Introduction
Some time in the late-fifth or early-sixth century CE, a ritual practitioner—operating in the environs of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt—created a protective amulet that reads, “Hôr, Hôr, Phôr, Elôei, Adônai, Iaô, Sabaôth, Michaêl, Jesus Christ. Help us and this house. Amen” (Ὡρ, Ὡρ, Φωρ, Ἐλωεί, Ἀδωναί, Ἰάω, Σαβαώθ, Μιχαήλ, Ἰεσοῦ Χριστέ· Βοήθι ἡμῖν καὶ τούτῳ οἴκῳ. ἀμήν). Each of the names used in the first part of this amulet, known as P.Oxy. VIII 1152 (=PGM P6a), is familiar from other ritual objects from late antiquity (approx. fourth to seventh centuries CE).Footnote 1 But the juxtaposition of these divine names on a single amulet presents us with a puzzle: did the ritual expert who created this artifact or his client perceive there to be a difference, tension, or even contradiction between Jesus Christ and the other names listed? Or, alternatively, would they have conceptualized all of these names as belonging equally within what they would have thought of as the “Christian tradition” or some other tradition?
When confronted by the presence of names or motifs from seemingly different religious traditions on a single artifact, scholars of ancient magic have tended, often without explicit methodological justification, to classify each of those elements in terms of its “original” linguistic or cultural context.Footnote 2 In 1911, Arthur Hunt referred to P.Oxy. VIII 1152 as “a short incantation containing magical, Jewish, and Christian elements.”Footnote 3 This deep scholarly reflex continues to inform contemporary work on amulets and other ritual artifacts. Thus, the checklist of Greek ritual artifacts containing Christian elements recently compiled by Theodore de Bruyn and Jitse Dijkstra, while considerably more cautious in its application of categories of religious identification, still characterizes this particular amulet as a prime example of the juxtaposition of “Christian” elements with “Graeco-Egyptian and Jewish powers.”Footnote 4 Certainly, the scholarly practice of emphasizing the diverse origins of elements present in a given text, genre, or corpus highlights the degree to which practitioners serving various religious communities in the late antique Mediterranean and Near East participated in a shared magical culture.Footnote 5 But, in our view, the scholarly predilection to label isolated elements and to formulate abstract rules governing the limits of what a practitioner from a given religious community might do when writing an amulet builds unwarranted definitions into the very phenomena that a scholar has set out to study.Footnote 6
We argue in this essay that the task of interpreting the apparent juxtaposition of seemingly diverse elements on magical artifacts must consider the full spectrum of strategies that ritual specialists used to negotiate religious similarity and difference. In particular, we propose an approach to such materials that emphasizes the dialectical processes of indigenization and exoticization that were often at work within late antique magical discourse. We believe that this approach will better enable us to understand how difference was alternatively marked out, effaced, or simply ignored by ritual practitioners as they pursued their immediate, local aims. At the same time, this approach highlights the perilous gap that too often exists between modern scholarly conceptions of religious difference and the ancient categories that in practice shaped the contours of a given religious tradition.
Toward this end, our paper considers how best to describe, categorize, and analyze the presence of so-called Jewish elements in Christian magical materials from late antiquity. This task demands that we neither ignore nor reify the distinctions between the Jewish and Christian magical traditions. The apparent juxtaposition of divine names, mythic figures, historiolae, and authoritative personages in magical materials of all religious stripes often merely reflects the pragmatic bent of ritual experts in late antiquity; in most instances where modern scholars perceive religious difference among various elements in a single artifact, ancient practitioners did not overtly mark this juxtaposition rhetorically, graphically, or otherwise. At the same time, some ritual artifacts do appear to capitalize on the perceived exoticism of a given element, translating its foreignness into authority or ritual power.
This paper lies at the intersection of the academic fields of ancient magic and early Jewish–Christian relations, and we hope it will contribute to both. For the scholar of ancient magic, this paper offers a new approach to dealing with the apparent juxtaposition of idioms from seemingly different religious traditions. We argue that the field should move beyond simply labeling elements based on their presumed historical or linguistic origins to consider the fluctuating nature of religious idioms and communal boundaries. For those primarily interested in early Jewish–Christian relations, this paper provides a window into how boundaries between Jews and Christians were drawn and understood in the “lived” contexts of late antique Christianity.Footnote 7 Most studies of the dynamic interaction between formative Judaism and Christianity—whether traditional or revisionist—focus on the writings of rabbinic and patristic elites and, therefore, tend to observe this process from above, as it were.Footnote 8 In our judgment, scholars have yet to consider adequately the implications of amulets and other ritual objects for the study of Jewish–Christian relations in large measure because of the prevailing assumption that the eclectic and even inclusive strategies that ritual practitioners pursued were fundamentally at odds with the exclusionary discourse that characterized efforts at religious differentiation.
By contrast, we demonstrate that the concerns of ritual efficacy and boundary demarcation could be mutually reinforcing and, on occasion, could overlap in ways that eclipsed the distinctions between Jews and Christians that ecclesiastical elites frequently promoted and that contemporary historians of religion have so often assumed. We analyze a series of ritual artifacts that illustrate the range of uses to which Christian practitioners put seemingly Jewish elements within their spells. The texts considered here were produced in Egypt and Syria from approximately the fourth to seventh centuries CE and were written in a range of languages (Greek, Coptic, and Syriac). Each of these texts offers important clues for determining the various approaches Christian practitioners might take to ostensibly Jewish elements. At the same time, the diverse contexts in which these artifacts were created allow us to consider how specific regional and historical circumstances shaped the relationship between the language of magic and the language of religious self-identification.
The Function of the Exotic in Ancient Mediterranean Magic
Our investigation into what late antique ritual specialists were actually doing when they clustered elements from seemingly different religious traditions in their amulets and spells requires us to grapple with a series of questions: do symbols and idioms that become closely linked with a given culture or group, often on the basis of their putative origins, retain such associations and identifications when applied by an individual from another group? If so, under what conditions do those associations and identifications persist and for how long?
Scholars of ancient magic have argued that scribes and practitioners studded their ritual scripts with elements that they considered exotic in an effort to lend them authority as well as to enhance their “coefficient of weirdness.”Footnote 9 Among the various magical corpora from late antiquity, the so-called Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri appear to be particularly susceptible to an interpretation that stresses their creators’ strategic use of exotic elements.Footnote 10 Thus, for example, Morton Smith argued influentially that many of the “Pagan” creators of the Greek Magical Papyri peppered their spells with foreign-sounding “Jewish” or “Hebrew” elements in order to supercharge them with an air of power and authority.Footnote 11
But this approach to the presence of “Jewish” elements in non-Jewish magic is tacitly predicated upon a narrow conception of the “exotic” and, consequently, obfuscates the manifold ways ancient practitioners might have approached these idioms and symbols. To this end, there is much to be gained by considering how historians and social theorists more generally have come to think about the circulation of “exotic” elements across cultural and social boundaries and their potential ideological functions in their new settings.
Postcolonial theorists have found significant analytical value in the notion of the “exotic” (and its cognates) as a lens for understanding the functions that the cultural, ethnic, racial, or religious Other has served within colonialist discourses.Footnote 12 Thus, in her work on European travel literature, Mary-Louise Pratt has detailed how representations of non-Europeans helped to produce European knowledge about previously unknown cultures and regions, while also justifying colonial practices of domination.Footnote 13 Building upon this intellectual tradition, scholars of religion like Timothy Fitzgerald and Randall Styers have detailed how the emergent scholarly categories “religion” and “magic” were framed in relation to exoticism and otherness and, consequently, participated in the construction of “modern” ideology and concomitant colonial projects.Footnote 14
Scholars of the pre-modern world, especially in art history, have likewise deployed the concept of the exotic to capture how emperors, elites, and specialists appropriated signs linked to the cultural or religious Other. One recent trend within this line of scholarship is to draw a distinction between the “exotic” and the merely “foreign.” In her study of the display of high-prestige artifacts at the imperial court in the medieval Byzantine Empire, art historian Alicia Walker defines the exotic as “a fluid, generative process through which cultural difference is negotiated and both foreign and indigenous identities are defined.”Footnote 15 By extension, exotic elements are “active agents of meaning” and “represent powerful gestures aimed at the resolution of the curiosities, pleasures, and anxieties spurred by encounters with cultural Others.”Footnote 16 In contrast to the notion of the “exotic,” Walker uses the term “foreign” more generally to denote elements that come from outside the society under investigation, “but can still be associated with a specific external cultural, historical, and/or geographical group.”Footnote 17 Alongside these two terms, Walker uses “hybrid” to refer to an object in which foreign and indigenous elements are consciously juxtaposed, with meaning deriving from “the friction between disparate parts.”Footnote 18 Walker applies this theoretical framework to a series of case studies in order to show how elements from Sasanian, Islamic, and Chinese cultures were incorporated into, but left visible within, Byzantine imperial objects (e.g., textiles and ivory boxes) and architectural structures (e.g., buildings within the palace complex).Footnote 19 For Walker, such exotic elements were intentionally deployed “to project a cosmopolitan concept of imperial authority.”Footnote 20 Crucially, for our purposes, Walker's typology points to the manifold ideological functions that the juxtaposition of elements from seemingly different traditions might serve. Indeed, “exoticism” is itself dynamic and represents only one possible horizon of appropriation and usage.
The social complexities that underlie analytical categories such as “foreign,” “exotic,” and “hybrid” are also inextricably entwined with the rubric “syncretism,” which has been the primary term used to characterize and explain instances of apparent juxtaposition in the study of ancient magic.Footnote 21 Of course, historians of religion have long recognized the theological baggage associated with the term syncretism. This rubric has often been used, especially within the study of religion, as a derogatory term to denote those processes whereby originally “pure” religious traditions become adulterated and thus corrupted and even degenerate.Footnote 22 Some have, therefore, called for the elimination of the term syncretism completely from the conceptual vocabulary of the field.Footnote 23
More recently, however, David Frankfurter has attempted to revive syncretism as an analytical tool within the study of religion.Footnote 24 Frankfurter's revised version of syncretism highlights the complex ways late antique ritual experts engaged with “new” and “old” elements, resulting in the creation of novel and even hybrid religious traditions.Footnote 25 This model of syncretism is especially useful for describing the creative agency of ritual experts at specific moments of cultural transition as well as for tracing shifts in religious idioms over the longue durée.Footnote 26 Indeed, as our analysis below suggests, at least some practitioners and clients in antiquity seem to have capitalized on the authority or power generated through their mastery over an eclectic assortment of materials drawn from a range of authoritative traditions that they and, crucially, their clients would have seen as distinct or at least distinguishable.Footnote 27
Nevertheless, the dynamic of agency endemic to this approach to the category syncretism is temporally contingent and thus limited in its heuristic utility. As Michael Pye has shown, syncretism tends toward “resolution,” whether in the form of “assimilation” (i.e., weaker elements are absorbed into the dominant tradition), “dissolution” (i.e., “the reassertion of the separate identity or divergent meaning of disparate elements which are consequently drawn apart”), or “synthesis” (i.e., a new religious tradition).Footnote 28
Something analogous to these dimensions of resolution (especially “assimilation”) seems to be at work in the vast majority of alleged cases of Jewish “exoticism” in the Greek Magical Papyri. Thus, most scholars would follow Gideon Bohak's cautious but reasonable assessment regarding the limited presence of Hebrew and other Jewish elements in non-Jewish magic.Footnote 29 In his view, given the length of time these elements circulated within Egypt, the non-Jewish Egyptian practitioners who thought of Adônai or Iaô Sabaôth, for instance, as specifically or exclusively Jewish were in the minority. And, as Lynn LiDonnici has shown, the instances in which the papyri demonstrate an awareness of “Jewish” or “Hebraic” elements are incredibly rare and in fact often reflect the work of Jewish practitioners—albeit those out of step with the boundary keepers of Judaism.Footnote 30
These historical and sociological considerations in turn hint at an important principle that ought to inform evaluations of apparent juxtaposition: inherent in the notion of an exotic element—and, by extension, syncretism—is an acute awareness of difference and even otherness. As art historian Jonathan Hay has noted, exoticism is best seen as “a mechanism regulating the fear and desire associated with awareness of the foreign.”Footnote 31 Accordingly, it follows that exotic elements are primarily associated with moments of transition and initial infiltration (i.e., before syncretism has been “resolved”). We would not, therefore, expect the recognition, much less the shock, of this exoticism to last for generations—at least, not without its ongoing cultivation by hegemonic power. Over time, elements lose their exoticism and may eventually become indigenized in their new settings.Footnote 32
It is thus incumbent upon the scholar of late antique magic not only to examine the elements that occur on a given amulet from the perspective of origins, but also to consider the historical and social conditions behind a possible “exotic” element or cluster of elements. Would such conditions make it more likely that the elements were consciously deployed with their exotic connotations intact or, conversely, that they were absorbed into the dominant tradition?
That religious traditions absorb “exotic” elements should also make us attuned to the nature of religious boundaries during late antiquity, which were hotly contested and subject to continual renegotiation.Footnote 33 In some cases, the movement of words, symbols, objects, and practices across boundaries was a relatively rare, one-time event. In other cases, these “exotic” elements were subsequently naturalized within their new contexts or even supplied with fictive genealogies.Footnote 34
The operative taxonomies we use to organize and analyze our sources ought to reflect these dynamic configurations of religious boundaries during late antiquity. As we argue at length below, magical texts that appear to contain Jewish elements should most often be seen as evidence that the categories formulated by modern scholars have more in common with the preferences of various ancient elites than with the actual language found on the magical objects themselves. We must, therefore, be careful of recapitulating the perspectives of the elite gatekeepers. Certainly, ecclesiastical authorities like John Chrysostom argued that many Christians put a great deal of stock in the powers of Jewish practitioners and were likely to be impressed by a ritual practice or text that was liberally flavored with the spice of “Jewish” words and symbols.Footnote 35 But the rhetoric of figures like Chrysostom, who harnessed the discourse of “magic” in order to sharpen the distinction between “Christianity” and “Judaism,” should not serve as the basis for conceptualizing our own scholarly taxonomies of late antique magical practice. We must instead turn to the artifacts themselves to consider the light they shed on the conceptions of religious proximity or distance with which Christian ritual practitioners actually operated.
“Jewish” Elements in Christian Magic
A number of amulets and magical books that were likely produced by and/or for Christians incorporate what appear to be Jewish elements.Footnote 36 Most of these devices—like P.Oxy. VIII 1152, discussed at the outset of this paper—bear no linguistic or material signs that would indicate whether or not the practitioner capitalized on or even recognized such elements as Jewish.Footnote 37 But some artifacts do provide us with valuable insight regarding the stance that a practitioner has adopted vis-à-vis the various elements that make up his amulet or spell. In this and the following sections, we demonstrate the range of tactics that were available to Christian ritual practitioners when making use of what modern scholars have labeled as Jewish elements. This survey will allow us to formulate some general working principles that we think should inform future scholarly consideration of this phenomenon.
The task of studying the use of Jewish elements in Christian magic poses special methodological challenges. In the first place, Christian practitioners inherited a trade from earlier (and perhaps contemporary) non-Christian practitioners in Egypt, mostly non-Jewish, for whom many of the so-called Jewish items were probably not recognized or utilized as such. This process of indigenization is compounded in the case of Christian magic. Christian ritual practitioners participated—at least to some extent—in the wider Christian culture of late antiquity that increasingly embraced the “Old Testament” as the prophetic forerunner of the “New” and viewed the Christian Church as the True Israel that had inherited the Abrahamic covenant.Footnote 38 Because of this supersessionist logic, Christian practitioners would have been even less likely than their “Pagan” counterparts to have conceived of the so-called Jewish items they cited in their amulets and spells (e.g., Old Testament texts and idioms derived from them) as Jewish, but would have treated them as simply Christian.Footnote 39 Indeed, many of these elements had long been integral to Christian symbolic systems, in some cases from the first phases of the early Jesus movement.
Some Christian artifacts bear witness to the process of indigenization by which originally Jewish elements became Christianized—and thus in a very real sense no longer Jewish. This process is perhaps best exemplified by Brit. Lib. Or. 6796(4), 6796 (=ACM 132), a seventh-century CE exorcistic spell written in Coptic across two sheets of papyrus.Footnote
40
The spell's strong emphasis on Jesus's passion suggests that the practitioner who created it was Christian or, at least, designed it for a Christian client. The text begins with a prayer of Jesus on the cross and a description of the events surrounding his crucifixion, mostly taken from the Gospel of Matthew.Footnote
41
The same scribe responsible for the text of the exorcism also included a drawing of the crucifixion scene toward the bottom of the second sheet. Moreover, the theme of Jesus's crucifixion appears in another section of the text, which reports a conversation between the crucified Jesus and a “unicorn” (
). As part of this conversation, Jesus proclaims: “I am I(sra)êl Êl, the force (
) of Iaô Sabaôth, the great power (
) of Barbaraôth.”Footnote
42
Given the centrality of the crucifixion to this spell, there is little reason to suppose that either the practitioner or his client would have considered the divine name “I(sra)êl Êl”—most likely meaning “God of Israel”—to be a Jewish magical tradition. As it is Jesus who bears the title, this particular divine name has literarily been Christianized.Footnote
43
In addition, all indications suggest that this practitioner did not consider Iaô Sabaôth to be Jewish—or Pagan, for that matter—but rather to be one of the Christian names of the Father, with the crucified Jesus as the force (
) of Iaô Sabaôth.Footnote
44
That Jesus and the Father fall within the same theological framework for this practitioner is further reinforced in subsequent sections of the spell, in which the practitioner highlights the Father's approval of Jesus by including the names that he spoke over the crucified Jesus's head (ll. 23–26) and by calling upon the Father to send his son (ll. 31–45). Likely with such paternal connotations in mind, the practitioner incorporates Iaô Sabaôth into the drawing of the crucifixion on the second sheet.Footnote
45
In short, all signs suggest that this practitioner did not consider these names to be marked Jewish elements, but rather to be part-and-parcel of a genuinely Christian ritual discourse.Footnote
46
Brit. Lib. Or. 6796(4), 6796 is representative of how most Christian practitioners from late antiquity deployed ostensibly Jewish elements. Indeed, much of the extant evidence suggests the magical names, formulae, or narrative traditions that may appear to modern scholars as quintessentially Jewish were readily indigenized within Christian magical culture. Nevertheless, it is necessary to expand and complicate this picture of appropriation. In the following sections, we analyze a series of cases in which “Jewishness” figures prominently in Christian magical texts. We first consider examples in which so-called Jewish elements are utilized as a positive or constructive resource for ritual efficacy. We then discuss cases in which Christian practitioners juxtapose what scholars generally regard as “Jewish” elements with overtly anti-Jewish rhetoric. Given the harsh anti-Jewish invective used in these texts, we find it unlikely that these practitioners capitalized on some kind of Jewish exoticism. It is far more probable that they regarded such elements simply as Christian. Taken together, the artifacts discussed in the following sections thwart simplistic accounts of the relationship between Jewish and Christian magical traditions.
Jewish Ritual Authority in Christian Magic
We have thus far cautioned that scholars must consider the dynamics of reception and indigenization when seeking to determine whether it is appropriate to label a given element as Jewish within Christian contexts of use. At the same time, some ritual artifacts that appear to have been produced or used by Christians do employ idioms or formulae that are drawn from contemporaneous Jewish magical discourse. We argue here that, in such cases, the “Jewish” character of these particular elements was not only perceptible to the practitioners and the clients, but was also important to the ritual efficacy of the artifacts in which those elements appear.
One of the most plausible cases of this phenomenon is a group of five incantation bowls from Sasanian Iraq written in Syriac script that employ a version of the Jewish get (divorce) formula alongside a reference to Rab (or Rabbi) Joshua bar Peraḥya for apotropaic or healing purposes.Footnote 47 Numerous Jewish incantation bowls from late antiquity also link the divorce formula to Joshua bar Peraḥya,Footnote 48 who, according to rabbinic literature, lived during the Hasmonean period in the late second and early first centuries BCE and, among other things, was among the “pairs” (zugot) who transmitted the Torah to the rabbis.Footnote 49 This conjunction of Syriac script with Jewish magical traditions requires us to consider the possibility that the exoticism of marked Jewish elements contributed to the protection and healing such artifacts were thought to mediate.
Typical of this cluster of Syriac-script incantation bowls that invoke the ritual-legal authority of Joshua bar Peraḥya is CBS 16086, which was excavated in the late nineteenth-century at Nippur and is now housed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The opening of the text inscribed on this bowl reads as follows:
-
1. Prepared is this bowl for the sealing of the house
-
2. and of the wife and of the sons of dynwy son of ’yspndrmyd, that may depart from him the mevakkalta
-
3. and the evil dreams. The lot I cast and I take, magical act that was performed
-
4. like it was when Rabbi Joshua bar Peraḥya sat (in court), and wrote against them a bill of divorce against all of them: demons and devils
-
5. and satans and liliths and no-good-ones that are in the house of dynwy son of ’yspndrmyd. Again, he wrote against them a bill of divorce that is forever.Footnote 50
The ritual specialist who created this text explicitly authorizes the use of a “bill of divorce” against the demons by appealing to the judicial activity of “Rabbi”Footnote
51
Joshua bar Peraḥya, who appears to have established the precedent for this application of such documents.Footnote
52
It may perhaps be significant that the technical term that the Syriac texts use to refer to the divorce document is the Iranian loanword dstbyr’ (
), rather than the term get (
) employed in the Jewish Aramaic parallels.Footnote
53
Yet, as a number of scholars have shown, despite this terminological difference and some other minor discrepancies, the text of the bowl in the looping Syriac script powerfully resembles—and was almost certainly taken over from—the examples of this tradition written in the square Jewish Aramaic.Footnote
54
The particular intersection of script and content on these bowls requires us to entertain at least two scenarios. A first scenario entails a Christian practitioner and a Christian client. This scenario is the most likely option given the abundance of texts and artifacts linking the Syriac script with Christian communities.Footnote 55 Of course, such a practitioner–client arrangement raises the question of why a Christian practitioner, presumably writing for a Christian client, would cite a “Jewish” divorce formula and reference Joshua bar Peraḥya.
Exacerbating the problem of interpreting what this bowl might tell us about the Christian use of Jewish magical idioms is the current scholarly conundrum regarding the social and scribal milieus through which the divorce formula entered into and disseminated in Syriac Christian contexts. According to Shaul Shaked, the Syriac bowls represent “a transcription from a Jewish Aramaic model (or from an oral formula first uttered in Jewish Aramaic).”Footnote 56 This quite reasonable hypothesis, however, does not yet allow us to determine with any degree of certainty whether the Syriac Christian practitioners behind the extant exemplars would have associated this formula with Jewish ritual experts or with the larger Jewish world. They might equally have viewed the use of the divorce formula as belonging to the general milieu in which they were operating, which was in any case characterized by porous boundaries and an eclectic religious sensibility.Footnote 57
Yet there is the stubborn association of this practice with a named figure whose literary and cultural context is so clearly linked to contemporaneous Jewish traditions and communities. It is interesting to consider that, according to the Babylonian Talmud, Joshua bar Peraḥya had been the teacher of Jesus the Nazarene in Egypt before he rejected his disciple for “practicing magic and leading Israel astray.”Footnote 58 Apparently, then, in the rabbinic culture of Sasanian Iraq Joshua bar Peraḥya was not only linked to magical knowledge and power, but also was associated with Jesus himself.Footnote 59 It is difficult to know whether the master–disciple relationship of Joshua bar Peraḥya and Jesus, as depicted in the Babylonian Talmud, was known to the Christian scribes who incorporated the name of this Jewish authority into their ritual praxis. And, even if it was known to them, they surely did not share its negative portrait of Jesus. Nevertheless, we must consider the possibility that the figure of Joshua bar Peraḥya and the ritual strategy associated with him was made especially attractive to these Christian ritual experts because of his general association with magical power as well as the all-important figure of Jesus.
A second scenario worth entertaining is that these particular Syriac bowls containing Jewish elements were produced by non-Christian ritual experts, presumably Jews. According to this scenario, these practitioners would probably have created the bowls for Christian clients who would have found the Syriac script desirable. There is evidence that non-Christians utilized the Syriac script. In the fourth to sixth centuries CE, Syriac in the Estrangelo script was not confined to Christian contexts, but represented a regional “lingua franca in large areas of the western provinces of the Sasanian empire and beyond” and was thus also used by non-Christians as well.Footnote 60 Moreover, as is evident from a number of medieval Jewish texts that have taken over Christian materials in Syriac, some Jewish scholars appear to have had access to texts in Syriac language and script.Footnote 61 It should be stressed that even this scenario points to the important fact that a Jewish tradition found an audience in a script that was primarily associated with Christian contexts.
For the purposes of this essay, we follow current scholarly wisdom in Syriac studies and, consequently, presume that Christian practitioners composed this group of bowls. Nevertheless, we think that the Syriac incantation bowls deserve further study pertaining to the relationship between scripts and religious communities. Indeed, if it could be shown that the ritual experts who produced these particular bowls were Jews who otherwise wrote in Jewish Aramaic script, that finding would be of enormous interest in its own right, suggesting an even higher degree of contact and fluidity across religious boundaries than most scholars now imagine.
In sum, we would suggest that what we find in this group of Syriac bowls is a “Jewish” divorce formula and a figure overtly labeled with the technical term “Rab” or “Rabbi” having found their way into a Christian text, presumably without having lost their “Jewish” associations. This scenario strongly implies that there were Christian practitioners who drew on the power believed to inhere in Jewish exoticism. It would seem that CBS 16086 and similar bowls exemplify the degree to which Jewish ritual experts and their non-Jewish counterparts could participate in a shared magical culture. At the same time, these bowls embody the difficulties that often confront the scholar when attempting to identify indigenous and exotic elements on specific Christian artifacts.
Jewish Difference as Ritual Resource in Christian Magic
In the examples discussed above, Christian ritual experts were either unaware of the presence of possible Jewish elements in their spells or, by contrast, intentionally capitalized on Jewish exoticism for generating ritual efficacy. But the extant evidence reveals other ways that Christian practitioners negotiated “Jewish” similarity and difference. At least certain practitioners—presumably Christian—appropriated negative discourses of Jewish otherness for efficacy. This fact is hardly surprising since the “Jews” as an oppositional category figured so prominently in the construction of Christian identity throughout late antiquity. In particular, the Jews were not only blamed for the death of Christ—a point hinted at in the three examples to follow—but they were also used as an orienting metaphor for numerous forms of heresy against which Christian orthodoxy sharpened itself.Footnote 62 It is no surprise, therefore, that in recent decades scholars have stressed the central function of Jews and Judaism in the formation of Christian identity.Footnote 63
But it must be stressed that even those Christian magical artifacts that demonstrate a sensitivity to religious distinction do not necessarily operate according to the taxonomies to which modern scholarship is accustomed. More often than not, the categories of religious identity operative in these texts stand in tension or even conflict with those deriving from origins or idealized ecclesiastical tradition.
For instance, P.Heid. inv. G 1101 (=Suppl.Mag. 32), a fifth- or sixth-century CE Greek amulet from Egyptian Babylon that was designed to heal eye discharge (ῥεῦμα), utilizes elements that scholars typically label “Jewish,” while also emphasizing Jewish difference.Footnote 64 Thus, in a lacunose section at the beginning of its text, the practitioner adjures Toumêêl Êl (l. 3)—an ad hoc name that seems to be playing on the Hebrew -êl endings.Footnote 65 The practitioner then adjures the six-winged seraphim from the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 6, writing, “I adjure those who say, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ Lord of Sabaôth” (l. 6). This reference is further qualified with the phrase, “the God Adonaei Aoth” (l. 6). Finally, at the end of the ritual text, the practitioner calls upon the angels Michaêl, Gabriêl, Ourêêl, and Raphaêl to undo quickly the pains caused by the eye discharge (ll. 11–12).
Yet, despite this apparent pattern of Jewish or Hebrew names, orthographical peculiarities, and references, this amulet includes the following historiola (or short narrative used for ritual power):
For our Lord was pursued by the Jews (Ἰουδέον), and he came to the Euphrates River and stuck in his staff, and the water stood still. Also you, discharge (ῥεῦμα), stand still from head to toe-nails in the name of our Lord, who was crucified (ll. 8–11).Footnote 66
In this historiola, the practitioner establishes the setting of Jesus's otherwise unattested miracle at the Euphrates River with a reference to the Jewish pursuit of Jesus—perhaps partly inspired by the Exodus story.Footnote 67 Since Jesus is the protagonist of this ritual text, it is clear that the Jews here were understood as antagonists. Given the overall anti-Jewish rhetoric of the text, it makes little sense to say that its creator understood elements such as Adonaei and the angels to be Jewish in any meaningful sense. Instead, the practitioner seems to have operated according to a taxonomy in which these so-called Jewish elements were considered part of the same tradition as Jesus. The co-presence of these elements should not be viewed by scholars as the juxtaposition of Jewish and Christian elements, but instead as an internally coherent idiom that reflected and gave expression to the practitioner's version of Christianity.Footnote 68
We are confronted with a similar situation in P.Oxy. LXV 4469, a late-fifth-century CE healing amulet from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. The greater part of the amulet consists of a citation in Greek of the pseudepigraphical letter of Abgar, king of Edessa, to Jesus, with the client's name, written in Coptic, inserted into this passage. At the end of the ritual text, the practitioner references the following names (in Greek): Iaô Sabaôth, Elôe, and Adônai. Despite using names that some scholars might label as Jewish, the practitioner includes in his citation of Abgar's letter the reference to the Jewish persecution of Jesus. In the Eusebian version of Abgar's letter, the reference to the Jewish persecution of Jesus reads as follows: “I heard that the Jews are mocking you, and wish to ill-treat you.”Footnote 69 But P.Oxy. LXV 4469 offers an even more negative—and otherwise unattested—version of this statement: “for I have heard that the Jews murmur against you and persecute you, desiring to kill you.”Footnote 70 Again, like P.Heid. inv. G 1101, the practitioner highlights religious difference between Christians and Jews but does so based on a taxonomy in which Iaô Sabaôth, Elôe, and Adônai are classed under the taxon “Christian.”
Like these two Greek exemplars, P.Anastasy 9 (=ACM 134), a sixth-century CE Coptic codex that was used for apotropaic and other magical purposes, juxtaposes ostensibly Jewish elements and anti-Jewish invective.Footnote 71 Some of the texts in this codex correspond to those known from other contexts (e.g., The Letter of Abgar to Jesus, The Letter of Jesus to Abgar, and the Gospel incipits), while two seem to be original compositions of the scribe (a prayer and exorcism attributed to Gregory [Nazianzus?] and an untitled text).Footnote 72 In the material attributed to Gregory, the practitioner calls upon the archangels Michaêl, Gabriêl, Raphaêl, Ouriêl, Sedekiêl, Anaêl, Setêl, Azaêl (4r, ll. 14–23).Footnote 73 He also includes in this text an extended invocation that draws on the precedent established by God's interventions on behalf of the people of Israel:
I adjure all you violent deeds, by the great glorious name (of) God almighty, who brought his people out of the land of Egypt with a strong hand and a raised arm, who struck Pharaoh and his entire force, who spoke with Moses on Mount Sinai, who gave his law and his commandments to the children of Israel and made <them> eat manna, that you flee far away and not at all continue to stay in the place where this prayer is deposited. (3v, ll. 5–26)
Alongside this litany of redemptive events, the text invokes the Father using what might be interpreted as a Jewish or Hebrew formula, “Adônai Elôei Elemas Sabaôth.” Significantly, this divine epithet appears in two different sections of the codex: in the text attributed to Gregory (1r, ll. 9–10; 2v, 5–6) and in the untitled text (9r, ll. 14–15). In addition, various other formulae that might be labeled Jewish or Hebrew appear in the codex.Footnote 74 We might be tempted to view these features of the codex, especially when taken together, as strategic appropriations of Jewish elements.
Nevertheless, the scribe responsible for this codex highlights the charge of Jewish culpability for the persecution and death of Jesus. The untitled composition in the codex instructs: “Rejoice, all you creatures, for the lord has risen from the dead on the third day and freed the whole race of Adam. He has destroyed the Jews who were ashamed on account of what they did.”Footnote 75 Moreover, the scribe also included a version of the Letter of Abgar in which the anti-Jewish invective is even more pronounced than in P.Oxy. LXV 4469:
I have heard that your race rejected your lordship. They live wickedly and enviously, and they prosecute you, not wanting you to reign over them. They are ignorant of this, that you are the king of those in the heavens and those who are upon the earth, (you) who gives life to everyone. What, however, is the people of Israel? A dead dog, since they reject the living god. For surely they are unworthy of your holy gift. (12r, ll. 16–12v, 6)
In this version of Abgar's letter to Jesus, the practitioner makes several accusations against the Jews, including their rejection of Jesus and their desire to kill him. These themes also appear either implicitly or explicitly in P. Oxy. LXV 4469. But what is distinctive here is the comparison between Jews and dogs, which draws on the Christian claim that the Jews fell into kinship with dogs because of their rejection of Jesus.Footnote 76 This Coptic codex, therefore, is unlikely to be citing elements that its creator or intended clients would have viewed as Jewish. Nor does it seem that such elements would have been used for their foreignness or exoticism. Instead, given his antagonistic attitude toward Jews and Judaism, the practitioner most likely understood these elements as Christian and cited them accordingly. While this codex most certainly draws a firm boundary between Christians and Jews, its implicit taxonomy of religious difference only partially overlaps with—and thus calls into question—modern scholarly labels of what constitutes a Jewish or Christian element.
The appropriation of such anti-Jewish invective in these artifacts may reflect the perceived importance of the client's proper standing with God for achieving ritual efficacy. The client's piety, often understood as a well-ordered religious identity, is sometimes made a precondition for the success of the spell. For example, P.Oxy. VI 924 (=ACM 15) exemplifies the importance of a pure Christian identity for ritual efficacy. The practitioner behind this fourth-century CE amulet not only invokes the Trinity—interestingly, alongside Abrasax—but also includes the following words:
Truly guard and protect Aria from the one-day chill and from the daily chill and from the nightly chill and from the mild fever of [the top of the head]. You shall do these things [graciously] and completely, first on account of your will and also on account of her faith (κατὰ τὴν πίστιν αὐτῆς), because she is a handmaid of the living god (ll. 1–11).Footnote 77
The ritual efficacy of this text depends, at least in part, on the client's “faith” (πίστιν), which serves as a basis for the appeal to the divine (“because she is a handmaid of the living god” [ὅτι δούλη ἐστὶν τοῦ θ(εο)ῦ]). Given the additional recitation of names for god—which, admittedly fall outside the traditional Trinitarian boundaries—it is unlikely that πίστις here is completely restricted to what we might call “devotion” (i.e., “faithfulness”), but comprised purity in all dimensions of the client's Christian faith, including the absence of heresy and improper social relations.Footnote 78
The practitioner's assumption aligns with a larger emphasis in ancient magic on proper standing with the divine, especially in cases in which the speaker makes demands on the entity invoked. In the words of David Frankfurter, “[i]n the case of the directive utterance, which includes prayer and magical command, the speaker's mind-set, preparation, traditional status, and purity are of paramount importance since the force of that utterance explicitly comes from that ‘I’ who says the words.”Footnote 79 It is important to note, therefore, that all of the aforementioned objects that deploy anti-Jewish invective also include commands as part of their ritual texts.
Given the importance of the Jewish foil for the creation and maintenance of Christian identity within late antiquity more generally, we propose that the aforementioned practitioners utilized anti-Jewish invective in order to distinguish their clients from the “Jews”—whether actual Jews or rhetorical Jews. In particular, practitioners appropriated motifs of boundary demarcation in order to demonstrate to God their clients’ proper Christian identities vis-à-vis Jewish Others.Footnote 80 The performance first establishes the purity of the client's Christian piety and then deploys that identity to ensure the efficacy of the ritual.
Conclusions
The artifacts studied above make it clear that no one model can account for the frequent use of ostensibly Jewish elements on Christian amulets and spells. Practitioners—like the authors of other discursive genres from late antiquity—constructed and appreciated religious difference in manifold ways. Thus, one cannot speak of a single approach to the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity in magical discourse any more than one can speak of a single perspective on the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism in late antique literary texts.
For this reason, we have attempted to let individual practitioners and artifacts speak for themselves. As we have seen, many, if not most, Christian amulets and spells (including P.Oxy. VIII 1152 cited in the introduction of this essay) do not contain sufficient information to enable scholars to determine how their Christian practitioners or clients categorized elements that appear to have their origins in Jewish contexts. It is, therefore, doubly difficult to say with any confidence that these Christian texts used Jewish idioms as foreign or exotic elements intended to enhance their ritual power.
In the face of this epistemological uncertainty, we have argued that these elements should not be made to conform to some idealized notion of the boundaries separating Judaism and Christianity. Such an operation runs the risk of distorting or even misrepresenting how their creators categorized these elements. A purely diachronic “etymological” approach to magical language tends to short-circuit consideration of how elements with diverse genealogies actually operated synchronically within a specific text or corpus. Rather, when seeking to determine which elements are foreign to or exotic within a religious tradition like Christianity, scholars ought to give due consideration to the native taxonomies that are operative within the artifacts themselves. Moreover, we have argued that, even in those cases where a practitioner seems to be pushing the limits of acceptable usage, the boundaries between traditions were rarely, if ever, governed by abstract rules.
Thus, we have seen that, in the case of the Syriac bowls that appealed to the ritual and legal authority of Joshua bar Peraḥya and his practice of using a divorce document to ward off demons, the presumably Christian scribes who produced these texts were likely cognizant of the Jewish origins of this tradition; indeed, they may even have been familiar with the associations with both Jesus and magic that this figure carried in contemporaneous rabbinic culture. On the other hand, we have shown that several Christian amulets in Greek and Coptic include supposedly Jewish elements while employing anti-Jewish invective. In such cases, we think it highly unlikely that the creators of these artifacts recognized or valued these elements to enhance their spells with a “Jewish” flavor.
Moreover, these artifacts indicate that the indigenization of a given Jewish element within Christian discourse in no way indicates that Christian practitioners and clients failed to distinguish between Christianity and Judaism or between Christians and Jews. In some cases, they drew precisely such distinctions, presumably highlighting this religious difference for ritual efficacy. But these practitioners drew the symbolic boundaries between Judaism and Christianity in ways that do not correspond in a one-to-one fashion with those of ancient heresiologists or modern scholars.
Based on the examples studied in this paper, we would venture a general methodological principle: absent indications to the contrary, scholars should begin from the supposition that the elements on a given artifact that belong to the shared magical culture of Jews and Christians no longer carried a Jewish valence, but rather were seen as indigenous features of the Christian tradition. In particular, scriptural citations from the Hebrew Bible (or, better, the Old Testament) and certain divine or angelic names, while perhaps having their historical origins in Jewish contexts, carried neither the taint of Jewishness nor a frisson of Jewish exoticism. In other words, the burden of proof ought to fall on the shoulders of scholars who would assume that Christian practitioners understood or utilized “Jewish” elements as Jewish. While taxonomies based on origins or idealized portraits of “Christianity,” “Judaism,” or even “Paganism” can be useful for charting changes in magical language over time, the blanket use of such taxonomies to organize “magical” artifacts distorts the various ways individual practitioners—as authors—conceived of religious difference and, as a consequence, can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of their ritual texts.
Once unfettered from the shackles of taxonomies based on origins rather than reception and use, amulets and spells can play an important role in reimagining how religious difference was configured in lived contexts during late antiquity. A careful reading of Patristic condemnations of magic reveals that many early Christians viewed the distinctions between Christians and non-Christians in ways that were in considerable tension with the views of those who policed the boundaries of orthodoxy.Footnote 81 And yet, this paper has also revealed that those Christians whose so-called magical practices may have made them targets of such efforts at marginalization could themselves deploy a familiar anti-Jewish rhetoric of subordination for their own ritual purposes. Even in those instances where we have observed Jewish and Christian ritual specialists working with a broadly shared repertoire of symbolic and material practices, we also found powerful hierarchies of religious difference at play. It would seem that, in the late antique Mediterranean at least, the very same conditions that promoted exchange across communal boundaries often went hand in hand with efforts at religious differentiation.
