The Ethiopian Eunuch and Conceptuality in the Imperial Imagination of Biblical Studies

Gifford Rhamie addresses the contentious question, ＂why cannot the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 be conceptualised as a Jew in the British academy?＂ Rhamie uses postcolonial studies and theory to examine the Ethiopian eunuch’s ethnoreligious agency, finding two epistemological lenses: whiteness and ’critical conviviality’. The former is employed in the function of deconstructing, while the latter encourages opening one’s conceptuality in a multidimensional way, functioning to reconstruct analyses for agency.

Turning to the early Church Fathers, Rhamie argues that the anti-Jewish discourse of the time, the Adversus Judaeos trope, functioned teleologically to shift the Ethiopian eunuch’s ethnoreligious agency from an Afroasiatic Jewish to a Graeco-Gentile ideal. In more recent years, the racialised imagination of the academy further identifies the eunuch as a Graeco-Roman Gentile. His being denied a Jewish identity appears to foreclose an exploration of a dynamic agency that could open up new opportunities and possibilities of (re-)conceptualising Jewish history, the Book of Acts, and Christian origins. Rhamie asserts that ’Black lives matter’ for Jewishness in the Book of Acts and for Christian origins.

Gifford Rhamie is Senior Lecturer of Ethnicity and Culture in Early Christianity & Contemporary Praxis at Newbold College of Higher Education, UK.