Ethnicity and Sacrifice in the Early Christian World

Philippa Townsend argues that early Christian sacrificial ideas were shaped by a widespread discursive association between ethnicity and sacrifice in ancient Mediterranean texts. Christians used sacrificial rhetoric to establish and perpetuate their identity as a people in ways that have shaped modern ideas about race and religion.

Philippa Townsend argues that early Christian ideas about sacrifice were developed within the context of a widespread discursive association between ethnicity, race and sacrifice in ancient Mediterranean texts. She demonstrates that sacrifice was understood to be deeply effective in boundary-making between ethnic groups and in the creation, sustenance, and sometimes destruction, of lineages and peoples. The author focuses on a series of case studies from the second century BCE to the fourth century CE, across Jewish, Christian, Middle Platonist, and Neoplatonist traditions, including the book of Jubilees, the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, the Gospel of Judas, and the works of Justin Martyr, Celsus, Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and the Emperor Julian. The study demonstrates how these authors deployed sacrificial and ethnic rhetoric in distinctive ways depending on their own social, political and theological contexts, in order to articulate various conceptions of peoplehood within a changing imperial context. This nexus between ethnic and sacrificial reasoning was fundamental to the development of early Christians’ identity, their sacrificial theologies, their development of anti-Jewish supersessionism, and their responses to empire. Far from rejecting or spiritualizing sacrifice or ethnic self-definition, many early Christians viewed sacrifice as a powerful mode of establishing and perpetuating their own sense of peoplehood within the ethnic landscape of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, the rhetoric of universalism and particularism, spirit and flesh, blood and seed, barbarism and civilization that animated these ancient sacrificial and ethnic debates has contributed decisively to modern conceptions of race and religion.

Introduction
Chapter 1. Race, Ethnicity, and Sacrifice: Ancient and Modern Intersections
A. Race and Ethnicity: Definitions and Approaches
B. Biblical Interpretation in the Construction of Ethnicity
C. Ethnicity, Universalism, and the Construction of "Religion"
D. Scholarship on Jewish and Christian Difference
E. Ancestry and Fluidity in Ancient Ethnic Definition
F. Sacrifice and Ethnicity in the Greco-Roman World
G. Sacrifice and Descent
H. Blood, Seed, and Spirit
Chapter 2. Jubilees' Narratives of Sacrifice and Descent
A. Jewish Narratives of Sacrifice and Descent
B. Jubilees: Text and Contexts
C. The Noachic Covenant: Cult and Cultivation
D. Sacrifice and the Seed of Abraham
E. Priestly Nation, Holy Seed
F. Conclusion
Chapter 3. Sacrifice, Priesthood, and Descent in Hebrews and Beyond
A. Ethnicity and Sacrifice in New Testament Texts
B. Sacrifice and Kinship in Hebrews
C. Melchizedek: Priest without Genealogy
D. Melchizedek: Priest of the Uncircumcised
E. Conclusion
Chapter 4. Sacrifice and Dissent in the Gospel of Judas
A. "Race" in the Gospel of Judas
B. Generative Blood and Christian Sacrifice
C. Sacrifice and Supersessionism
D. An Anti-Sacrificial Gospel?
E. Conclusion
Chapter 5. Justin and Celsus: Ethnicity in Middle Platonic Context
A. A Dialogue with Whom?
B. The Relationship between Justin and Celsus
C. Ethnicity in Platonic Tradition
D. Conclusion
Chapter 6. Justin and Celsus: Debating Ethnicity and Sacrifice
A. The Philosophical Setting of the Dialogue
B. Israelite Prophecy as Barbarian Wisdom
C. Sacrificial Cult and Ancestral Tradition
D. The Ethnic Implications of Daemonic Sacrifice
E. Sacrificial Ethnogenesis
F. The Universal Sacrifices of the New People
G. Conclusion
Chapter 7. Neoplatonic Debates on Ethnicity, Sacrifice, and Empire
A. Origen's Theology of Race
B. Daemons, Ethnicity, and Sacrifice
C. Porphyry and Iamblichus on Sacrifice
D. Universalism and Empire
E. Julian and Sacrifice in the Fourth Century
F. Conclusion
Conclusion

• By (author) Philippa Townsend