Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging by Maia Kotrosits (review)

In Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging, Maia Kotrosits challenges readers to rethink a presupposition so fundamental it is rarely even articulated, arguing that an array of writings from the first and second centuries that are typically understood to be predicated on or constitutive of Christian identity are not, in any important sense, invested in Christian self-understanding, individual or collective. Rather, she contends, the so-called Christian texts on which she focuses are haunted by diasporic trauma: “If a text shows interest in the temple, priesthood, sabbath, Israelite prophetic history, Judea, Genesis stories, or any number of other elements of Israelite tradition . . . , that to me suggests a participation in Israelite diasporic culture” (14). Kotrosits’s argument is deliberately affective, steeped in the affects haunting the texts she discusses, attentive to ways that affects of contemporary readers inform the readings they produce, theoretically reliant (not surprisingly) on the growing body of affect-oriented criticism.

Addressing the affective stakes of Christian historiography, in Chapter One Kotrosits situates herself among other recent scholars who have engaged the question of identity in the first and second centuries, arguing that there “are many ways to understand the appearance of the term ‘Christian’ in the late first and early second centuries . . . without presuming a unitary, translocal phenomenon that finally comes to be named” (37). In Chapter Two, Kotrosits relies on Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan to argue that contemporary attempts to understand early Christian identity are consonant with an imperial program that demands to know, “Who are ‘these people’? What are ‘they’ about?” (60). As a result, Kotrosits argues, scholars fail to do justice to the reality that belonging is messy, the reality that there are not “ready-made Christians, understanding themselves as such, hiding out everywhere around the Mediterranean” (60). She attempts to reframe both 1 Peter and the letters of Ignatius as instances of a latent Israelite diasporic belonging. In Chapter Three, Kotrosits rejects the treatment of Acts of the Apostles as a charter document for Christianity, emphasizing Paul’s failure to own the epithet “Christian” as well as the work’s intense engagement with the temple. Chapter Four takes off from the opening scene in the Secret Revelation of John (SRJ), locating John in the vicinity of the temple before he turns, grieving, to the desert. Although Kotrosits detects “diasporic pangs and longings” (132) in SRJ, she also allows that the text “gathers alienated, lost, or otherwise un-homed others, who might or might not think of themselves as part of Israelite diaspora. And does it matter whether they do nor not, really?” (145).

Chapter Five highlights the simultaneous denigration of and obsession with place, specifically the place of the temple, in Hebrews and the Gospel of John. Kotrosits argues that despite their attraction to transcendence, both works ultimately replace attachment to place with attachment to flesh. Noting that many scholars have focused on pleasure and joy in reading the Gospel of Truth, she focuses instead on the trauma implicit in the text. Chapter Six suggests that the Gospel of Truth, Ephesians, and Colossians “evince a set of strategies that create some of the most important conditions of possibility for the articulation of a Christianity by wiping out most, if not all, references to the nexus of social conditions that engender their aspirations” (199). Chapter Seven is centrally engaged with questions of affect and historiography, calling for “affectively textured readings” that acknowledge the degree to which contemporary readers have already been “touched, possessed, and affected” by the historical subjects so often identified as Christians (225).

Kotrosits thus has multiple aims in this book, which is in part a plea for an affective and affecting scholarship. Along the way she engages other strands of contemporary scholarship, including post-colonial and diasporic criticisms. She demonstrates that striking, creative readings can result from abandoning an assumption that the writings we categorize as Christian presuppose or negotiate a Christian identity. Perhaps because she does not attempt to...