“We Are a Royal and Priestly Race” : Ethnic Reasoning in Jerome’s Views on Asceticism and the Church
Scholarship in the last decades has increasingly paid attention to the rhetoric of race and peoplehood in early Christian literature. It has been shown how the construction of Christian identity took place through ethnic reasoning, with writers using metaphors of parenthood, kinship, homeland and descent to express what it meant to be a Christian. These studies have typically focused on pre-Consta
