RT Article
T1 Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community
JF Currents in biblical research
VO 16
IS 2
SP 191
OP 227
A1 Berzon, Todd S.
LA English
YR 2018
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1576124584
AB This article outlines how recent scholarly interventions about notions of race, ethnicity and nation in the ancient Mediterranean world have impacted the study of early Christianity. Contrary to the long-held proposition that Christianity was supra-ethnic, a slate of recent publications has demonstrated how early Christian authors thought in explicitly ethnic terms and developed their own ethnic discourse even as they positioned Christianity as a universal religion. Universalizing ambitions and ethnic reasoning were part and parcel of a larger sacred history of Christian triumphalism. Christian thinkers were keen to make claims about kinship, descent, blood, customs and habits to enumerate what it meant to be a Christian and belong to a Christian community. The narrative that Christians developed about themselves was very much an ethnic history, one in which human difference and diversity was made to conform to the theological and ideological interests of early Christian thinkers.
K1 Church History : Primitive & early church, ca. 30-600
K1 Ethnicity
K1 Genealogy
K1 Greekness
K1 Kinship
K1 UNIVERSALISM (Theology)
K1 Community
K1 Early Christianity
K1 Ethnic Reasoning
K1 nation/nationality
K1 Race
K1 Universalism
DO 10.1177/1476993X17743454