Christianity and paganism, I: Egypt

Abstract

To understand the Christianisation of Egypt as well as the conflicts with native religion that this process entailed, we need to make some tentative distinction between the Christianity of texts and the Christianities assembled locally in villages. If the ancient gods and their shrines were often demonised, the new Christian worldview also depended upon familiar notions of harmful and beneficial power, ritual efficacy, and communication with divine beings. The author calls this inevitable process of mediating new ideologies within traditional schemes of ritual power syncretism, but only to the extent that it involves indigenous local agency and a genuine engagement with the authority of the new worldview, and not in the older sense of pagan survival or native misunderstanding. A growing intolerance among Christian leaders for Egyptian temple cults from the late fourth century probably arose with a revival of martyrological lore. The secret corridors and austere priestly rites once romanticised in Hellenistic literature now became the loci of sorcery.

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