Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (review)

Interest in ancient ethnic, cultural, and religious identities has experienced a dramatic increase in recent years. Whereas earlier treatments produced surveys of ancient Greek and Roman perceptions of Ethiopians, Byron's contribution in this slim volume is to explore the ways that such perceptions could be manipulated by Christian authors to function within larger literary and theological programs. She terms such manipulations "ethno-political rhetorics" and seeks to locate the ways in which "vituperative and idealized representations" of Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Blacks "were used to prescribe the boundaries and self-definitions of early Christian communities" (p. 6) by drawing on the insights of rhetorical criticism, ethnocriticism, and gender criticism (chap. 1). In order to unpack the variety and force of such rhetorical strategies, she constructs a taxonomy of all possible uses of these ethnonyms and the geographical locations associated with them in both classical and Christian literature. The various markers of ethnic identity, from mythical idealization and sexual temptation to physical phenotype, are thus classed within three main rhetorical categories governing the geopolitical, the moral-spiritual, and the descriptive characterizations (chap. 2). An approach that seems at first promising quickly disappoints, however, as Byron's taxonomical survey of the sources remains fairly thin at best (e.g., her chronologically and literarily incongruous pastiche of quotations, from Herodotus, Ammianus, and Lucian, without a single word of evaluative commentary, p. 40), or plain false at worst (e.g., her adducing of Martial's poem on his sexual attractions to a black girl as the sole evidence for Ethiopians as "models of virtue" in classical authors, p. 38). Such errors are compounded by others later in the book (e.g., the assertion that the pagan Philostratus was a "desert father" and his Life of Apollonius of Tyana was representative of monastic views of Egypt and Ethiopia, p. 79).

The second half of the book focuses on particular areas identified in her taxonomy in order to offer closer readings of the relevant sources. In the first of these (chap. 3), she isolates blackness as symbolic for evil and vice. Readers may not be persuaded by her argument that the two brief references to the devil as "the Black One" in the Epistle of Barnabas constitute a thoroughgoing rhetorical strategy in themselves, or her suggestion that the application of the epithet "black" to the devil was influenced by the presence of Ethiopians in Alexandria (pp. 60–65). Oddly, where a case might more plausibly be made for connecting symbolic blackness with Ethiopian ethnicity in the Shepherd of Hermas, Byron refuses to take the term genos in its racial sense, instead opting for the vague "way" (pp. 67–68). Origen's well-known statements from the homily and commentary on Song of Songs are adduced as more straightforward evidence of the Christian equation of (Ethiopian) blackness with sin (pp. 72–75), though other relevant passages are missing from the discussion (e.g., de Orat. 27 [PG 11.516A-B]; Select. Ezech. 30 [PG 13.824C-825A]). Byron finds firmer footing in her discussion of the perceived role of Ethiopians (male and female) in narratives of sexual temptation in Egyptian monastic literature (chap. 4). While negative portrayals of Ethiopians in such temptation scenes need not depend upon a heightened Romanization of Egyptians in late antiquity (p. 79), such scenes certainly exhibit an attempt to construct a more compelling definition of ascetic virtue. An analysis of the Ethiopian as a trope for delineating variously either heresy or moral exemplarity concludes the book (chap. 5). Marred by the periodic misconstrual of sources, Byron's emphasis on ethno-political rhetorical strategies nonetheless constitutes a serious methodological advance in the scholarship on ancient Ethiopians and Christian ethnic perceptions.