Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (review)

In Why This New Race, Denise Kimber Buell offers a theoretically sophisticated analysis of ethnoracial discourses in early Christian writings before the legalization of Christianity in 313 A.D. She employs a "prismatic approach" for dealing with the ideas of race and ethnicity as a strategy for avoiding the essentializing discourse that pervades many discussions about these concepts and as a means for bringing together three historical vantage points: the present, the recent historical past, and the ancient historical period (p. 33). Central to her analysis is the premise that race and ethnicity are characterized by a "double-sided discourse" of both fixity and fluidity. By focusing on the dynamic interplay between these two phenomena, Buell complicates and rethinks assumptions about early Christian self-definition, especially with respect to its claims about universalism and inclusiveness.

The book is organized as follows: an introduction, which develops a theoretical foundation for understanding four strategic uses of ethnic reasoning for early Christians; five chapters that examine in detail various examples of the ethnic reasoning in early Christian writings and the rhetorical situations that produced ideas of "peoplehood"; and an epilogue, which discusses the implications of this study for both ancient and contemporary interpretations of race, ethnicity, and religion. A bibliography of ancient and modern sources and two indexes (ancient sources and general) are also included.

Throughout the book, Buell analyzes a wide range of texts generated by writers such as Clement, Origen, and Justin Martyr to illuminate the four strategic uses of ethnic reasoning: (1) defining ethnicity through religious practices, (2) viewing ethnicity as mutable even if "real," (3) universalizing ethnicity and religion, and (4) using ethnic ideas as polemic. She also exposes the "messier" interpretive process that would result if scholars examined (and articulated) the "motives behind and implications of the historical mappings and reconstructions we produce." In this regard, her book engages ethnic reasoning in order to offer insights into the historical legacy of both contemporary racism and Christian anti-Judaism. Though her arguments are persuasive and grounded in a wealth of scholarship dealing with the ancient and contemporary intersections of Christianity, race, and religion, Buell leans more toward the ethnoracial discourses embedded in ancient texts than towardthe contemporary methodologies and interpreters that are used to interpret these texts. Thus, her claims regarding "race/ethnicity" are more general and suggestive when it comes to assessing modern scholarly discussions about ethnoracial discourses. Despite this limitation, all who utilize this book will be delighted with the sources provided and the eloquent manner in which Buell encourages scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity to examine the interconnections "among our own commitments and values, the ways we have been trained to think and interpret, and the goals and ideologies of ancient texts" (p. 167).

Buell's study is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature dealing explicitly with race and ethnicity in biblical and extra-biblical writings: Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Fortress, 1994); Mark Brett, Ethnicity and the Bible (Brill, 1996, 2002); Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (Routledge, 2002); Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (Routledge, 2002); and Rodney Sadler, And They Were All Gathered Together in One Place: Minority Biblical Criticism (Society of Biblical Literature, forthcoming). All of these studies isolate the need for interpreters of ancient Jewish and Christian literature to engage the conceptual categories of race and ethnicity as integral to understanding the origins of Christianity; Buell's analysis of ethnoracial discourses in Why This New Race demonstrates why such scholarship is no longer the exception, but the rule for contemporary biblical scholarship and historical reconstructions of early Christianity.