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.