If you look at Oetzi, the stone age (or early bronze age) corpse that was found on an Italian/Austrian/Italian glacier, its DNA tells you that he was more closely related to modern inhabitants of Corsica and Sardinia than to populations in the Alps, where he was unearthed.

Which means that you never can know which ‘race’ is compared to which ‘race’ if you look at it with modern eyes. Massive movements of people have created a disorientated view of the past.

Celts and Germans and Slavs may even have come from a common ancestor.

1. The oldest forms from Germanic languages of the first centuries CE may be ‘heiþna’ and ‘haiþina’. These words are assumed to mean heathen in the meaning of ‘Paganus’ (See point 3). But these words are older than the use of the Latin ‘paganus’ for heathen people, because that is known after the 4th century CE.

2. Another explanation is, that ‘heathen’ is derived from the Armenian/Greec ‘hethanos”, and gothic ‘haiÞnö’ which points to ‘ethnos’ = crowd, foreign people (not belonging to us). Greec knows here the plural ‘ethne’ for ‘heathen’.

3. Further the interpretation is mentioned, that the Germanic word ‘*haiÞio’ =uncultivated, barren land, forested land, knows the adjective ‘haiÞ[a]na’ =belonging to the heath, inhabiting the forest area (uncivilized). This should have come in use as an expression for non-christian people during the Christianization. Based on this assumption it is supposed, that it was developed in analogy to the Latin ‘paganus’ =villager; ‘pagus’ means village, district, area.

4. Here is ‘heathen’ etymologically connected to ‘heimr’, which leads the Oldnorse word „heiðinn“ which is interpreted then as ‘belonging to the domestic religious community”. This is however a late etymology, based on Oldnorse, which we know after 800 CE.

What I find interesting is the difference between the Judieo/Christian “insult” and the word chosen by Muslims (Mohamad) – infidel. With Heathen or Pagan it was a matter of degridation giving the Christians a feeling of superiority where as infidel gives, in the feel of the word, the Muslims a reason for violence agains non-believers.