This chapter summarizes and brings together all the work conducted in the book. It offers an answer to the original question concerning what it meant to be Assyrian in the second millennium bce and how this changed over time.

This chapter develops the theory of social categories, a new theoretical framework that offers a universal prism through which to understand all social groups. The theory builds on work in social psychology and sociology.

Luke’s prologue presses the question raised in Part I (“What is a Gospel?”) into new territory: what about the many other writings that variously recorded Jesus’s life and/or teachings not included in the New Testament canon? Many of them also accrued the title “Gospel,” generally conformed to the definition outlined in Part I, and populated the literary landscape of early Christianity into Origen’s own day. This chapter considers how, in Origen’s view, one may distinguish the four received Gospels from the many others, and how he understands Luke (in particular) to have participated in this process of discernment in the way he hands on the traditions he receives. Origen cannot accept that Luke’s own language allows one to reduce his intent with these narratives to matters of plain facticity. Something, as Luke says, had “come to pass among us,” something of which he and his tradents had become fully convinced, something that had made of them all servants of its proclamation: “attendants of the word.” In other words, the very writing of these stories becomes, in Origen’s view, a form of “spiritual reading” of Jesus’s early life.

During the second and third centuries AD, recruitment in the Roman army brought many Palmyrenes from their home city to various parts of the Roman Mediterranean and its hinterland. Military recruitment brought them to Dacia and Numidia in particular, but a famously well-documented unit of Palmyrenes was stationed at Dura-Europos on the Middle Euphrates. Most Palmyrene soldiers served in units of the auxilia or numeri, and many of these then settled in the regions in which they had served. Their descendants could be found in the same regions generations later. As Palmyrene soldiers and their descendants faced varied degrees of dispersal and isolation from their compatriots, they endured diverse pressures to assimilate. They also witnessed their ancestral divinities being adopted by fellow soldiers, military collectives or networks and local populations. Did Palmyrenes maintain social or cognitive links to their ancestral homeland under such circumstances? Did they conceive of themselves as part of a broader, dispersed Palmyrene community even as they became enmeshed in local ones? This chapter address such questions.

9.1 [603] So then, by taking up our shield a longside the doctrines of the truth with the utmost endurance, so it seems to me, we have held our own against the nonsensical words of those who know only how to disparage our doctrines.1 But because our opponent bears down upon the ineffable glory with all his sails unfurled and dares, as it were, to lead forth his profane ideas in unbearable assaults, expending his most effective resources on the task of stripping the nature of God the Father of his progeny and stripping the true Son, who came from his nature, of his hypostasis2 (for he does away with his existence and engages in such extremely perilous undertakings), come now, “putting on the breastplate of justice,” while also lifting up “the shield of faith” and whetting against him “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,”3 let us show that he is a liar and in his extreme arrogance all but kicks against the goads4 and leaps down into the deep pit of destruction.5 [604]

1 The successes of your holy empire are noteworthy, remarkable, and cannot be expressed in words, and the incomparability of your piety, which is like an inheritance come to you from above, you have successfully defended from the arrows of envy, thanks to the skill in all things excellent that you received from your father and also your grandfather,1 as is obvious in this instance.2