Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Ethnological Apologetics in the Apologia of Aristides
The final installment of chapter two in my doctoral dissertation
I am currently writing the dissertation for my second Ph.D., in Church History and Ecclesiology at Stellenbosch University. The tentative title of my dissertation is “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist.” As I complete each portion, I will post the segment for anyone who wants to follow my progress. I will not be including the footnotes in these posts, so each chapter will typically be a couple thousand words longer than what’s posted here.
Chapter 1a: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Introduction”
Chapter 1b: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: The Apologia in the Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph”
Chapter 1c: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Syriac Text, Greek Papyri, and Armenian Translations”
Chapter 2a: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Cosmological, Ethnological, and Doxological Apologetics”
Chapter 2b: “Aristides of Athens as Ecclesial Apologist: Ethnological Apologetics in the Apologia of Aristides”
2.4 Ethnological Apologetics the Apologia of Aristides
Viewed from a modern perspective, the four people-groups in the Syriac and Armenian Apologia of Aristides may not seem to align with one another. “Greeks” in modern usage is an ethnic or racial grouping, and “barbarians” seems like a cultural epithet; “Jews” might be understood as a cultural, ethnic, or religious term while “Christians” tends to be restricted to a religious profession and perhaps a cultural descriptor. However, these people-groups only seem misaligned in modern contexts because “race”—or, to use the alternative term that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, “ethnicity”—has been widely perceived as inherent, immutable, physiologically perceptible, and biologically grounded (see, e.g., Prichard 1847:304–310; Dieffenbach 1848:15–16; for further discussion, see Buell 2001:450–451, 455; Malkin 2001:3–4; Tuplin 1999:47–48; Wilhite 2007:120–130).
But these were not necessarily the ways in which ethnic categories were understood in ancient contexts.
2.4.1 Ethnic identities in ancient Mediterranean contexts
When the Greek historian Herodotus defined Greekness in the fifth century BCE, the markers he identified included “the same blood and same speech and common shrines of gods and sacrifices and the sameness of our manner of life” (“ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα,” Herodotus, Hist. 8.144.2). Although this description did mention blood kinship (“ὅμαιμόν”), the other markers Herodotus included were habitual and practical, not physiological or innate (Tuplin 1999:49). Furthermore, it seems that Herodotus may have listed these markers in ascending order of significance, with cultural considerations outweighing blood relationship (Hall 2002:193). Decades later, the Greek orator Isocrates declared that “Greek” connoted a mental disposition (“τῆς διανοίας”) and shared instruction (“τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας”) more than a common nature (“τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως”) (Isocrates, Paneg. 50).
The Sophist skeptic Favorinus lived in the same era as Aristides of Athens. Although born a Celt in southern Gaul, Favorinus refashioned himself into a model Greek by habituating himself to Greek speech, thought, culture, and sartorial customs (“τὴν φωνὴν μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τὴν γνώμην καὶ τὴν δίαιταν καὶ τὸ σχῆμα τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐζηλωκώς,” [Pseudo-]Dio Chrysostom, Disc. 37.25). Ethnic identity was, in the case of Favorinus, less about biological lineage or physiological appearance and more about a “frame of mind (dianoia) and a way of life (ethos)” (Malkin 2001:11). This understanding of ethnic identity influenced Hellenistic Jewish thinking as well. According to Josephus, writing in the late first century CE, the law of Moses welcomed anyone who shared in the Jewish way of life (“τῇ προαιρέσει τοῦ βιοῦ”), regardless of genealogical descent (Cont. Ap. 2.210).
Further examples might be identified, but these examples are sufficient to suggest that ethnic categories in antiquity represented mutable conceptual and ascriptive boundaries which provided individuals and groups with central organizing frameworks for defining their identities (Hall 1997:24; Tuplin 1999:53; Buell 2001:451; Berzon 2018:193–195; see also Barth 1969:15–16). Ethnic identities could be ascribed based on kinship, but they were also socially constructed and could be negotiated, practiced, and learned (Buell 2001:451, 466–469; Harland 2009:6; Gruen 2020:2–3; Horrell 2020:69).
Having recognized the functions and foundations of ancient ethnic identities, many scholars of antiquity have moved away from primordialist models which view ethnic identities as innate and immutable as well as instrumentalist perspectives that treat ethnicity as a choice grounded in political interests (Malkin 2001:1–28; Berzon 2018:192; for models of ethnic identity, see Barth 1969:9–38; Geertz 1973:41–42; Hutchinson and Smith 1996:8–12). Ethnic identity in the ancient Mediterranean world may be regarded instead as a historical force that derives its essence from long-term existence as a belief widely shared (Malkin 2001:16-18). According to classicist Jonathan Hall, the criteria that established ancient ethnic identities included (1) subscription to a myth of common descent and kinship, (2) association with a specific territory, and (3) a sense of shared history (Hall 2002:9–19; cf. Hutchinson and Smith 1996:6–7; Smith 1986:22–32). Myths of common descent and kinship could be constituted through a variety of perceived and actual relations, including consanguinity, adoptive kinship, shared historical narratives, and fictive genealogies (see, e.g., Dench 2005:222–235, 258; Malkin 2001:15).
2.4.2 Ethnic reasoning in early Christian self-definition
Considered in this way, the ethnological categories of “barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians” in the Apologia of Aristides are revealed to be more parallel than modern people might initially imagine. Although Christianity was not associated with any specific terrestrial territory, Christians certainly claimed adoptive kinship and a common history. By the early second century if not earlier, Christians perceived and presented themselves as a people-group that functioned in parallel relation to groupings that modern people would identify as ethnic, racial, and cultural. Religiosity and ethnicity were, in some sense, mutually constitutive, and religious practices could function as indicators of ethnic and civic identity (Buell 2001:458–459; Buell and Johnson Hodge 2004:243–250).
It is not surprising, then, that second-century Christian apologists used ethnic reasoning and ethnological discourses to define their identities as Christians and to defend common professions and practices.
Early Christians used ethnic reasoning to legitimize various forms of Christianness as the universal, most authentic manifestation of humanity, and it offered Christians both a way to define themselves relative to “outsiders” and to compete with other “insiders” to assert the superiority of their varying visions of Christianness. (Buell 2005:2)
In these early ethnological discourses, the church was presented as a people-group—a γένος and έθνος—constituted not by blood but by faith. The Epistle to Diognetus referred to Christians as a new type of humanity (“καινὸν τοῦτο γένος,” Diog. 1). Those who received faith in Christ were a distinct people-group gathered and preserved by God, according to Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 6.39, 42; 41.2, 6). And, although Justin did not explicitly deploy γένος or έθνος to define Christians, he did clearly classify Christians as a distinctive people assembled from barbarians and Greeks (Apol. A 5, 7, 14). In these texts, as in the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea two centuries later, “many elements that are easily subsumed by moderns into a category of ‘religion’ are deeply embedded in an ethnic framework” (Johnson 2006:232). The Apologia of Aristides reflects this vision of shared Christian kinship and develops an ethnological discourse to specify “the religious practices that continue to perpetuate the kin bonds and collective identity of its participant members” (Buell 2005:46).
It was not at all uncommon for ethnological discourses to reinforce one group’s identity by attempting to classify other groups as foreign, unnatural, or strange (Lieu 2004:269–297), and this formed one aspect of of Aristides’ apologetics strategy. From the perspective of Aristides, the order and motion of the cosmos require a sole and supreme deity who is the unmoved mover and singular sustainer of the cosmos. Because the people-group that worships the true God will live in a manner congruent with the deity that nature requires, Aristides pointed to Christians as worshipers of the true God by comparing the devotion and ethics of each genus of humanity. Aristides seems to have accepted a common assumption in his context which suggested that a flourishing people-group was a society that lived in conformity to natural law. “Among philosophers of the early principate it [was]… a widely shared view that the ideal society [was] a community of virtue and that such a community (whether a household or a state) [was] in accordance with nature” (Morgan 2015:494). The ethnological apologetic in the Apologia of Aristides compares barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians, with the goal of determining how closely each group’s devotion and ethics accorded with the deity that nature necessitates.
2.4.2.1 The relationship of Christian identity to other identities
According to Aristides, the deity necessitated by nature accords exclusively with the community of Christians—which inevitably provokes a series of questions about this text and early Christian self-perceptions. If early Christians perceived themselves as a genus of humanity parallel with barbarians, Greeks, and Jews, did their faith in Jesus supersede these other identities when they became followers of Jesus? How did early Christians view the ethnic and social connections that formed the boundaries of their identities before they became followers of Jesus? Did the church’s faith replace previous identities?
To comprehend the ethnographic discourses in the Apologia of Aristides in their initial context, it is vital to understand the perceptions of these differing ethnic and social identities among early Christians. Although Aristides did not explicitly answer the questions that I have raised, the patterns of ethnic reasoning in his apology and in other early Christian texts provide important insights that reveal how differing ethnic and social identities may have been perceived in his context.
2.4.2.1.1 Christian identity as replacement of former ethnic and social identities?
One possibility is that the early followers of Jesus formulated a new ethnic identity that replaced their previous ethnicities. New Testament scholar Love Sechrest has contended that the apostle Paul constructed precisely such an identity.
Sechrest is right to recognize that the identities of early Jesus-followers were framed in ethnic terms. She also correctly notes that Christian identity took precedence, in some sense, over other identities (Sechrest 2010:228). However, according to Sechrest, this new identity in Christ eclipsed previous ethnic identities in such a way that Paul and other Jewish persons became former Jews when they embraced the way of Jesus (Sechrest 2010:5, 15, 156, 210). Daniel Boyarin agrees that, for Paul, Christian identity superseded Jewish identity. According to Boyarin, Christian identity did not, however, replace Jewish identity, as Sechrest suggests. Instead, Christianity suppressed racial and ethnic identities by obliterating the legitimacy of these distinctions in favor of a Greek-inspired universal and spiritual Jewishness (Boyarin 1994:9, 94, 151–152).
Neither the New Testament texts nor the writings of the second-century apologists, however, sustain such claims. Sechrest’s argument in particular seems to overlook the most real and radical discontinuity in Paul’s epistles. The primary discontinuity of identity that Paul presented was not between Jewish identity and a new identity embodied in the church; it was between the former lives of Gentiles and their new participation in the divine promises made to Abraham. As N.T. Wright has pointed out,
Paul insists that even when (Jewish) branches are cut off from the olive tree it remains “their own olive tree” (Romans 11:24)…. When a Jew believes in “the one who raised from the dead Jesus our lord” (Romans 4:24) this constitutes an act of “resurrection” whereas when a Gentile believes Paul sees that event as an act of “new creation” (Wright 2013:1448–1449)
Paul’s call for unity in Christ did not require the erasure of other identities (Johnson Hodge: 2007:126). Neither was Paul attempting to form communities in which ethnic identities became irrelevant, as J.M.G. Barclay seems to suggest (Barclay 1995:104). Paul was seeking instead to form communities in which Jews as Jews in Christ, Greeks as Greeks in Christ, and barbarians as barbarians in Christ were recognized together as the offspring of Abraham. Paul the follower of Jesus was no longer a Torah-observant Jew in zealous conflict with other ethnic and social identities; this transformation did not, however, obliterate his Jewish identity. In the words of New Testament scholar Jarvis Williams, “In Christ, Paul was no longer ‘in Ioudaïsmos.’ But he was still a Ioudaios” (Williams 2020:28). Christian identity did not supersede other ethnic and social identities. And yet, if Christian identity did not supersede previous identities, how did Christian faith impact these identities?
2.4.2.1.2 Christian identity in the context of nested ethnic and social identities
In ancient Mediterranean contexts, the same individual might simultaneously live with multiple ethnic and social identities. Neither Sechrest’s nor Boyarin’s reconstructions take such pluralities into sufficient account. It was entirely possible for persons in the world of the early Christians “to hold plural ethnic and social identities as a result of multiple group affiliations” (Harland 2009:156). Among many people-groups throughout the empire, ethnic identities could and did coexist with supranational loyalties to Rome (Walbank 1972:154–168). Furthermore, Jews maintained membership in commercial guilds without diminishing their Jewish identities or their social ties to the synagogues (Harland 2009:158). “People who regarded themselves as Judean in one context,… when they were attending Jerusalem to take part in the Passover ceremonies, might have activated other ethnicities they derived from other contexts, for example, by birth and upbringing in other places, such as Galilee or Idumea” (Esler 2003:358).
To become a follower of Jesus was not to eliminate existing ethnic or social identities. Instead, early Jesus-followers seem to have arranged multiple identities in “a hierarchical order with the unitary good on top” (Johnson Hodge 2007:130–131; see also Buell and Johnson Hodge 2004:247). Faith in Christ produced a new kinship, and this new kinship was more than mere metaphor (Johnson Hodge 2007:4–5). The life of faith was described in ethnic and social terms, yet the believer’s new kinship did not obliterate, supersede, or transcend previous identities. Instead, a new identity of faithfulness to Jesus provided early followers of Jesus with a unitary good which relativized and reordered other identities. In the case of Gentiles, this transformation required giving up the aspects of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds that stood in opposition to their Christian identity, but they were not thereby required to embrace the indicia of Jewish identity.
Philip Esler has referred to this participation in multiple, hierarchicalized ethnicities and affiliations as the practice of “nested identities” (Esler 2003:49–60; see also Johnson Hodge 2007:126). Justin seemed to imply the practice of precisely such an identity when he described the life of the church in the mid-second century: “The ones who hated one another, even destroyed one another, and would not do anything in common with those of other tribes because of their customs, now since the revealing of Christ live in familiarity with them” (Apol. A 14). Christian identity did not obliterate differences in tribes and customs; instead, kinship in Christ became a unitary good that relativized and reordered every previous identity.
The concept of a unitary identity that coexisted with other identities without replacing them may already have been present in the context in which Aristides wrote his apology. To become a Roman was, in some sense, to participate in a universalized identity that did not cancel ethnic or regional identities (Pohl 1998:1).
Romans did not conceive of their identity as underwritten by a unique language or a common descent in the same way that some others (including Greeks) did, and their traditions of origin stressed the progressive incorporation of outsiders. Roman identity was based to an unusual degree on membership of a political and religious community with common values and mores (customs, morality and way of life). (Woolf 1994:120)
It is not inconceivable that this notion of a unitary Roman identity that reordered other identities may have influenced early Christian ethnological discourses (Olster 1995:22–28).
Faith in Christ produced a new kinship, and this new kinship was more than mere metaphor…. The believer’s new kinship did not obliterate, supersede, or transcend previous identities. Instead, a new identity of faithfulness to Jesus provided early followers of Jesus with a unitary good which relativized and reordered other identities.
2.4.2.2 Ethnological discourses as apologetic
Regardless of whether or not Roman imperial notions influenced Christian conceptions of a universalized identity, Christians certainly saw their identity as the living exemplification of a universal ideal for all humanity (Buell 2005:164). Yet Christians were also, at the same time, a particular people-group that lived according to an ethical habitus that did not cohere with the values of their neighbors. Perhaps most important, Christians gathered regularly in sacramentally-bound communities which demanded the transformation of adherents’ lives. If the formation of such communities had not been vital to the Christian habitus from the earliest stages of the church’s development, Christians would not likely have seemed subversive or strange. And yet, to participate in a Christian identity was unavoidably to be identified with church (Rowe 2010:103, 126).
While acknowledging the ways in which the early church borrowed from existing categories of ethnic self-definition, I concur with Philippa Lois Townsend that Christians “did not merely reproduce the ethnic categories of those around them” (Townsend 2009:279). Christian ethnological discourses also interrogated, revised, and even subverted these categories in ways that no longer fit neatly or easily within existing identity structures. A universalized ideal for all humanity articulated in ethnic terms as a distinctive identity in a particular community produced an inevitable tension in Christian ethnological discourses. This misfittedness also contributed to the widespread perception of Christians as a subversive threat to the social order. To gather regularly in a sacramentally-bound community that confessed Jesus as Lord and simultaneously to call all people to join this community was to make a political declaration that set the church at odds with its cultural context (Rowe 2010:103–134; see also Trueman 2020:453). Thus the church challenged the absolute supremacy of the Roman Empire and yet simultaneously refused to challenge the empire on the empire’s own terms.
By the end of the second century CE, the notion of Christians as another people-group was not only an ethnological apologetic made by Christians but also an antagonistic epithet aimed at Christians by their neighbors (Harnack 1908, 1972:1.267–278). Christians in Carthage were lambasted by opponents as a “third race” after Romans and Jews, according to Tertullian (“tertium genus deputamur, non de natione ut sint Romani, Iudaei, dehinc Christiani,” Ad nat. 1.8). In this ethnology, the people-groups competing with Christians and Jews were not Greeks or barbarians but Romans—which positioned two universalizing identities, Christian and Roman, in conflict with one another. There seems to have been space, in the minds of Tertullian’s interlocutors, for the strangeness of Jewish devotion, since the practices of the Jews were venerable and traceable to a particular region where their temple once stood. There was no place, however, for a third genus of humanity which lacked the antiquity of the Jews and which refused to join in universal devotion to the deities of Rome but which also invited people from every tribe to join them in declaring the lordship of Jesus.
In his reply, Tertullian attempted to show that Christian faith did not spawn disloyalty to the Roman Empire: “Agnoscimus sane Romanam in Caesares fidem. Nulla umquam coniuratio erupit, nullus in senatu vel in palatiis ipsis sanguis Caesaris notam fixit, nulla in provinciis affectata maiestas” (Ad nat. 1.17; see Schneider 1968:12–13). And yet, whether knowingly or unknowingly, Tertullian’s interlocutors recognized that the church’s identity represented a political reality which, while not incompatible with contributing to Rome’s flourishing, was ultimately incompatible with the universal supremacy of Rome. By actualizing this new political reality through a new culture and not through revolution or coup, the church rejected the entire Roman premise of power and constructed an alternative way of conceiving reality—all of which brings this research back to the apologetic strategies in the Apologia of Aristides.
The church’s identity represented a political reality which, while not incompatible with contributing to Rome’s flourishing, was ultimately incompatible with Rome’s universal supremacy. By actualizing this new political reality through a new culture and not through revolution or coup, the church rejected the entire Roman premise of power and constructed an alternative way of conceiving reality
2.5 Ethnology and Ecclesiology in the Apologia of Aristides
What I have demonstrated in this chapter is that Aristides’ apologetics strategies were ecclesial and ethnological. Although the argument begins with arguments from order and motion, Aristides was convinced that a people-group’s devotion and ethics could reveal whether or not their deity was the one necessitated by nature. Thus the Apologia of Aristides turns from cosmology to ethnology to determine which people’s deity is the true God. The four genuses of humanity in Aristides’ ethnological discourse suggest both that ethnic and social identities in the ancient Mediterranean world were not fixed and that Christian identity did not obliterate or supersede other identities. Instead, the new identity of faithfulness to Jesus functioned as a unitary good which relativized, reordered, and transformed other identities. Although Christians utilized familiar patterns of ethnic reasoning to explain this new identity, Christians also subverted existing categories of ethnic and social identities in ways that revealed the incompatibility between Christian faithfulness and the universal supremacy of the empire.
In a context in which Christianity was perceived as a threat to the social order, Aristides provided no proofs for distinctively Christian beliefs, nor did he offer historical evidences for the resurrection of Jesus or other events described in the Scriptures. Instead, Aristides defended the faith by clarifying the identity of the church and by articulating the compatibility between the order of nature and the nature of the church. His apologetic was an ecclesial and ethnological apologetic that emphasized Christian identity and presented the church itself as a defense of the faith.
