There was no abstract conception of religion in antiquity, but religious beliefs and praxis were closely intertwined with ethnicity in the Greco-Roman period. Building on the groundbreaking studies by Denise Kimber Buell, this thesis investigates the use of ethnic reasoning in centrist Christian identity formation in the second century CE. Specifically, I closely examine four different Christian texts (1 Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyrs Dialogue with Trypho the Judaean and the Epistle to Diognetus) to show how the centrist Christian elites utilized ethnic reasoning to construct a distinct Christian ethnic identity and to manufacture sharp differences between Christians and Judaeans. In order to defend the idea of a homogenous Christian ethnic identity with pure origins,centrist Christian intellectuals re-appropriated the legacy of Israel and represented the Judaeans as an adversarial foil. This rhetorical strategy of othering characterizes the Christian Adversus Ioudaios literature.

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This essay studies if the Sweden Democrats is a centrist party or not. The party’s ideological affiliation has been debated for a long time in Sweden. The party has been described as fascists and racists by opponents from both right- and left-wing. Most of the research on the Swedish Democrats has focused on the party’s connections to right-wing populism and nationalism. But the research has paid little attention to study the Sweden Democrats as a centrist party, despite the party defining itself as it. This makes it interesting to further investigate what ideological association the party has since they define themselves as centrist combined with elements from both right-and left-wing ideologies. It’s a study on the party’s updated party-platform, the study focuses on how the party describes the state, the economy and their view of humanity. The purpose of this study is to examine if the party is a centrist party based on the ideologies of liberalism, conservatism and social democracy through the use of the ideal-type analysis. The ideologies work as theories in this study. These ideologies were formed into ideal-types and were then applied to the chosen policy areas to be examined, to study whether the party had any connection to these as they claimed.

Throughout the years there has been rise to extensive debate in the media and in the research world about the Swedish Democrats being labeled as a populist radical right-winged party or even leaning towards a centrist position with authoritarian values. With a general election coming up soon this year the aim of this study is with the help of a two-dimensional approach, combining the traditional left/right dimension and the GAL-TAL dimension, to find out where the SD place themselves on the political spectrum. The left/right dimension focuses on socioeconomic interests – the relationship between the state and the market while GAL-TAN considers socio-cultural issues such as independence and the degree of individual freedom. By conducting a qualitative content analysis and an ideal-type analysis in this study, several statements from the party's manifestos from the year 2010, 2014 and 2018 have been analyzed to find out where the party can be placed on the political spectrum. The study shows that the SD can be placed on the two-dimensional scale, where the party combines elements of TAN, some libertarian elements (GAL), where SD positions itself as a centrist-right party in some issues of the economic dimension. In addition, results show that social conservatism has been a prominent ideology in the SD:s manifestos over the years. / <p>2018-06-07.</p>