Book Note | Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature

Moshe Blidstein. Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature. Oxford University Press, 2017.

For early Christians, questions of embodiment, ethics, and the construction of communal boundaries turned around (im)purity discourse as a central node. What is the role of the body in the purification of the soul? What is the relationship of impurity to sin? To what extent are purity and impurity subject to human agency? Moshe Blidstein’s Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature strives to answer these complex questions. In so doing, Blidstein guides the reader through the “web of allusions” that characterized early Christian purity discourses in the first through third centuries (p. 232). Focusing on the development of early Christian purity discourse in particular, Blidstein demonstrates that the ongoing interest in this concept served as a site of simultaneous differentiation and innovation. The analysis coalesces around four major domains—food, death, sex, and baptism—and reveals “how purity and defilement are redefined in early Christianity to support the anthropology, demonology, and theology of second- and third century communities, and to construct the identity of these communities” (p. 17).

In Chapter 1, Blidstein sets the methodological groundwork and broad historical context for his intervention and provides an overview of previous scholarship. Over against the influential work of Mary Douglas, Blidstein resists the urge to systematize diverse discourses into a monolithic social model and instead relies on close readings and historical contextualization to develop his argument. To orient the reader, Blidstein develops the framework of “truce” and “battle” perceptions of impurity—the former indicating notions of purity and impurity as status to be managed and the latter referring to purity and impurity as oppositional forces related to concepts of good and evil (p.11). Chapter 2 investigates how purity and defilement in Greco-Roman religions and Judaism provided the conceptual foundations for early Christian purity discourses. Blidstein highlights the internal diversity of both traditions, traces the sites of convergence and divergence between Greco-Roman and Jewish conceptions of purity and impurity, and underscores the social functions of ritual practices and (im)purity concepts in the management of social hierarchies and the construction of communal and bodily boundaries.

Part II, "Breaking with the Past,” shifts focus onto the strategies early Christians employed to distinguish themselves from their forebears. Dietary impurity (Chapter 3) and death defilement (Chapter 4) serve as case studies for these developing sites of differentiation. Dietary laws were a particularly charged site of anti-Jewish polemic in the first and second centuries, as early Christians touted the superiority of their “internal” and “spiritual” purity against “external” and “fleshy” Jewish practices. To defend against the uncomfortable similarities between Jewish and early Christian practices, texts such as the Epistle of Barnabas developed a symbolic and polemic interpretation of the dietary laws as emphasizing individuals to be avoided rather than material regulations to be followed (p. 85). Chapter 4 argues that differences between Jews and Christians over the defiling power of corpses predated the cult of the martyrs. While resources for reconstructing Christian views around death impurity are scarce, they do depict Christian views as inflected by a concerns about sin. Origen, for instance, is vexed by the idea that all dead are equally impure regardless of their moral fortitude in life and thus is born a notion of the “very special dead” (p. 100).

Part III, “Roots of a New Paradigm: The First Two Centuries,” charts the innovations required to address the embodied rituals of baptism and eucharist, as well as the management of sexual impurity in early Christian communities. In Chapter 5, Blidstein argues that baptism raised a particular dilemma for those early Christians who had worked to emphasize internal or spiritual purity over against the material and “fleshly.” How can a bodily ritual act upon the soul? As with dietary impurity, the proximity of baptism to pre-existing Jewish rituals required justification. Justin Martyr and the The Epistle of Barnabas, for example, represented strains of Christian thought which foregrounded moral and spiritual transformation wrought through baptism. The Valentinians, on the other hand, were more open to the role of the body in ritual contexts, theorizing baptism as a fundamental transformation and synthesis of body and soul as a result of the conquest of evil both within and outside of the individual (p.132). Chapter 6 analyzes the eucharist as a ritual mechanism for sustaining the purity of the community. Underscoring the social function of ritual, Blidstein contends that in this period, as today, the eucharist served not only as a means of purification but also sustained boundaries and hierarchies as it could be denied to the unbaptized and insubordinate. Finally, in chapter 7, Blidstein demonstrates how and why sexuality became a prime focus of purity language in early Christianity. According to Blidstein, questions of body and community converge around sexual impurity as a particular threat to communal integrity, and responses ranged from a totalizing view of sexuality as sin/impurity to an understanding of marital (procreative) sexuality as central to the purity of the community. Even as early Christians became increasingly invested in issues of sexual impurity, there was no systematic consensus on whether, how, or to what extent sexual impurity should be managed or eradicated.

Part IV, “New Configurations: Purity, Body, and Community in the Third Century” traces how the third century saw a softening of the predominance of battle-oriented perceptions of purity and impurity in early Christianity. Chapter 8 is anchored in the unique shape of purification practices in so-called “Jewish-Christian” communities. Despite ongoing contestation over the category “Jewish-Christian”, Blidstein uses the term to frame his discussion of pivotal texts such as the Didascalia Apostolorum, Pseudo-Clementines, and sources on the Elchasites as distinct voices within the larger Christian conversation. In these communities, ritual washings and sexual purification were linked and menstruation remained a point of sustained interest. Chapter 9 stands apart from the rest of the work as the only chapter dedicated to an individual thinker, Origen, who functions for Blidstein as an apt synthesizer of the questions and concerns addressed in the preceding chapters. While Origen’s particular exegetical approach in a given text inherently shapes his statements on purity, he nevertheless comes closest to a “truce” perception of impurity in his understanding of baptism as the purification of an evil, but not necessarily sinful, “stain” of humanity (p. 226). In the conclusion, Blidstein ties these threads together and argues that “purity discourse was instrumental in constructing early Christian identity vis-à-vis Jews and pagans, in negotiating the place of the body in Christian practice and thought, and in developing a new ethic out of existing traditions” (228).

Purity, Community, and Ritual is comprehensive in its analysis of purity discourses across a wide range of early Christian texts, though it might have been helpful to the reader tracing the contours of the argument to pursue a more sustained engagement with fewer texts. Nevertheless, Blidstein’s argument that conceptions of purity and impurity should be analyzed not as embedded categories but as particularly charged sites for grappling with anthropological, cosmological, and ecclesial questions is convincing and has considerable implications for future study.

Kelsi Morrison-Atkins is a ThD candidate in New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Kelsi_morrison-Atkins@mail.harvard.edu