Philippa Townsend argues that early Christian ideas about sacrifice were developed within the context of a widespread discursive association between ethnicity, race and sacrifice in ancient Mediterranean texts. She demonstrates that sacrifice was understood to be deeply effective in boundary-making between ethnic groups and in the creation, sustenance, and sometimes destruction, of lineages and peoples. The author focuses on a series of case studies from the second century BCE to the fourth century CE, across Jewish, Christian, Middle Platonist, and Neoplatonist traditions, including the book of Jubilees, the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, the Gospel of Judas, and the works of Justin Martyr, Celsus, Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and the Emperor Julian. The study demonstrates how these authors deployed sacrificial and ethnic rhetoric in distinctive ways depending on their own social, political and theological contexts, in order to articulate various conceptions of peoplehood within a changing imperial context. This nexus between ethnic and sacrificial reasoning was fundamental to the development of early Christians' identity, their sacrificial theologies, their development of anti-Jewish supersessionism, and their responses to empire. Far from rejecting or spiritualizing sacrifice or ethnic self-definition, many early Christians viewed sacrifice as a powerful mode of establishing and perpetuating their own sense of peoplehood within the ethnic landscape of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, the rhetoric of universalism and particularism, spirit and flesh, blood and seed, barbarism and civilization that animated these ancient sacrificial and ethnic debates has contributed decisively to modern conceptions of race and religion.
