Review of Maia Kotrosits, Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence and Belonging, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2015

Abstract

Christian self-identity vis-a-vis Judaism is a stone in the shoe of scholarship on ancient Christian literature as the twenty-first century begins. Significant work re-thinking traditional Jewish and Christian self-definition and separation (wistfully put: “the parting of the ways”) appeared at the dawn of the twenty-first century (Boyarin 1999; 2000; Jacobs 2004; Lieu 2005); it merged in part with scholarship on Pauline selfdesignation and identity in the 1970s (Stendhal 1976; Sanders 1977 and their “new perspective” descendants) as biblical scholarship's contribution to larger, post-ColdWar conversations pitting neoliberal capitalism against populist nationalism and foregrounding Subjectivity and ethnicity. At present, the discussion is clearly finding an audience: 2015 saw the release of several dense tomes on the question (Sanders 2015; Dunn 2015; Lieu 2015; Gager 2015; Keck 2015), each presenting itself as definitive, each bristling with page-tapping citation and edgy polemic. In a year of so many “seminal” analyses, the most significant was the utterly brilliant Maia Kotrosits's Rethinking Early Christian Identity. Kotrosits has written a historically informed, erudite, and literate book that offers new insight and original argument. If these other books have a use, it is survey; at best they are recommended skimming (an afternoon with one of them will equip you with the salient arguments of them all). Kotrosits, in contrast, is required close reading for anyone interested in where the conversation could go next.