Yonatan Binyam (UCLA)
Recent works have pointed out the problem of fusing ancient and medieval categories of peoplehood, demonstrating the need for scholars to conceptualize more dynamic ways of thinking about identity in the premodern world. For example, scholars of antiquity have called attention to the fallacy in many historians’ assumptions that the term race is anachronistic in the study or the premodern past, while the term ethnicity is not (Gruen 2013; McCoskey 2002). In early Christian studies in particular, several works have shown the limitations of religion as an analytic category (Nongbri 2013; Mason 2019), while others have highlighted the salience of ethnic reasoning in early Christian texts (Buell 2005; Byron 2002; Berzon 2018).
Despite the clear demonstration of the problematic uses (and prohibitions) of terms like race, ethnicity, and religion, some scholars have voiced explicit objections to the use of race in premodern past (Jordan 2001; Seth 2020). In contrast, a number of works have made the case for the utility of race as an analytic category in studying premodern societies. Broadly classified as premodern race studies, works in medieval studies (e.g. Heng 2018; Kaplan 2018; Whitaker 2021), as well as Classics (e.g. Haley 2009; Murray 2021; McCoskey 2012) have provided useful analytical models for thinking dynamically about premodern instances of racism. Such historians draw on the works of race theorists (e.g. Stoler 1997; Goldberg 2009; Winant 2007, 2009) as well as philosophers of race (Taylor 2013; Hochman 2020) to conceptualize analytic models that can account for the intersecting semantics of race, ethnicity, and religion.
In this paper, I draw on these scholarly discussions and debates in order to rearticulate certain aspects of late-antique Christian literature that are pertinent to the history of race in the longue durée. I begin by briefly analyzing the debates over the use of race as an analytic category in the study of the premodern world before arguing for its usefulness for early Christian studies. I then draw on models in premodern race studies to propose four different modes of racialization that appear in late-antique Christian texts: 1) The production of genealogical ethnographies that create and reinforce racial stereotypes; 2) the signification of black bodies as demonic; 3) the legitimation of biopolitical social structures through literary devices such as monstrification and de-centring; 4) the religious justification of imperial ideologies.
While early Christian discourses did not invent race-thinking ex nihilo, they are critical for our understanding of the various reinventions (Heng 2018, p. 3) of racial discourse introduced by early Christian texts. My main argument is concerned with outlining the significance of apocalyptic modes of thinking that influence the Christian reinventions of Greek and Roman racialized tropes. In particular, apocalyptic dualisms (e.g. carnal vs. spiritual, white vs. black, salvation vs. damnation, saints vs. sinners, the Church vs. the World) become enduring symbols that Christian writers employ to differentiate themselves from racialized groups like black people, Jews, and barbarians.