Early Christian Books in Egypt

Roger S. Bagnall

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691140261
• eBook ISBN: 9781400833788
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History

For the past hundred years, much has been written about the early editions of Christian texts discovered in the region that was once Roman Egypt. Scholars have cited these papyrus manuscripts--containing the Bible and other Christian works--as evidence of Christianity's presence in that historic area during the first three centuries AD. In Early Christian Books in Egypt, distinguished papyrologist Roger Bagnall shows that a great deal of this discussion and scholarship has been misdirected, biased, and at odds with the realities of the ancient world. Providing a detailed picture of the social, economic, and intellectual climate in which these manuscripts were written and circulated, he reveals that the number of Christian books from this period is likely fewer than previously believed.

Bagnall explains why papyrus manuscripts have routinely been dated too early, how the role of Christians in the history of the codex has been misrepresented, and how the place of books in ancient society has been misunderstood. The author offers a realistic reappraisal of the number of Christians in Egypt during early Christianity, and provides a thorough picture of the economics of book production during the period in order to determine the number of Christian papyri likely to have existed. Supporting a more conservative approach to dating surviving papyri, Bagnall examines the dramatic consequences of these findings for the historical understanding of the Christian church in Egypt.

CHAPTER I

The Dating of the Earliest Christian Books in Egypt

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

The subject of this book, early Christian books in Egypt, cannot make any claim to novelty. The bibliography is enormous, and much of it is learned and even intelligent. If I dare to offer some observations on several aspects of this vast domain, it is certainly not because I think I know more about Christian literary manuscripts, or about book production in antiquity, or indeed about the dating of handwriting, than my predecessors. That is certainly not the case. Nor will many of my observations be very original. Rather, what has led me to trespass onto this intellectual territory is my unease with what I see as the excessively self-enclosed character and absence of self-awareness of much of that scholarship.

The narrowness of much of it has permitted its practitioners to reach conclusions that I believe are profoundly at odds with fundamental social realities of the ancient world and with basic probability; and the lack of a self-critical posture has been particularly damaging in that it has tended to allow problematic assumptions, interests, agendas, and desires to escape being made explicit. Much of what I have to say will therefore be directed at bringing these foundations of the discussion into the light and looking for their consequences. More broadly, my interest in the subject comes from two intersecting directions of work: first, social history and the role of writing in ancient society; and second, the character of written texts as archaeological artifacts (Bagnall 1995).

The subject of early Christian books, of course, offers many interpretations, many avenues of approach, and many sets of issues, of which I shall deal with only a few. That there is such a diversity of issues and approaches is in large part the result of Christianity’s inheritance from Judaism of a writing-centered culture. I do not mean by this to suggest that other characteristics of the religion, like ritual, healings, and so on, were absent or unimportant, only that they were perhaps less distinctive and original. The gospels and the letters of the New Testament respond to certain characteristics of the early church and embed its diversity and contentiousness. Surviving writings that did not make their way into the eventual biblical canon go back to almost as early a period as the gospels and epistles.¹ A religious movement geographically dispersed around the Roman world, but evidently, from an early date, intent on achieving some kind of unity and uniformity, depended on correspondence and on written versions of its message to achieve any kind of coherence.² Such unity and coherence need not have been important, but in Christianity clearly they were felt to be important from the very beginning, or at least from as close to it as we can get. This double drive for uniformity and organizational structure is indeed one of Christianity’s most distinctive characteristics.

It is particularly with the implications of surviving books and book fragments for Christianity before Constantine that I shall be concerned, and especially with its first two centuries. That is where the liveliest controversies are to be found. The reason for that is not obscure. It is, quite simply, that we are far less well informed about pre-Constantinian Christianity than we are about the fourth century or later periods. This relative lack of information has been a central problem for scholarship, in large part because Christian discourse and the study of Christianity have for more than a century been obsessed with questions about the nature of early Christianity, of Christian “origins.”³ For modern scholars who were unfriendly to the Christianity that emerged as catholic orthodoxy from the struggles of late antiquity it has been important to demonstrate that this late antique religion had betrayed the essence of the original message of the religion it claimed to represent; and the contrary has been equally important to demonstrate for those intent on defending Nicene Christianity against all such assertions. The authority attributed by the church to Jesus and the canonical scriptures has been virtually the one element on which people who agree on little else can agree. Or, as we might put it, those who think that Nicene Christianity was a deviation from a more sympathetic primitive Christianity have adopted for the sake of persuasiveness a rhetorical strategy that privileges the supposed origins. Determining just what Jesus preached and how far the New Testament canon rests on an accurate rendering of that preaching has thus been one of the most durable of scholarly industries.

There is, of course, a large body of surviving extracanonical Christian writings from the period before Constantine, both those preserved and revered in orthodoxy and those rejected by it (Ehrman 2003). Many of the latter, although not all of them, were not transmitted in the medieval manuscript tradition and are known only from texts discovered since the late nineteenth century. The publication of the Gospel of Judas in April 2006 has brought one more element to this dossier.⁴ But because all these writings, whether preserved or rejected by the church authorities, are with hardly an exception writings devoted to supporting one side or another of some ancient controversy, and thus obviously not objective witnesses to the early character of Christianity, there is a tradition, now of some antiquity itself, of looking to archaeological and documentary sources—using these terms in a broad sense—to try to capture a less tendentious and more “authentic” early Christianity.⁵ That notion is itself problematic, but that is not my subject here.

In that endeavor, Egyptian Christianity has played a central role, mainly because the survival of papyri there seemed already by the early twentieth century to offer hopes of recovering an earlier documentary past than was available elsewhere, but also because the episcopal throne of Alexandria was one of the most prestigious of late antiquity and seemed to demand a past commensurate with its distinction and influence under Athanasius and his successors. And even for the period after Constantine, when archaeological evidence remains relatively scarce until the fifth century, the evidence from the papyri has continued to be called on to help us figure out what was going on behind the noisy clash of doctrines in the theological literature, above all what were the realities of daily practice and habits (Wipszycka 1996, 2007a, and forthcoming).

The pressure to produce usable information from the papyri has been even more intense than it might otherwise have been precisely because Christianity before Constantine in Egypt itself is so poorly known from the literary tradition. There is in effect a vast blank, the “mere echo and a puff of smoke” as Walter Bauer famously called it.⁶ Most of this tiny amount of traditional information comes from Eusebius’s Church History, and it does not give one the impression that Eusebius knew a lot. In book 2, chapter 16, he says, “They say that this Mark was the first to be sent to preach in Egypt the gospel which he had also put into writing, and was the first to establish churches in Alexandria itself.” That is all Eusebius knows of the supposed foundation of the see of St. Mark, and he does not seem to give it a high degree of confidence; it is clear that his sources were far from being as copious as he was accustomed to in some other settings.

There follows, in chapters 17–18 of the Church History, a long excursus concerning Philo’s On the Contemplative Life, which Eusebius identifies as describing an early Christian community near Alexandria, ancestral to or at least foreshadowing the monastic milieus of his own time. This passage has given rise to extensive modern discussion that I cannot go into here. Then comes a more characteristic notice, in chapter 24: “In the eighth year of the reign of Nero Annianus was the first after Mark the evangelist to receive the leitourgia of the paroikia in Alexandria.” Stephen Davis, in his recent book The Early Coptic Papacy (2004: 14–15), has summarized the scattered notices that follow in Eusebius about the succession to Mark and Annianus. None of them, for the period down to the late second century, betrays any actual information about any of the early bishops of Alexandria, other than their names and dates.

Alexandria did, of course, eventually develop a distinctively centralized episcopate leading a highly Christianized society with a vast network of local bishops. But Eusebius, as we have seen, had no real information about this developmental process before the episcopate of Demetrios (189–231), nor do we. There have been various reactions to this blank, including Attila Jakab’s argument that there were no bishops of Alexandria before Demetrios, only a collection of presbyters.⁷ This has become almost a counterorthodoxy, if we may judge by its adoption as a basic premise for understanding the position of Origen, in the new book of Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams (2006). But the logical consequences that might be derived from such a view, or from pre-Demetrian skepticism in general, for the development of the book in Egypt have hardly touched discussions of early Christian manuscripts actually known.⁸

It has been widely asserted, instead, or at least assumed, that the developments in the reign of Demetrios show that (and are understandable only on the assumption that) Christianity was widely disseminated in the Egyptian chora before this time, and that he in effect built on a substantial infrastructure, at least in the metropoleis of the nomes. This view has in large part been based on the existence of papyrus letters and manuscripts dated to the second century and coming from various provenances. This is true even in the work of so critical a historian as Ewa Wipszycka, who has rejected the Christian identity of some of what have been claimed to be the earliest private letters showing signs of Christianity.⁹ This view, however, seems to me seriously open to question because of the insecure dating of the papyri. Perhaps equally problematic, it shows just how vital the existence and early dating of the papyri are to the entire conception of the development of Christianity in Egypt and how much is at stake in such datings. Without these early datings of papyri, we have no contemporary witnesses to pre-Demetrian Christianity to provide a background for his era.¹⁰ It is worth the trouble at least to consider the consequences that would follow from taking a different view.

It may be helpful to summarize briefly some of the distinctive characteristics visible in the church of Egypt in late antiquity, as Wipszycka has outlined them. The episcopal network of Egypt developed relatively late in comparison with other regions; there were no metropolitan bishops in charge of subdivisions of the Egyptian province (which included Cyrenaica); the patriarch therefore had a direct relationship to all his bishops. Similarly within dioceses, priests had a direct relationship to their bishops. These characteristics were highly consequential for the history of the Egyptian church. What today in the language of management we might call an extremely flat structure, with a lack of intermediate layers of hierarchy, is very striking. Such structures have, as Wipszycka notes, various trade-offs of advantages and disadvantages. The chief executive, the bishop of Alexandria, had a relatively weak ability to watch over so many people carefully and adequately, thus allowing room for quite a bit of local freedom of maneuver. On the other hand, potential rivals to episcopal power were kept far from any position in which they could build up a substantial power base.

It would be surprising if a flat, monarchic structure of this kind had been universally popular. In fact there are many signs that the authoritarian ambitions of the see of Alexandria were not supported by everyone. Origen’s need to leave Alexandria, late in Demetrios’s reign, was probably a matter of a struggle over episcopal control of the teaching function, which was most likely not very institutionalized until that point (Jakab 2001: 169–73 and 216–27). The Meletian schism in the fourth century was mainly a question of the primacy of Alexandria over other bishops. Although Arius’s clash with successive bishops is depicted by Athanasius throughout his works as a matter of false versus correct doctrine, something he could not claim about the Meletians, it seems that the Arian controversy was perennially insoluble precisely because it was not a matter of doctrinal agreement but of the struggle of the bishop to control a presbyter in his diocese and of widespread resistance to that type of control over preaching.

In the face of such a picture, it is hard not to adopt the extreme skeptic’s position and wonder if the entire history of the see of Alexandria during its first century and a half, with its long but thin foundation story, was not part of an attempt, at the earliest in the time of Demetrios but perhaps not until a century or so later,¹¹ to create a legitimation by apostolicit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• A Note on Abbreviations
• Chapter I: The Dating of the Earliest Christian Books in Egypt
• Chapter II: Two Case Studies
• Chapter III: The Economics of Book Production
• Chapter IV: The Spread of the Codex
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Papyrological Texts Discussed