How did the ancient world become Christian, what cultural forms emerged as it did so, and how did those cultural forms relate to prior ones? These questions have exercised generations of historians of ancient Christianity, from Gibbon onward. Their views on the outcome of this cultural process have, of course, changed. Adolf von Harnack, in the epilogue to The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (Williams & Norgate, 1906), considered it a brilliant but lamentable “syncretism,” to be purged only in the Reformation. By contrast, in Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (Yale University Press, 1997), Ramsay MacMullen preferred the term “assimilation,” which, he argued, was the inevitable result of people wanting to have their long-standing expectations met—expectations for festivals, memorials, healings, harvests, forewarnings, and the like. In Christianizing Egypt, one could say, David Frankfurter offers a detailed argument as to how “assimilation” happened, while reclaiming the term “syncretism” to refer to what happened and exposing the inadequacy of notions of “pagan survival” to explain what happened.
Christianizing Egypt is, in many ways, the sequel to Frankfurter's groundbreaking Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton University Press, 1998). Both books focus on local forms of religious expression but from different perspectives. Whereas Religion in Roman Egypt explored how Egyptian religious traditions persisted as Christianity gained adherents in Egypt in the Roman period, the present book examines the process of creating Christian religious traditions in late antiquity, covering much the same period as MacMullen's interpretative essay. Christianizing Egypt is, in fact, a sustained synthesis of arguments and observations Frankfurter has made in numerous papers published in the decades since Religion in Roman Egypt appeared.
Readers who have come to value Frankfurter's ability to draw full-bodied renderings of the past by applying interpretative models from modern anthropological and sociological studies to ancient textual and material evidence will not be disappointed. Frankfurter defends this interpretative method at the outset in response to criticisms of his earlier book (31–33) and then applies it deliberately and with appropriate qualifications in subsequent chapters. Indeed, one of the principal contributions of this book—and why it is a substantial advance on MacMullen's—are the models it applies to understand and explain religious cultural production at a local level.
Christianization, according to Frankfurter, is best understood as the product of interacting local cultural ecosystems (my term, not his). In these ecosystems, agency is distributed: the person who requests an oracle or visits a holy man is shaping the system and its cultural products as much as the official who delivers the answer or the holy man who receives the entreaty. Moreover, the physical setting—the arrangement of a household, the location of a monk's cell, the built environment of the martyr's shrine, the operation of the artisan's workshop, or the monumental remains of Egyptian temples—is also an active party to this ecosystem. Thus, Frankfurter argues, we cannot explain processes of Christianization without taking account of all elements of these integrated, interactive ecosystems and the perceived efficacy of what ecosystems generated by way of places, gestures, objects, and texts.
Successive chapters in the book bring these ecosystems to life through a rich combination of modeling, analysis, description, and argumentation. Frankfurter begins with the concerns of the household, extending beyond its threshold, to show how rituals and objects associated with the household, such as lighting lamps, stamping bread, or singing charms, responded to those concerns. Household inhabitants, along with those whose assistance they solicit, are, thus, agents in the production of domestic Christian culture—an agency that is necessarily differentiated by gender and occupation.
The next chapter turns to one of the principal agents of protection, help, and discernment in late antique Egypt—the local “saint” or “holy man,” better understood, according to Frankfurter, as a type of regional prophet. In their performance of exorcism, divination, and healings, these prophets at once preserved and reshaped traditions associated with spirits, places, and materials. The forms of power they exercised were necessarily syncretistic, since whatever was new in their charismatic authority also had to be recognizable in their local context. Frankfurter then examines the physical and gestural aspects of saints’ shrines that made them vibrant social sites of local and trans-local syncretism: destinations for pilgrims, designed for processions; places of feasting and dancing; sites which received votive offerings and dispensed blessings and oracles. Only by imagining what transpired in interactions between the saint, the shrine, its officials and workshops, and devotees or petitioners can one appreciate how activity at these shrines produced new traditions associated with the Christian saint while satisfying the customary expectations of people.
The next two chapters focus on material and textual expressions of what one might call “recognizable innovation.” Frankfurter gives full value to artisans—carvers of funerary stelae, fashioners of figurines, painters of panels, weavers of robes—as blenders of pre-Christian and Christian motifs in sometimes predictable, sometimes idiosyncratic ways. He then describes various ways that scribes—a broad category of persons working in numerous sites with different abilities and diverse cultural resources—were agents “in the syncretistic construction of Christianity” (185). Their syncretistic textual agency encompassed the many literary or liturgical genres copied in manuscripts and held in monastic libraries, questions posed to oracles, incantations written on amulets, lullabies inscribed in incantations (a novel explanation of late antique blending of Egyptian and Christian motifs), and apocalyptic visualizations of demons and death that reinscribed prior Amente traditions. A final chapter explores how people collectively—bishops, townspeople, villagers, monks—constructed a Christian landscape through symbol, myth, ritual, and physical (re)construction.
In sum, Frankfurter offers a highly sophisticated and capacious analysis of local processes of Christianization—processes that were inevitably syncretistic. Any future discussions of these processes will have to take account of the models, evidence, explanations, and illuminating remarks encountered in this book. No doubt, others will adjust the models, correct some evidence, or revise an interpretation. For instance, a dimension of Christianization that Frankfurter discusses only in passing throughout the book and in the Afterword is how local and trans-local arrangements of the institutional church—its political situation, organizational structure, clerical and monastic formation, and ritual services—interacted with processes of Christianization associated with the prophet, the scribe, the shrine, or the workshop. But no book can do everything, and this book already does far more than most. Its legacy will be long and fruitful.
