Christianizing Egypt

Egypt had some of the oldest religious traditions and most impressive monuments in the ancient world, so how did such a culture come to identify as Christian? David Frankfurter approaches this question by examining how Christianity was shaped within the different communities of late antique Egypt. Each group, he argues, built its own version of the faith around its concerns, its inherited customs, and its view of what religion could do for people.

Frankfurter revives the word "syncretism" to describe the ongoing process through which any religion absorbs local practices and adapts to a new culture. He looks at household religion, the followings of holy men and saints' shrines, the work of craftsmen, the practices of monastic scribes, and the ways Egyptians reshaped their landscape through processions, buildings, and the lingering presence of the pharaonic past. Throughout, he treats conversion as more than a change of belief, and as a selective adoption of Christian tools for protection, authority, and effectiveness, and for making sense of the surrounding world.

The book draws on sermons, magical texts, saints' lives, figurines, letters, and amulets, and compares the Egyptian case with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman Empire and beyond. It is written for scholars and students of religion and ancient history.