Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200-450 CE. By ERIC REBILLARD.

Abstract

This slim but well-researched volume asks what it meant to be Christian at two different periods in Roman North Africa—how a person’s membership of the Christian church related to his social engagement and wider identity. A brief introduction sets the study within recent developments in historiography and sociology. Rebillard starts from the now common recognition that religions in Roman Africa were not the sharply demarcated groups represented in their texts by Christian clerics (whose writings sought in part to generate such divisions). While this has led to a welcome study of the interaction between Christians, Jews, and those traditionally categorized as pagans, Rebillard draws on the work of the sociologists Rogers Brubaker and Bernard Lahire to argue that study of early Christianity remains flawed through its continued treatment of religious groups as (what Brubaker terms) ‘basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis’ (p. 2). For Rebillard, the ‘findings of Brubaker and his students regarding ethnicity and nationhood … suggest that we should no longer assume that the behaviour of Christians was predominantly determined by their religious allegiance (despite the demands of bishops)’. Rather, we should ask ‘how and in which contexts Christianness became salient in Christians’ everyday life’ (p. 3).