Ethnic groups are not static, objective categories to which people happen to belong.
Rather, “ethnic identity is socially constructed and subjectively perceived.”7
Summarizing his research on the Lue ethnic group of Thailand, anthropologist Michael Moerman states, “Someone is a Lue by virtue of believing and calling himself Lue and of
acting in ways that validate his Lueness.”8
This conclusion highlights that the only general “objective feature” enabling observers to identify ethnic groups is the testimony of those who create the group. An ethnic group is constituted by people who mutually recognize each other as members of that group. That is, it is an inter-subjective reality that may be observed by outsiders as the ethnic actors live according to their corporate identity. Ethnic groups distinguish themselves from their neighbors by various strategies, and certain commonly used markers—somatic features, language, religion, shared
cultural forms—have been proposed and found wanting as a basis for defining ethnicity.9
6
On this symbolic and community constituting function of baptism and the Lord’s
Supper see, Meeks, First Urban, 150-62; Horrell, Social Ethos, 80-88.
7
Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 19, italics original. Fredrik Barth, "Introduction," in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (ed. Fredrik Barth; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 10, calls this inter-subjective nature the “primary feature” of ethnic groups.
8
Michael Moerman, "Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization: Who Are the
Lue?" American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1222.
9 Cynthia K. Mahmood and Sharon L. Armstrong, "Do Ethnic Groups Exist? A Cognitive
Perspective on the Concept of Cultures," Ethnology 31 (1992): 1-14; Moerman, "Lue,"
Modern genetics has confirmed the observations of anthropologists that actual
biological descent is not the basis of ethnicity.10
What is important is the collective will to actualize as a group identity. Without a collective will to exist, an ethnic identity will dissolve. Shaye Cohen affirms this consensus:
Sociologists agree that ethnic or national identity is imagined; it exists because certain persons want it to exist and believe that it exists. It can be willed into and out of existence. So far all agree. However, exactly what needs to be imagined to create and maintain an ethnic or national identity
is the subject of ongoing debate and discussion.11
Cohen demonstrates this subjective dynamic of ethnicity through an analysis of Jewish
identity in Roman antiquity.12
He searches ancient sources for evidence of objective criteria by which one could have distinguished Jews and concludes that looks (somatic characteristics), clothing, speech, names and occupations were not reliable factors for identifying individual Jews. He observes that it was repeatedly assumed that Jews could pass as non-Jewish Romans and vice versa. His study concludes that Jews were most readily recognized by one another and by outsiders by two factors—association and Torah observance. They had an identity because they actively formed groups and
Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 288-89; Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From
Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1-18.
10
For rejection of race and ethnicity as biological categories, N.H. Barton, "Population
Genetics: A New Apportionment of Human Diversity," Current Biology 7 (1997): 757-
58; Andrew Marshall, "Slicing Soup," Nature Biotechnology 20 (2002): 637; Barbar
Cohen, "Census, Race and Science," Nature Genetics 24 (2000): 97-98; Svante Pääbo,
"Genomics and Society: The Human Genome and Our View of Ourselves," Science 291
(2001): 1219-20; Morris W. Foster and Richard R. Sharp, "Race, Ethnicity, and
Genomics: Social Classifications as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity," Genome
Research 12 (2002): 844-50; Pamela Sankar and Mildred K. Cho, "Genetics: Enhanced:
Toward a New Vocabulary of Human Genetic Variation," Science 298 (2002): 1337-38;
Eliot Marshall, "Cultural Anthropology: DNA Studies Challenge the Meaning of Race,"
Science 282 (1998): 654-55; Peter Aldhous, "Geneticist Fears 'Race-Neutral' Studies Will
Fail Ethnic Groups," Nature 418 (2002): 355-56; Nell Boyce, "All the Difference in the
World." U.S. News & World Report 133, no. 18 (11 Nov 2002): 80.
11 Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties
(Hellenistic Culture and Society 31; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 5.
12
promoted a common ethos. Similarly, Nils Dahl, in his exploratory essay, “The Nations in the New Testament,” observes the bewildering variety of features by which named people groups, both in antiquity and in the present, distinguish themselves from others and concludes, “One might almost say that a nation is made up of persons who consider
themselves, and who are considered by others to be a nation.”13
Yet to argue that ethnic identity is self-ascriptional and socially constructed does not thereby undermine the reality that ethnic identity is also ascribed by birth. One is born into the ethnic group of one’s parents. The collective will to exist pre-establishes the ethnic context into which one is born. Each succeeding generation and the individual members of it must negotiate their way in a poly-ethnic social world, preserving tradition or modifying cultural practice and norms, reinforcing or relaxing proscriptions on inter- group traffic, reclaiming or rejecting their ethnic heritage. In other words, ascription by birth leads to self-ascription. The central role of birth in promulgating the ethnic group provides the myth of interrelationship with its credibility. Ethnicity is not actual kinship but fictive kinship. In differentiating ethnicity from actual kinship, which he refers to as an aggregation of families, Benedict Anderson says that the members of this “imagined community . . . will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear
of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”14
An ethnic group has projected the concept of kinship beyond the limits of actual familial verifiability, rendering it a symbolic kinship, in which ascription by birth reinforces the presumption of consanguinity.
13
Nils A. Dahl, "Nations in the New Testament," in New Testament Christianity for
Africa and the World (ed. Mark E. Glasswell and Edward W. Fasholé-Luke; London:
SPCK, 1974), 61. Dahl uses the term nation as the catchall category for named groups in
the NT.
14
Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
For instance, Danish-Americans do not constitute an ethnic group in the United States because there is no motivation to maintain a separate identity from the broader white anglo-saxon protestant (WASP) identity. But the WASP identity has been maintained in distinction from other groups who look identical and also derive from northern Europe, such as Irish Catholic or Russian immigrants. The WASP identity has also been
maintained in distinction from groups who look different, such as blacks and Hispanics. Furthermore, in the last generation, the WASP-Irish Catholic divide has largely given way to the more inclusive ethnic identity of white northern European, whether Protestant or Catholic. This broadening arose because both groups shared a common out-group that was gaining power—African-Americans in the 1960s—and more recently newer non-
white immigrants.15
The Irish-Catholic ethnic identity in America persists but in a much more attenuated form than a generation ago. Certain social settings can make it more salient, bringing it to the fore; but in the face of increasing non-European immigration and the rise of ethnic politics, Irish-Catholics and WASPs have conjoined as white
northern-European Americans. This phenomenon highlights a further dynamic which will be developed below—the possibility of holding simultaneous multiple ethnic identities.
Clearly, in Paul’s epistles we glimpse the churches at a very early stage of formation when converts are adopting a new identity and identity formation via procreation is not yet established. So the dynamics of collective identity formation are evident in the chaos of social realignment. We see this in the social crises addressed in each of the epistles under consideration in this thesis—Galatians, 1 Corinthians and Colossians. Pleas for solidarity in the face of challenges to the believers’ status and in the midst of confusion about appropriate behavior are prominent in each epistle. We will see below that in each case the baptismal unity formula counters threats to their solidarity and supports a plea
15 Martin Kilson, "Blacks and Neo-Ethnicity in American Public Life," in Ethnicity:
Theory and Experience (ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 240-43.
for unity in their common identity. These epistles reflect a process of self-ascription and social construction in differentiation from a poly-cultural context; however, my choice to identify this social process as “ethnic” remains to be explained.