Race and universalism in early Christianity

Through rhetorical analyses of Clement of Alexandria's Protreptikos, Origen's Contra Celsum, and the Shepherd of Hermas, this article demonstrates how some early Christians use ideas about race and ethnicity to make universalizing claims about Christianness by defining Christianity as a race, open to all peoples. In so doing, it challenges prevailing ways of interpreting the meaning and significance of race in early Christian self-definition. Adopting a different approach to reading race and ethnicity in pre-Constantinian Christian texts holds great potential for analyzing the intersecting domains of Christian-imperial, Christian-local, intra-Christian, and Christian-Jewish relations. © 2002 The Johns Hopkins University Press.