In his treatise On Weights and Measures, Epiphanius, the fourth-century bishop of Salamis,Footnote ¹ recounts a trio of noteworthy tales of religious concerning Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, each credited with translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek after the promulgation of the Septuagint.Footnote ² Aquila, stationed in the ruins of Jerusalem by a leprous Emperor Hadrian, was so impressed by the Christian disciples there that he was baptized as a Christian.Footnote ³ Unable to give up his love of astrology (ἀστρονομία), however, he was ultimately excommunicated; he cursed Christianity and was circumcised as a Jew (προσηλυτεύει καὶ περιτέμνεται Ἰουδαῖος). Twice-converted, Aquila learned Hebrew (he was already Hadrian's Greek translator) and executed a “perverse” (mepataltah) translation of the Hebrew Bible.Footnote ⁴ Symmachus, one of the “wise men” (σοϕῶν) of the Samaritans, felt spurned by his people; to satisfy his “lust for power,” he converted to Judaism, “circumcised a second time.” (Assuming his audience will be “surprised” to hear this, Epiphanius patiently explains that second circumcisions are routine in Samaritan-Jewish cross-conversion as are, he notes, operations to undo circumcision altogether.Footnote ⁵) To spite his former fellow Samaritans, we learn, Symmachus executed an additionally “perverse” (διαστροϕὴν; potlah) biblical translation.Footnote ⁶ Finally Theodotion: originally a follower of Marcion, “the heresiarch of Sinope,” Theodotion also “grew angry” (at what we are not told) and “turned aside to Judaism and was circumcised and learned the language of the Hebrews and their writings.” More influenced than the other two by the Septuagint, Theodotion produced a translation not notably “perverse” to orthodox sensibilities, but doubtless unwelcome as such among his former Marcionite co-religionists.Footnote ⁷

In multiple ways these conversion narratives evoke boundaries and borders. First, Epiphanius asks us to imagine the translators articulating the religious margins of late antiquity, between paganism, Judaism, heresy, and even the more exotic Samaritanism: orthodox Christianity is no one's final religious destination, but is rather framed by these marginal beliefs.Footnote ⁸ Geographical borders also shape these stories, from Pontus in the north to Egypt in the south, and the liminal and multiply named space of Palestine/Judaea (and Jerusalem/Aelia) out of which the multiple Greek translations of the Bible emerge.Footnote ⁹ Finally, textual boundaries, as heterodox and “perverse” as the translators' works are found to be, end up collected together into the uniform columns of Origen's Hexapla: safely, even usefully, contained for orthodox Christian delectation.Footnote ¹⁰ Borders multiply, boundaries collide, but Epiphanius never loses control of his matter.

In recent years, students of early Christianity and late antiquity more generally have made fruitful use of the concept of boundaries and borders, in order to dislodge the monological self-presentation of our ancient sources.Footnote ¹¹ To think in terms of borders is to imagine the point at which the “self” and “other” touch, merge, and even change places. Borders must be asserted, put into place, and so ancient attention to borders signals, ironically, an acute awareness of the porousness of identity and community: “Borders themselves,” Daniel Boyarin has written, “are not given but constructed by power to mask hybridity, to occlude and disown it.”Footnote ¹² Borders produce, and elide, difference and distinction. Roman borders—or, more properly, limites, or frontiers: sites of material and cultural exchange—were primarily sites for the exercise of control, where the authoritative logic of empire was most visibly, and anxiously, at work.

When we situate rhetorics of conversion in these borderlands, therefore, we begin to rework our assumptions about the nature of religious transformation.Footnote ¹³ Just as the border is about the often uneasy management of social, cultural, and religious contact, so late ancient conversion must be viewed as an exteriorized discourse of identity subject to structures of power and knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴ Such an exteriorized understanding of conversion stands in contrast to our typical understanding of (Western, Christian) conversion as the interior reorientation of the individual soul. We can trace the irreducible individuality and interiority of religious transformation, postulated by Arthur Darby Nock and William James,Footnote ¹⁵ to that master of interior introspection, Augustine.Footnote ¹⁶ But there are surprisingly few introspective narratives of religious conversion in antiquity: moments at which a subject invites us to witness his, or her, movement from one religious life to another.Footnote ¹⁷ More often, we read about religious transformation: narratives of conversion form part of the larger discursive social and religious fabric of late antiquity. More helpful than Augustine's evocation of the inner movements of the soul may be modern theorist Gauri Viswanathan's insights into the role of conversion as a colonial discourse. For Viswanathan, conversion appears in the rhetoric of empire when the “state” desires to visibly grapple with, and masterfully overcome, the problems of identity and difference within its borders: “If conversion precipitates breaches within the fold, it also sets in motion a dynamic social process that confers a new power and role on the state.”Footnote ¹⁸ Viswanathan's insights, originally directed to the modern period, bear fruit when projected into other cultural and political contexts. In other periods during which the interests of the state overlap with those of religious institutions—the late Roman Empire, for instance—we can see that to talk about conversion is also to think about personhood and power.Footnote ¹⁹

Epiphanius is a useful figure through whom we can approach the late ancient Christian construction of conversion. Most famous for his massive Panarion, or Medicine-Chest Against Heresies, a heresiological treatise based on previous sources, personal experience, and downright fabrication, Epiphanius was a towering figure of late fourth-century Christianity. It is true that modern scholars find Epiphanius, at best, a distasteful figure: narrow-minded, inflammatory, prone to extreme and violent rhetoric, the father of heresiology whose lurid accounts of heretics can be used only with the greatest care as a source of historical information.Footnote ²⁰ As a controversialist he was seemingly ubiquitous in the last third of the fourth century, condemning bishops (both John of Jerusalem and John Chrysostom of Constantinople), attacking monks, and even ripping down the curtain of a church that he found religiously offensive.Footnote ²¹ Yet in his own time, Epiphanius was perceived quite differently. His influence across the Mediterranean world, from Rome to Constantinople, is undeniable, and remarkable for a Palestinian monk who rose to become the bishop of a small city on the island of Cyprus. He served as an ascetic counselor and theological advisor to numerous Christian luminaries,Footnote ²² and soon after his death was eulogized as a miracle-working saint.Footnote ²³ I do not suggest we revise our modern opinion of Epiphanius—he was, to be sure, a difficult and harsh figure—but rather recognize that he speaks more representatively of his time and place than he is often given credit for.

I argue that Epiphanius can help us reconsider late ancient conversion, not as the internal reorientation to a “new life,” but instead the exteriorized management of status and difference.Footnote ²⁴ That is, Epiphanius allows us to think more imperially about the ways in which people became and unbecame in the late ancient Christian world. My use of imperial in this context is, to be sure, a bit broad. Epiphanius himself did not directly serve in the administration of the Roman Empire, nor has he left any writings that explicitly defend the workings of the Empire or its increasing entanglement with ecclesiastical institutions.Footnote ²⁵ I nonetheless claim that Epiphanius gives us insight into the imperial nature of the Christian church of the late fourth century by the way he views the world. Epiphanius's Christian world is imperial insofar as it assumes a position of superiority and totality, an ability to comprehend the world absolutely and represent it totally. Epiphanius does not question empire; he exists in and through it.Footnote ²⁶

Epiphanius also allows us to think more expansively about what we typically consider “conversion.” Much of Epiphanius's narratives of religious status change, like the stories of the biblical translators I presented above, occur in geographical and cultural frontier zones of empire, sites in which the political, cultural, and religious power of empire is most manifest and most under scrutiny.Footnote ²⁷ The imperial frontier zone imagines border crossings as loci of danger but also mastery. Here, empire becomes potent and visible (because also only partially present and contested). In the frontier zone, a variety of types of religious border crossing become relevant: points at which religious status is challenged, transformed, and managed by a masterful hand. In what follows, I explore three different types of “becoming,” each of which will give us some purchase on comprehending the frontiers of Christian personhood. First, changes in status within Christian hierarchies (from priest to lay, and back again) illustrate the ways in which frontiers function as unstable zones of authoritative control. Next, in the conversion from orthodox to heretical Christian we see the erratic role of empire in Christian community. Finally, by looking at the change from Jew to Christian we see how the particularly “Christian” notion of religious boundary can collapse in on itself, as identity in the borderlands becomes totalizing.

I. Becoming a Leader: Ascetics and Priests

In two very different episodes, Epiphanius describes changes of religious status within the Christian hierarchy. In a letter to Bishop John of Jerusalem, translated into Latin and preserved by his ally Jerome, Epiphanius tells the story of an irregular ordination. Through contact over the years, Epiphanius had become aware that a certain monastery in John's episcopal jurisdiction had no one to minister the sacraments: the two priests already resident there, it seemed, “were unwilling to offer the sacrifices permitted to their rank” (ep. 51.1.3). A third potential priestly candidate, who had so far eluded ordination, serendipitously presented himself before Epiphanius with other monks wishing to settle a grievance. As Epiphanius tells it:

Epiphanius's victim here is Paulinian, Jerome's brother, inhabitant of Jerome's monastery in Bethlehem, some miles from Jerusalem. Paulinian's is not the only forcible clerical ordination we hear tell of during this period, and later: forcible (or, at least, coercive) ordination becomes something of a trope in hagiographic literature, part of the growing mythos of the saintly “monk-bishop.”Footnote ²⁸ Epiphanius's account is one of the few narratives of forcible ordination from the hand of one of the direct participants,Footnote ²⁹ and is striking for its matter-of-factness.Footnote ³⁰ We have no sense in this account that Epiphanius finds his own behavior unusual or extreme.

The context of Epiphanius's account must explain, in part, his sang-froid. In this letter, Epiphanius is (ostensibly) responding to accusations that he had improperly ordained Paulinian within Bishop John's jurisdiction without John's consent. In a broader sense, the story is about who exerts control over the boundaries of Christian selfhood. Mostly obviously, the sloppy ecclesiastical boundary of clergy and laity is managed and corrected by Epiphanius: for years, he reports, the monks of the monastery had been complaining about their clerical deficiency. In an act of charity, Epiphanius had forcibly escorted Paulinian—twice—across clerical borders to correct this deficiency.Footnote ³¹ Other boundaries and borders are implicated here, as well. Epiphanius suggests that the monastery by its nature exists outside of episcopal authority, a free-floating island of sanctity that defies its own geography; he further notes that his “action concerned a monastery whose inmates were foreigners in no way subject to [John's] provincial jurisdiction” (ep. 51.1.3). Besides, Epiphanius chides, why should John be so precious about episcopal borders? In the “large and ranging” province of Cyprus, Epiphanius is grateful if other bishops ordain priests he has “been unable to capture” himself (ep. 51.2.1). It is, somewhat paradoxically, a sign of control and mastery to allow others to intrude on these boundaries. Finally, John's overly conscientious attention to his own boundaries bespeaks an ironic loss of self-control: in pressing his case, John has “allowed [his] anger to overcome [him] and [his] indignation to get the better of [him]” (ep. 51.2.5). Epiphanius, by contrast, as he forced Paulinian across the borders of ecclesiastical hierarchy, is masterful and orderly.Footnote ³²

Control over clerical and geographic boundaries structure another story of religious status transformation that Epiphanius tells in the fortieth chapter of his Panarion, on the “archontics.” (Like many of Epiphanius's eighty heresies, the “archontics” are otherwise unattested among ancient Christians.) Here the subject is a monk named Peter, who lived in Palestine near Epiphanius's own home turf:

We might consider this a simple reversal of the story of Paulinian: a man is stripped of his presbyterate, forced by a masterful bishop back across a clerical boundary he had illegitimately transgressed. Once again, appropriate control of Christian frontiers is exerted. But the story does not end there. A generation after his deposition (Aetius of Lydda was dead by the 340s), Peter returned to Epiphanius's neighborhood as an old man, although “secretly still carrying this poison within him.” Apparently living as a monk in Epiphanius's own monastery,Footnote ³⁴ Peter began to “whisper” his heresy until “he was exposed for what he was and anathematized and refuted by my poor self” (Pan. 40.1.6). Epiphanius seems to refer here to a monastic expulsion since, as an abbot, he does not (yet) possess the power of excommunication. Forced once more across an internal ecclesiastical boundary, the ex-priest now becomes an ex-monk. Where the first religious status change failed to do its job, we might think, the second will be more successful.

Yet this narrative ultimately lacks the fully confident mastery of Epiphanius's ordination of Paulinian. For Peter—ex-priest, ex-monk—merely moves into a nearby cave, where he becomes a famous hermit and “gathers many.” He has, seemingly, lost none of his ecclesiastical status and remains a teacher and minister. From his deceptive anchoritic cave (in a sheepskin that makes him, according to Epiphanius, a real “wolf in sheep's clothing”) Peter passes his heretical teachings to one Eutactus, who will go on to “sow his tare” in Armenia: the failure to enforce internal ecclesiastical boundaries is echoed by porous geographic boundaries. If the story of Paulinian is one of control of hierarchical boundaries, the story of Peter is about the loss of containment that threatens even the most well-managed frontier zone.

II. Becoming a Heretic

In many ways, Epiphanius's master-work, the Panarion, is a study both in the porous frontiers of religious identity and in Epiphanius's own role as the manager of those anxious frontiers. Of all the boundaries crossed by Christians, that threshold between orthodoxy and heresy looms largest in Epiphanius's imagination throughout his corpus. In some respects, this is because of the totalizing view of the Christian universe that Epiphanius cultivates throughout his writings: in a totalized scheme in which there is no “outside,” the multifarious differences within stand in precipitously high relief.Footnote ³⁵ Just as the movement across status lines within Christianity spoke to issues of hierarchy and control, the movement of Christians from orthodoxy into heresy likewise articulates the lack of containment within that orthodox totality. Viswanathan notes that “conversion unsettles the boundaries by which selfhood, citizenship, nation-hood, and community are defined, exposing these as permeable borders.”Footnote ³⁶ To pass from orthodoxy to heresy, for Epiphanius, is to make visible one of the myriad of fault lines fracturing the façade of Christian community. It is also, in a way, to provide an opportunity for a masterful Christian heresiologist to map and control those faults.

Certainly we witness several Christians passing from truth to error in the pages of the Panarion. Valentinus, before launching into gnostic error, “abandons the faith” (Pan. 31.7.2). Theodotus, after lapsing during persecution, invents a heresy to cover his shame (Pan. 54.1.3–7). Bardesan was originally a member of “God's holy church,” even risking martyrdom, before he “fell in with the Valentinians” (Pan. 56.2.1). Hieracas “was Christian . . . but did not persevere in the Christian way of life; for he strayed from it, slipped, and came to grief” (Pan. 67.1.4). The borderlands of Christian orthodoxy are precarious, indeed, across which faithful Christians drift and morph into heresiarchs.Footnote ³⁷ I would like to focus more specifically in this section on just two significant heretical border-crossers. Young Richard Kim, in recent work on Epiphanius's Panarion, noted the degree to which biography structures the later chapters of the bishop's heresiography.Footnote ³⁸ Following Kim's lead, I want to touch on the biographies of two major heresiarchs of the Panarion: Origen and Arius.Footnote ³⁹ These two “conversions” in particular highlight a second aspect of Epiphanius’ discourse of conversion: the erratic presence of Empire in the management of Christian boundaries.

Origen, against whose teaching Epiphanius waged a protracted battle,Footnote ⁴⁰ begins his life in Panarion 64 as a model Christian, the pious son of a martyr, himself subject to harassment in Alexandria for his Christianity. Although he lapses at the pagan altar before the threat of sexual violence, he remains (as Epiphanius says) “of the orthodox, catholic faith” replanted in Caesarea (Pan. 64.3.1). From the beginning of his life, the shadow of Empire (in the form of religious persecution) casts a chill on Origen's Christianity. Studious to a fault, Origen's longing for knowledge leads him into heresy: “his wealth of learning proved to be his great downfall” (Pan. 64.3.8); he was “bitten by a baneful viper, I mean secular education (τῆς κοσμικῆς προπαιδείας), and became the cause of others' death” (Pan. 64.72.5).Footnote ⁴¹ The sexual violence of the state and the intellectual violence of “worldly education” are perhaps not unrelated in Epiphanius's mind, insofar as they both envision the boundaries of the person (body and mind) subject to the deteriorating outside influence of Empire (political and cultural). Origen immediately retrojects these negative material and intellectual influences back outward. In addition to producing “mortally dangerous exegesis” (Pan. 64.3.9), Origen was rumored to have devised unnatural ways of “dealing with his body,” such as methods of chemical castration and medical memory-enhancement.Footnote ⁴²

Folded within the story of Origen's fall from orthodoxy to heresy is the story of Ambrose, his eventual patron. Origen is pressed to meet Ambrose (“a prominent imperial official”) so he may draw him from heresy (Epiphanius guesses Marcionite or Sabellian) to the proper orthodoxy which, at that time, Origen professed (Pan. 64.3.1). Origen is seemingly successful: Ambrose is converted from his “other heresy” to orthodoxy, and bankrolls Origen's prodigious textual and exegetical criticism (Pan. 64.3.2–4). Yet it is precisely because he has acquired the support of Ambrose—the convert from heresy—that Origen can himself become so swallowed up in “learning” that he begins to produce his “dangerous exegeses.” Instead of clearly articulating a boundary between orthodoxy and heresy, the life of Origen becomes a kind of Möbius strip, leading without clear transition from childhood orthodoxy to near apostasy to learned orthodoxy (even converting heretics!) to the most dire heresy.

Origen's heresy is marked at its core by the baleful influences of “the world” (ὁ κόσμος): Roman power, evident in persecution, and Greek knowledge, evident in overly intellectualized interpretation. Yet Epiphanius himself is deeply embedded in both imperium and paideia, a learned bishop riding comfortably (or, at least, unself-consciously) in the eddies of imperial Christian power. But perhaps this reflection is not accidental, as Epiphanius succeeds where Origen fails. In other words, the “outside” forces he sees as responsible for Origen's conversion to heresy are now contained safely “within” Epiphanius's own orthodox Christianity. Of course the projection of worldly power into the realm of heresy even as it remains within the orbit of orthodoxy places Epiphanius's imperial Christianity in a problematic situation, one that certainly haunted post-Constantinian Christianity. What is the relationship between Christianity and “the world?” Epiphanius's life of Origen—converter of heretics, convert to heresy—does not resolve, but merely embodies and contains this ambiguity.

If Origen's conversion problematizes the secular foundations of Epiphanius's Greco-Roman Christian Empire, Arius's tale bears witness to the power of empire to squeeze out evil and defend its own boundaries. Epiphanius prefaces his account of Arius with just such an image of masterful expulsion: “Alexander removed him from office and expelled him from the church and the city, as a great evil which had sprung up in the world” (Pan. 69.1.1). In the same introductory section, Epiphanius (impossibly) aligns the beginning of Arius's life and Christian Empire, as the heresiarch was “born during the reign of the great and blessed emperor Constantine” (Pan. 69.1.3).Footnote ⁴³ Arius even functions as an inverse Constantine: whereas the first Christian emperor “was admirable in the practice of Christianity,” Arius “succeeded in detaching a large number [from it]” (Pan. 69.1.4).

The beginning and ends of Arius's life are also modeled on Judas: his conversion to heresy begins when “a spirit of Satan . . . entered” him (Pan. 69.2.1; cf. Luke 22:3), and ends when his body “bursts” and he expires (Pan. 69.10.3; Acts 1:18).Footnote ⁴⁴ Like Judas, Arius is the false disciple, the traitor within; inspired by Satan, filled to bursting with wickedness, he succeeds in seducing others to his evil heresy, including clergy, monks, virgins, and even bishops. “Infused with the power of the devil” (Pan. 69.12.1), “inspired by vanity” (Pan. 69.3.1), Arius represents the vulnerability of the Christian body politic. Expelled from Alexandria, he flits around the eastern Mediterranean like a heretical tse-tse fly, carrying his contagion across provincial boundaries and within other city walls. Only the bishops of the East (and the threat of imperial sanction) can stop Arius's evil; special credit goes to Bishop Alexander of Constantinople, who prayed for the humiliating death that came to Arius while he sat on the toilet (Pan. 69.10.2–3).

On Epiphanius's timeline, Arius's death is followed immediately by the Council of Nicaea, the very watershed of Christian Empire. The juxtaposition of the obliterated boundaries of Arius's body and the newly constituted boundaries of the Christian Roman Empire are, indeed, striking. So striking, indeed, that it must help explain Epiphanius's curious—and impossible—chronology of Arius's life. Supposedly born “during the time of Constantine,” Arius somehow was also “an old man” (γέρων) when “he departed from the prescribed path” and entered into heresy some time in the 310s (Pan. 69.3.1).Footnote ⁴⁵ So too we know (and imagine Epiphanius knew) that Arius outlived the Council of Nicaea by a decade or more.Footnote ⁴⁶ Strict chronology is not Epiphanius's concern here; rather, as in the heretical slide of Origen, Epiphanius gazes upon the conversion of heretics and contemplates the force, or failure, of Empire.

III. Becoming a Christian

Conversion within Christian hierarchy speaks to the desire for, and instability of, episcopal control; conversion to Christian heresy problematizes the foundations of Christian empire; conversion to Christianity itself both materializes and dissolves the absolute frontiers of Christian identity, ultimately closing the religious frontier zone and folding “the other side” within. As a bishop, Epiphanius surely presided over many individual and communal conversions from non-Christian to Christian life. Unlike other contemporary bishops, however, he shows little interest in preserving any catechetical instruction or advice for the illuminandi.Footnote ⁴⁷ He does, however, preserve several telling narratives of conversion to Christianity that cohere with his larger interests in religious transformations as illuminating moments of Christian discourse. Several of his lengthier accounts of conversion to Christianity involve conversion from Judaism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Certainly, as Daniel Boyarin has convincingly argued, Epiphanius lingers on the Jewish-Christian border so long precisely in order to create a meaningful ideological divide between two messily interpenetrated religious categories.Footnote ⁴⁹ But in closing and solidifying the Jewish-Christian frontier zone, Epiphanius ultimately embeds the Jewish “other” within his own Christian territory.Footnote ⁵⁰

In a long digression in Panarion 30, his chapter against the Jewish-Christian “Ebionites,” Epiphanius relates the story of Count Joseph of Tiberias, a Christian aristocrat whom Epiphanius met in the 360s in Scythopolis.Footnote ⁵¹ Joseph's conversion narrative is long and convoluted; indeed, its length and complication seem to be something of the point. When Epiphanius meets Joseph, he is an orthodox Christian in Scythopolis, a Palestinian town full of Arians (Pan. 30.3.5–6); previously, however, Joseph had been a Jew, assistant to the Jewish Patriarch, Hillel. Upon Hillel's death, Joseph was charged with keeping Hillel's unruly child in line until he could assume the patriarchate. A series of events before and after Hillel's death led Joseph toward Christianity—slowly and haltingly—until, once baptized as an orthodox Christian, he befriended Constantine and was given a high rank and the thankless task of building churches in Galilee. Multiple conversions from Judaism pervade this story, further echoing and complicating Joseph's own conversion narrative, from the secret, deathbed conversion of the Patriarch Hillel (Pan. 30.4.5–7, 6.1–5) to an anonymous young ex-Jew living a closeted orthodox life in Scythopolis (Pan. 30.5.7).

Joseph's own story is one of not-quite conversions. After watching, incredulous, as the Jewish Patriarch received deathbed catechism and baptism, Joseph discovers a secret cache of Hebrew translations of New Testament texts (Pan. 30.6.7–9).Footnote ⁵² Neither of these fortuitous events convinces Joseph to embrace Christianity nor does his wonder at the prophylactic force of Christ's name and cross, which protect a Christian maiden from the wicked magic of the Patriarch's nefarious orphan son (Pan. 30.7.6–8.10).Footnote ⁵³ Miracles follow: Joseph rises from his sickbed after a vision of “the Lord” (Pan. 30.10.1) and himself cures a “naked madman” by invoking Jesus' name (Pan. 30.10.3–7). When his final conversion does come, it is almost an accident: unhappy provincial Jews discover Joseph reading borrowed copies of the gospels, and throw him in a river to drown. Rescued from drowning, Epiphanius announces, Joseph was now “found worthy of holy baptism” (Pan. 30.11.3–7). It is unclear if Epiphanius means that the attempted murder by his co-religionists had proved him (to himself? to other Christians?) worthy of baptism, or whether the near-drowning itself was deemed ritually sufficient. Either way, the Jew has at last become a Christian.

The stuttering nature of Joseph's conversion demonstrates the force required in Epiphanius's narrative to bring closure to the frontier zone of Judaism and Christianity, the yawning distance established between the two religious territories. Yet other figures within the text curiously minimize this discursive distance, partially re-hybridizing the painstakingly disentangled religious threads. I refer here not to the heretical “Ebionites,” the refutation of whom has been interrupted by Joseph's tale, but rather to other Jewish figures who precede Joseph in conversion from Judaism to Christianity. The first and most surprising (to Joseph and the reader) is the patriarch Hillel: out of nowhere, it seems, Hillel calls for a bishop to come and baptize him. The rest of the household is tricked into the thinking the bishop is a doctor and the water is medicinal; only Joseph, peering through “cracks in the doors,” knows the truth (Pan. 30.4.5–7, 6.4). Later, when Joseph himself falls ill, “an elder, a scholar of the Law,” who also reveals himself as a crypto-Christian, visits him. He “whispers” to Joseph, encouraging him to accept Jesus as Lord (Pan. 30.9.2–3). That such instances of secret conversion are not outliers is made clear by Epiphanius, who verifies that this is (apparently) common: “I have heard this sort of thing from someone else,” a Jew who “honored Christians and loved them” apparently because someone (we don't know who) whispered “secretly” when he was sick that he would be judged by “Jesus Christ, the crucified Son of God” (Pan. 30.9.4–5).

What purpose does this trio of crypto-Christian Jewish converts serve, especially when juxtaposed with Joseph, the almost comically reluctant convert? In a discourse of conversion that emphasizes individuality, interiority, and introspection, these four converts might speak to the difficult nature of internal reorientation. Like Augustine crying out for “chastity, but not yet,” these Jews crave Christ but cannot whole-heartedly give themselves to him. But Epiphanius does not focus his conversion stories on the internal mechanics of the soul; instead he frames his tale with bishops and emperors, with patriarchs and aristocrats, and with orthodoxy and heresy. Viswanathan writes that, in the colonial context, “[c]onverts function as strategic displacements of religious and ethnic groups, allowing writers to probe questions of selective incorporation and exclusion not easily approached by more direct means.”Footnote ⁵⁴ When addressing the “heresy” of the Ebionites, the question of incorporation and exclusion is paramount: what part of Judaism “remains” in Christianity? Where does the authoritative bishop establish his closed frontier? The stuttering and repetitive conversion of Joseph, resonating and rebounding off of these ancillary characters, seems to allow Epiphanius to imagine a Christianity that has always contained the remains of Judaism, whispering secretively even in the bedchamber of the most prestigious Jews in Palestine. In the end, the frontier, once closed, dissolves as the true Jews morph, slow-motion before our eyes, into orthodox Christians.Footnote ⁵⁵

Epiphanius indicates this absorption of Judaism by Christianity when he briefly mentions another “conversion” narrative in this chapter of the Panarion. It seems the Ebionites themselves claim that the apostle Paul was originally a pagan (ϕάσκουσιν αὐτὸν εἶναι Ἕλληνα) who

That is, Paul had been a pagan, and then a Jew, and then (more or less) a Christian. The progression across these borders into Christianity makes sense in Epiphanius's larger scheme of religious transformation, eliciting the fluidity and dynamism of identity and community, but works exactly against Epiphanius's particular concern in his chapter on Jewish-Christians. Paul must be authentically Jewish before becoming truly Christian—just like Joseph of Tiberias, Joseph's patriarchal employer, and the other Jews-made-Christians in the Panarion. The question, after all, revolves around the ability of Christianity to absorb true and authentic Judaism, at its core. For Paul to be an ersatz Jew would defeat the purpose of telling these conversion stories at all.

Epiphanius in fact returns to the apostle Paul's religious transformation, from Jew to Christian, in one of his later works: a treatise On Gems, in which he provides intertextual interpretations of the twelve stones in the breastplate of the Israelite high priest (Exod 28:15–20).Footnote ⁵⁶ The last stone, onyx, is ascribed by Epiphanius to the tribe of Benjamin. The mention of this youngest son of Israel allows Epiphanius to link the gem also to Paul, “of the tribe of Benjamin” (Phil 3:5; Rom 11:1), the “last of the apostles.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This section of the treatise (like much of the chapters) is a dazzling intertextual display; here, much of it is in the voice of Paul, stitched together out of passages from Paul's letters and verses of Psalms. Old and New Testament recombine, even dance together, as focus shifts back and forth from Benjamin (the Old) to Paul (the New). The goblet of Benjamin covered in onyx (combining Genesis 44 and Exodus 28) becomes the cup from which Paul serves the “draft of the knowledge of God.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Benjamin, the “ravening wolf” of Genesis 49, becomes Paul who, “in his youth, like a wolf, ravened and champed the bones and the flesh of many.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Paul's transformation from “ravening wolf,” persecutor of the church, into most beloved apostle is the main theme of Epiphanius's spiritual interpretation of the onyx. Twice Epiphanius places us with Paul on the road to Damascus,Footnote ⁶⁰ hearing the chastising voice of God and becoming the “chosen vessel” of God's word. The layers of transformation are thick: from Benjamin (who is also associated by Epiphanius with Damascus, as the site where he was called “marvelous in his youth”Footnote ⁶¹) to Paul, from “wolf” to apostle, and from Old Testament into New. Here the value of re-visioning “conversion” with Epiphanius becomes most evident. Whereas, for Augustine, Paul's transformation on the road to Damascus became the index by which to understand God's inscrutable correction of the individual, fallen soul, at the climax of Epiphanius's spiritual interpretation of Aaron's bejeweled breastplate that same conversion condenses the power and majesty of the total transformation of “old” into “new,” the absorption of Judaism into Christianity, past into present. The frontier zone between Judaism and Christianity closes, but we discover that Judaism remains within that frontier, enfolded within a totalizing vision of religious truth.