“Why has this new race or way of living come into existence now and not before?” the Epistle to Diognetus asks and then sets Christians in contrast to Greeks and Jews. Other apologetic texts from the second-century suggest similar contrasts, using ethnic and racial language to describe Christian identity. This raises a question regarding Christians in this era that is important for understanding early Christian cultural engagement: If Christianity was a “new race,” what were the specific markers of this new identity in the second century? And in what ways did Christians maintain other ethnic and cultural identities in the second century?
Judith Lieu (Neither Jew Nor Greek) and Denise Kimber Buell (Why This New Race?) have already provided helpful foundations for some aspects of this discussion. My research adds to the discussion in two ways: Based on a detailed engagement with the Apologia of Aristides and other second-century texts, (1) I articulate three key markers of identity in second-century Christian ethnographic discourse: a people’s origins, object of devotion, and social ethics. (2) Additionally, I identify two distinct tendencies in Christian constructions of identity, (a) a more separatist tendency (e.g., Aristides) that marginalized other identities and (b) a nested-identity tendency (e.g., Justin, Epistle to Diognetus) that hierarchicalized identities. In this, I employ categories drawn from Philip Esler’s application of Henri Tajfel’s social-identity theory to early Christian identity formation. The result is both an engagement with and a correction of Lieu and Buell with reference to second-century apologists.
What this research also contends is that the second-century Christian apologies were not written primarily to win over unbelievers or even to achieve tolerance for the church. The in-group language of the apologies suggests that the audience for these apologies was the church and their primary goal was identity formation. The apologies were meant to shape the church into an alternative political structure in which an eschatological identity governed all other identities without transcending or superseding those identities.