacred precinct, altar, sacrifice, visible gods or goddesses, or any sacred artifacts at all.

So the third-people identity of the Christians, separate from Gentiles and Jews, was grounded in their distinctive worship. The making of the early Christians depended partly on their communal worship, to which only the baptized were fully admitted. Explanation in outline of what went on when the believers met together was a standard element in the best apologists, like Justin and Tertullian. Hence some of the most important early accounts of worship derive from apologies rather than liturgical texts. It is amazing that a network of small and still relatively sparse communities of Christian worshipers could sustain the claim to have brought into the world a new, third pattern of worship, worthy already to be counted after the two other dominant patterns known to the ancient world.

The evidence that this triad of Greeks (Gentiles), Jews, and Christians became “the church’s basal conception of history” is diffuse and often indirect.[8] Only once, it seems, in a treatise on calendrical calculation De Pascha, attributed falsely to Cyprian, written in 242–243, did a Christian writer say in so many words, “We are the third race [tertium genus] of humankind,” but in a context that affords no elucidation and therefore may suggest the familiarity of the description.[9] This conclusion probably finds support from several instances of the use of the phrase tertium genus by opponents, recorded in the writings of Tertullian of Carthage. He flourished just before and for a few years after the turn of the second and third centuries and is by far the most engaging and even entertaining of the ante-Nicene writers. He could not resist having some knock-about fun with this label stuck on the Christians as “the third race.” Interpreting it mischievously as implying the third stage of humanity above the brute beasts, still barely better than monsters, he asked who were the first and second. More seriously he continues, “But take heed lest those you call the third race take first place, since there is no people [gens] which is not Christian. Whatever people [gens] is the first, it is nonetheless Christian…. But it is for religion [de superstitione] and not for nationality that we are reckoned the third race, so that there are Romans, Jews, and next Christians. What about the Greeks then? … Besides, if those in the third rank are such monsters [i.e., as persecutors of Christians make them out to be], how must we regard those who precede them in first and second place?”[10]

The masterly craft of this passage is not easily glimpsed from a rapid reading. More briefly in his Scorpiace (“Scorpion’s Sting”) Tertullian taunts those Gnostics who taught that it was in heaven that men and women were called to confess Christ, not here on earth (and face possible martyrdom). Would they transport to heaven the whole apparatus of persecutions? “Will you set up there both synagogues of the Jews … which are wellsprings of persecutions—and heathen crowds with their own circus, indeed, where they can readily shout, ‘How much longer [must we put up with] the third race?’ ”[11]

A Distinctive People Scorned

It seems astonishing that the description of Christians as “the third race” was so well established by around A.D. 200 as to have lent itself to the sloganizing of the anti-Christian mobs on the terraces. In this setting “third race” reveals its potential to sum up with scornful contempt the sheer detestable outlandishness of these Christians. These are the sentiments in Celsus and in Caecilius in Minucius Felix’s Octavius. A badge of pride so easily became a hostile sneer.

Is it not scandalous that the gods should be mobbed by a gang of outlawed and reckless desperadoes? They have collected from the lowest dregs of society the more ignorant fools together with gullible women…. They have thus formed a rabble of blasphemous conspirators, who with nocturnal assemblies, periodic fasts, and inhuman feasts seal their pact not with some religious ritual but with desecrating profanation; they are a crowd that furtively lurks in hiding places, shunning the light; they are speechless in public but gabble away in corners.

They despise our temples as being no more than sepulchres, they spit after our gods, they sneer at our rites, and, fantastic though it is, our priests they pity—pitiable themselves; they scorn the purple robes of public office, though they go about in rags themselves. How amazingly stupid, unbelievably insolent they are.[12]

Why do they have no altars, no temples, no publicly known images? Why do they never speak in the open, why do they always assemble in stealth? It must be that whatever it is they worship—and suppress—is deserving either of punishment or of shame. Furthermore what is this unique god of theirs, what is his origin, where does he live, so solitary, so totally forlorn that no free nation has knowledge of him, nor any empire—not even the religious fanatics of Rome? The only other group to have worshiped one god is the wretched tribe of the Jews, but they did so in the open, with temples and altars, with sacrifice and ceremonial. But you can see that this god has neither power nor strength; he and his very own people are captives of the Romans, who are but men.[13]

You refrain from honest pleasures: you do not go to our shows, you take no part in our processions, you are not present at our public banquets, you shrink in horror from our sacred games, from food ritually dedicated by our priests, from drink hallowed by libation poured upon our altars. Such is your dread of the very gods you deny. You do not bind your head with flowers, you do not honour your body with perfumes; ointments you reserve for funerals, but even to your tombs you deny garlands; you anemic, neurotic creatures, you indeed deserve to be pitied—but by our gods. The result is, you pitiable fools, that you have no enjoyment of life while you wait for the new life which you will never have.[14]

More pertinent is the ridicule of Celsus, who compared the race of Jews and Christians to a cluster of bats or ants coming out of a nest, or frogs holding council round a marsh, or worms assembling in some filthy corner, disagreeing with one another about which of them are the worse sinners. Celsus ridiculed them as saying, “God shows and proclaims everything to us beforehand, and he has even deserted the whole world and the motion of the heavens, and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone; and he sends messengers to us alone and never stops sending them and seeking that we may be with him for ever…. [We are] like worms who say: ‘There is God first, and we are next after him in rank since he has made us entirely like God, and all things have been put under us, earth, water, air and stars; and all things exist for our benefit and have been appointed to serve us.’ ”[15]

Such contemptuous dismissal of the Christians makes sense when set alongside the size of the movement (about 200,000 by A.D. 200, perhaps 0.35 percent of the population of the empire)[16] and its cultural level (by around A.D. 180 only six hundred Christians were sophisticated, fluent literates, according to one estimate),[17] and some Christians’ grandiose claims for this “new race.”

Christians, the Soul of the Body

One of the best-known self-portraits of the early Christians comes in the Epistle to Diognetus, written perhaps not long after Celsus wrote. After laying out how Christians differed from other human beings only in behavior, the author added the following:

To put it briefly, the relation of Christians to the world is that of a soul to the body. As the soul is diffused through every part of the body, so are Christians through all the cities of the world. The soul, too, inhabits the body, while at the same time forming no part of it; and Christians inhabit the world, but they are not part of the world…. [He then speaks of the antagonism between soul and body.] The soul, shut up inside the body, nevertheless holds the body together; and though they are confined within the world as in a dungeon, it is Christians who hold the world together…. Such is the high post of duty in which God has placed them, and it is their moral duty not to shrink from it.[18]

Thus Christians are a distinct, new third race, but they also hold the key to the fortunes of the whole population. This remarkable self-confidence finds expression in a handful of pre-Constantinian Christian writers who discerned a providential parallel or even partnership between the Christian church and the Roman Empire. Melito of Sardis pointed out to Emperor Marcus Aurelius that “this philosophy of ours” arose “during the great reign of your predecessor Augustus” and has brought “great blessings to your empire.” The empire, Melito said, has suffered no mishap since the reign of Augustus, which is “most convincing proof that the flourishing of our religion has been a boon to the empire.” So it will continue, Melito warned Marcus Aurelius, “if you protect the philosophy which rose under Augustus and has risen with the empire.”[19]

Hippolytus is even more audacious. “As Jesus was born under Augustus, whence the Roman empire developed, and as the Lord also called all nations and tongues by means of the apostles and fashioned believing Christians into a people, the people of the Lord, and the people which consists of those who bear a new name—so was all this imitated to the letter by the empire of that day, ruling ‘according to the working of Satan’; for it also collected to itself the noblest of every nation, and, dubbing them Romans, got ready for the fray.”[20] Harnack comments, “The ecumenical range of the Roman empire is, therefore, a Satanic aping of Christianity … a plagiarism against the church by founding the great imperial state of Rome!”[21]

Similar more temperate sentiments are found in Origen. By Eusebius of Caesarea, the first historian of the church and Constantine’s spin doctor, those sentiments were hugely elaborated into a breathtaking theology of the Christian empire and the Christian emperor. The starting point of such reflection in ante-Nicene writers is the providential significance, perhaps already hinted by Luke the Evangelist, of the birth of Jesus falling in the reign of Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman world, who by common consent ushered in an era of peace and prosperity which lasted into the early third century.

Among the Christian apologists of the second and third centuries it was almost commonplace to assert that no group of people benefited the emperor and his empire as much as the Christians. Origen, for example, responded to Celsus, who complained that by refusing to fight in the Roman army the Christians failed to contribute to the empire’s security. But Origen responded to him by noting that the Christians prayed for victory for the Roman army. As an intercessory priesthood Christians were more effective than troops at the frontline of conflict. As for Celsus’s dread of the empire’s frontiers being overrun by the barbarians if all the population became Christian, Origen calmly retorted that universal conversion would eradicate war and hence the need for armies.[22]

These arguments were advanced at a time when the alliance between the church and the Roman state that followed Constantine seemed inconceivable to non-Christians—and also to some Christian writers such as Tertullian. These claims and pretensions were redolent of a strong sense of divine purpose on the part of this new people, this third race, of Christians. Not only did it enjoy a distinct identity alongside Greeks and Jews, but in some way it was the key to the well-being of the empire as a whole, present and future.

A further stage in the developing self-confidence of this new people of God is marked by the apologetic claim, found most clearly in Justin and Clement of Alexandria but present in other writers also, that the best of both Greek and Hebrew wisdom found its fulfillment in Christianity. The argument from prophecy became established from the first, in Matthew’s Gospel, for example, and it remained of great importance in apologetic writings. Prophecy served not only to lay claim to the Old Testament as a book belonging to the Christians, but also it mitigated the offense of novelty from which a religion known to have started “under Pontius Pilate” inevitably suffered.

Christianity, the Fulfillment of Greek Wisdom

Altogether more ambitious was the affirmation that the elements of truth in the Greek philosophical tradition had been “sown” by the preincarnate Logos of God, Jesus of Nazareth. This, of course, was another means of anchoring the new Christian people in the more distant past—and indeed in the classic past of Plato, Socrates, and the Stoics, as far as the intellectual history of the Greco-Roman world was concerned. This stupendous claim was formulated by the year 200, some time before Christianity itself produced towering leaders like Origen and Augustine. This claim bolstered the self-consciousness of this minority, persecuted movement. No wonder Celsus and other pagan observers found the Christians insufferably self-important.

Markus singled out this “fundamental intuition” of Adolf Harnack for special endorsement. Harnack, Markus observed, appreciated “the strong consciousness diffused among early Christians of their being a people: a sense ubiquitous in the period from the New Testament to the time of Eusebius” in which Christians were designated as the “third race” (tertium genus).[23] “It is indeed amazing! One certainly had no idea that in the consciousness of the Greeks and Romans the Jews stood out in such bold relief from the other nations, and the Christians from both, that they represented themselves as independent ‘genera,’ and were so described in an explicit formula. Neither Jews nor Christians could look for ampler recognition.”[24] This certainly greatly helped to make the early Christians who they were.

Notes

1. James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (London: Soncino, 1934), 97.
2. Adolf Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 1:301–2.
3. Aristides, Apology 2.
4. Ibid., 15 (Syriac).
5. Epistle to Diognetus 1, in Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, ed. Andrew Louth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 142.
6. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6:5.
7. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 1:309.
8. Ibid., 313.
9. Pseudo-Cyprian, De Pascha Computus 17, trans. George Ogg (London: SPCK, 1955), 16.
10. Tertullian, To the Nations 1:8.
11. Tertullian, Scorpiace, 10.
12. Minucius Felix, Octavius 8.3-5, trans. G. W. Clarke, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 39 (New York: Newman, 1974), 64.
13. Ibid., 10.2–4.
14. Ibid., 12.5–6.
15. Origen, Against Celsus 4.23, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 199–200.
16. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7.
17. Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 213.
18. Epistle to Diognetus 6.
19. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 1:329. This extract from Melito’s lost Apology is preserved by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.26.7–8.
20. Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 4.9, quoted in Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 1:331. There is no English translation of this work. It is edited with a French translation by M. Lefvre in Sources Chrétiennes, vol. 14 (Paris: Cerf, 1947), 278–79.
21. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 1:331.
22. Origen, Against Celsus 8.73, 68.
23. Robert A. Markus, “The Problem of Self-Definition: From Sect to Church,” in The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries, vol. 1 of Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E. P. Sanders (London: SCM, 1980), 1 (italics his).
24. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 1:349, quoted in Markus, “The Problem of Self-Definition: From Sect to Church,” 1.