The Possibilities and Limits of "Parabiblical" Literature

Since August 2020, I have been working as part of the ERC funded project “APOCRYPHA: Storyworlds in Transition,” hosted by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. This project aims to study apocrypha attested in the Coptic language (regardless of whether they were originally written in Coptic or translated from another language), which were circulated during the entire span of Coptic literary production— from roughly the 3rd to 14th centuries. Miroshnikov’s volume, Parabiblica Coptica, thus greatly complements our work. Indeed, the definition of apocrypha, which is presented in the preface to this book (p. V), is that of the PI of the APOCRYPHA project, Hugo Lundhaug. In its most recent iteration, this definition describes apocrypha as texts and traditions that elaborate or expand upon characters or events of the biblical storyworld. In turn, the biblical storyworld can be defined as “the imaginary world that is created in the minds of readers or hearers on the basis of one or more biblical and/or apocryphal texts” (Lundhaug, 2023: p. 514 n. 11). In the context of these definitions, it is pertinent to begin with a short comment on issues of terminology regarding the choice of title for Parabiblica Coptica, as discussed in the preface (pp. V–VI).

The term “parabiblica,” as Miroshnikov notes, is employed as a more neutral concept, devoid of the negative connotations associated with the term “apocrypha.” Such negative associations come not only out of antiquity—for example in the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius, discussed in this volume by Nils Arne Pedersen (pp. 151–174)—but are often present in modern scholarship on so-called apocryphal works (see, for example, the discussion in Farag, 2021: pp. 50–51 n. 16). Most importantly, Miroshnikov notes that the readers and writers of the texts discussed in the volume would not think of these as “apocrypha” (p. V). This is very apparent in my own research as part of the APOCRYPHA project on the library of the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Lower Egypt. In this corpus, I would argue that works subsumed under our project’s definition of “apocrypha” were not treated differently from any other literary works and were in fact incorporated into the liturgical celebrations of the monastery alongside other non-apocryphal homiletic and hagiographical works. It is important to remind ourselves that the way we as scholars categorize and discuss these works is a modern construct—something which is also discussed by Dan Batovici in his contribution to Parabiblica Coptica on the Apostolic Fathers (pp. 103–126).

There is a somewhat compelling argument for the use of a more neutral term like “parabiblical” in place of “apocrypha.” Nevertheless, I would argue that employing the term “apocrypha” is unproblematic, as long as the parameters of its use are clearly defined. In the APOCRYPHA project, we emphasize that we employ the term as a purely modern categorization, which does not necessarily reflect how these works would have been perceived in their original contexts. Rather, it is an analytical tool, employed to group together works based on particular features of their contents that are of interest to us as modern researchers. For this reason, one might also note that the terms “apocryphon” or “apocrypha” were used in antiquity, both by authors and readers  (see Burke and Landau, 2016: pp. xxii-xxiii; Shoemaker, 2008: pp. 525–527). This was not always negative: for example, Miroshnikov notes the self-designated Apocryphon of John in the Nag Hammadi Codices (p. V).

In any case, the use of “parabiblical” in place of “apocryphal” does not detract at all from the contents of the volume. What is most pertinent is that whichever term is employed is well-defined and well-delineated. In the case of the discussion on terminology in the preface to this volume, one question lingers: what are the limits of the term “parabiblical”? As Miroshnikov states, the term denotes texts that do not belong to the Bible but “move in its orbit” (p. V). In this case, one could argue that patristic exegetical homilies are parabiblical: they do not narrate stories set in the biblical storyworld, but rather they explain it. As such one might argue that they also move “in the orbit” of the Bible. They are not apocryphal according to the definition of the APOCRYPHA project, but could they also be classed as “parabiblical”? The preface could have benefited from a more detailed definition of what is and is not “parabiblical.”

Turning to the contents of the volume itself, there are several features of the contributions which stood out. More generally, given how much Coptic material is still unpublished or in need of republication, the first section of the volume (“Editiones”: pp. 3–100) is an invaluable contribution to the field. What is particularly useful are the editions and discussions of the apocryphal acts of the apostles—the Acts of Andrew and Paul edited by Christian Bull and Alexandar Kocar (pp. 3–29), and the Preaching of Philip edited by Miroshnikov (pp. 53–100). The apocryphal acts are, I think, some of the most fascinating and enjoyable examples of Coptic literature. Their manuscript evidence is often complex: many of the Coptic witnesses belong to highly fragmentary codices (particularly those of the White Monastery in Atripe), whose codicological reconstructions are highly contested. In general, Miroshnikov’s past work has greatly contributed to our understanding of these works and their manuscripts (see, for example, Miroshnikov 2019; 2018; 2017). The development and transmission of the apocryphal acts, and their relationship to other literary works, is something that is also often understudied and not fully understood. This is addressed quite thoroughly in Miroshnikov’s contribution, in which he explores the relationship—or in this case, the lack thereof—between the Preaching of Philip and other apocryphal acts of Philip. Consequently, the first part of Parabiblica Coptica contributes to the growing interest in, and understanding of, this sub-corpus of apocryphal works.

I would also like to highlight the effectiveness of the way in which the editions and translations are presented—specifically the synoptic comparison of different textual witnesses. This is relevant to the translation of the Preaching of Philip presented by Miroshnikov, and the edition and translation by Dylan M. Burns comparing the so-called “Notes of Some Philosophers” with relevant sections of Ps.-Evodius of Rome’s On the Passion and Resurrection (pp. 31–52). One of the key features of the APOCRYPHA project is working through the lens of Material Philology, which emphasizes textual fluidity and a focus on variations in individual textual attestations of a single work.  A major difficulty in this methodological approach is how to present multiple textual witnesses of a single work in such a way that is useful for the reader. This is, of course, more difficult if there are many attestations, which is often the case with, for example, Greek material. For Coptic, however, we are fortunate (if one can call it so) that we often have very few surviving texts of a single work, making the matter of presenting synoptic editions much easier.

The chapter by Burns applies this methodology effectively as he focuses on a section of Ps.-Evodius homily which presents so-called “wisdom that is outside” (wisdom coming from “pagan” Greek sources and thus from “outside” the bible). Burns compares this portion with the content of several leaves from Vienna containing sayings of Greek philosophers in Coptic translation. As such, Burns is dealing not only with textual variation within a single work, but also between two works which, ostensibly, come from very different literary contexts. The synoptic edition he presents illustrates the relationship between these works quite well. There is still much work to be done regarding the expression of textual variation in editions, particularly when we move into the territory of large numbers of textual attestations. This becomes especially pertinent in the field of Coptic studies when we begin to incorporate Copto-Arabic material. This is an issue for which digital humanities may be able to offer solutions, an area that has been gaining more traction in recent years.

In addition to the contribution in part one, I would also like to briefly highlight that of Eugenia Smagina on onomastics and orthography of loanwords in Coptic texts (pp. 175–189). The majority of the chapter is devoted to tracing the transmission of particular names of Satan and lower demons in apocrypha and other texts. This is quite a useful discussion for anyone interested in the origins of such names. One example which I found intriguing was that of the name of the angel of death, Abbaton (pp. 186–187), derived from Hebrew Abaddon via Greek. Smagina dwells on the change in orthography between Greek (abaddōn) and Coptic (abbaton). She suggests that it is not necessarily motivated by Coptic phonetics (that is, the devoicing of delta to tau and the similarities between omega and omicron), but rather may be an association with the word Sabbaton, that is the Seventh Day. As Smagina notes (pp. 186–187), in Pseudo-Timothy’s Encomium on the Angel of Death, Abbaton is the seventh angel (and the only successful one), who is ordered to fetch clay with which to make Adam, as well as being the angel who leads the righteous to the “places of rest.” For this reason, she suggests that the author of the encomium may have made an association between the angel and Sabbaton—the seventh day and the day of rest. Although the matter of phonetic-induced orthographic shifts should not be entirely dismissed, this is nevertheless a compelling and plausible argument.

Finally, I would like to draw particular attention to the contribution of Vincent van Gerven Oei and Alexandros Tsakos on so-called “apostolic memoirs” in Old Nubian (pp.191–224). There are several reasons why this chapter is invaluable. First, the field of Old Nubian studies is (at least compared to other fields like Greek and Roman studies) still in its infancy. As such, any work which furthers our knowledge of the corpus of Old Nubian texts, and their relationship to Coptic literary traditions, is much appreciated. The previous work of both van Gerven Oei and Tsakos has been instrumental in this vein (see, for example, van Gerven Oei and Tsakos, 2020; van Gerven Oei et. al., 2016, Tsakos, 2014). Their discussion in this volume is a strong addition to both Nubian studies and Coptic studies. To choose just one work from the chapter as an example, their discussion of the Investiture of Michael confirms an earlier claim by Gerald M. Browne (1988: p. 17) that the Old Nubian version was translated from Greek, not Coptic. Although this claim was first made almost 40 years ago, the authors note that no linguistic evidence had been provided to back this up—evidence which their contribution to the volume now provides (pp.197–200).

Second, in the introduction to this chapter, they stress that apostolic memoirs are preserved mostly in Coptic, Arabic, Gəʿəz, and Old Nubian, noting that “this has contributed, in part, to the recent rejection of the assumption that all Coptic literature was translated from Greek” (p. 192). This discussion also appears elsewhere in the volume—for example, in Miroshnikov’s edition of the Preaching of Philip, where he notes that Coptic was most likely the original language of the work (p. 58). The idea that all Coptic works must have been translated from a Greek Vorlage has been a persistent hangover in our field from earlier scholarship, which was undertaken in a very much colonial milieu. These early studies tended to underestimate the creativity of Coptic authors and their contribution to Christian literature. The extreme focus on the “hypothetical Greek original” is perhaps best exemplified by Layton’s discussion on philology and the Nag Hammadi codices (Layton, 1981). He argues for first creating a hypothetical Coptic archetype based on existing textual witnesses, from which the philologist should produce a “word-for-word reconstruction of a Greek witness”, or, failing this, “a free English translation of the Coptic archetype as though translated from the Greek” (Layton, 1981: p. 96). The work of Alin Suciu on the apostolic memoires (see, for example Suciu, 2017: pp. 125–128) and, more recently, the doctoral dissertation of Florian Graz on apostolic memoires with homiletic frame narratives (Graz, 2024), have helped to shift this attitude. It is great to see work in Old Nubian studies helping to support this more nuanced understanding of Coptic literature and its subsequent literary traditions in other languages.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the contribution of van Gerven Oei and Tsakos is noteworthy in its discussion of ethical considerations related to working with manuscripts (pp. 192–194)—something that has often been neglected within philology. The authors outline some of the implications of studying unprovenanced material, including the promotion of illegal excavation and trafficking, and highlight that there are living communities with local, ethnic, and national cultural ties to these artifacts. Most importantly, they raise the issue of one specific manuscript which forms part of their later discussions: namely, the Stauros Text. Although it was purchased at a time prior to any international conventions concerning the removal of material from their country of origin, they note that it nonetheless has an insecure provenance, having appeared suddenly on the antiquities market in Egypt before being purchased for the Prussian Royal Library, now the Berlin State Library (pp. 193–194). Such discussions of insecure or problematic provenance should be standard practice for publications in manuscript studies and related fields. By way of a small critique, I would have liked to see a deeper discussion on the provenance of the manuscripts edited in first part of the volume. For example, in Bull and Kocar’s discussion of the Borgia leaves from MONB.DM (the sigla provided to the manuscript by the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari), they state that the manuscripts in the Vatican library were sent to Rome from Egypt by Jesuit missionaries (p. 6). This discussion could have benefited from more information about how the missionaries came to acquire these manuscripts, or alternatively, since this is usually the case with such manuscripts, a note stating that this information is unknown to scholars.

Both the editions and other studies in Parabiblica Coptica provide valuable contributions to the fields of Coptic studies and manuscript studies, as well as to the study of apocrypha (or parabiblica) more broadly. Most important are those aspects which add to the growing understanding of Coptic literary production as a phenomenon in its own right, rather than as an exercise in the translation of Greek literature into Egyptian. The chapters are concise, well-written and argued, thus making the book easy and enjoyable to read. This volume would be of interest not only to those already familiar with Coptic apocrypha, but those who work with Christian literature in other languages and wish to get a snapshot into such traditions in the Egyptian (and Nubian) milieu.

Works Cited

Browne, G. M. 1988 “A Revision of the Old Nubian Version of the Insitutio Michaelis.” Beiträge zur Sundanforcshung 3: 17–24.

Burke, T. and B. Landau. 2016. “Introduction.” Pages xx–xlvi in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Edited by T. Burke and B. Landau. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Farag, M. K. 2021. “Rewriting Scriptures as a Homiletic Practice in Late Antique Egypt.” Journal of Coptic Studies 23: 47–61.

van Gerven Oei, V., Laisney, V. P., Ruffini, G., Tsakos, A., Weber-Thum, K. and P. Weschenfelder (eds). 2016. The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri. Dotawo Monographs 1. Goleta CA: punctum books.

van Gerven Oei, V. and A. Tsakos. 2020. “Translating Greek to Old Nubian: Reading between the Lines of Ps.-Chrysostom’s In venerabilem crucem sermo.” Pages 204–240 in Caught in Translation: Studies on Versions of Late-Antique Christian Literature. Edited by M. Toca and D. Batovici. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 17. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Graz, F. 2024. “I Found a Little Book which the Apostles Had Written: Frame Narratives in Coptic Apocrypha.” PhD diss. University of Oslo.

Layton, B. 1981. “The Recovery of Gnosticism: The Philologist's Task in the Investigation of Nag Hammadi.” The Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies 1(2): 85–99.

Lundhaug, H. 2023. “Pseudepigraphy and Coptic Apocrypha Authority, Authenticity, and Worldbuilding.” Early Christianity 14: 512–528.

Miroshnikov, I. 2017. “The Acts of Andrew and Philemon in Sahidic Coptic.” Apocrypha 28: 9–83.

Miroshnikov, I. 2018. “The Coptic Martyrdom of Andrew.” Apocrypha 29: 9–28.

Miroshnikov, I. 2019. “The Coptic Versions of the Acts of Andrew and Matthias (CANT 236), with an Edition of IFAO Copte inv. 132.” Le Muséon: Revue d’études orientales 132:291–328.

Shoemaker, S. J. 2008. “Early Christian Apocryphal Literature.” Pages 521–548 in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. Edited by S. A. Harvey and D. G. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Suciu, A. 2017. The Berlin-Strasbourg Apocryphon: A Coptic Apostolic Memoir. WUNT 370. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Tsakos, A. 2014. “The ‘Liber Institutionis Michaelis’ in Medieval Nubia.” Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 1(1): 51–62.

Samuel Peter Cook is a junior fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies “Beyond Canon”  at the Universität Regensburg, and recently a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project "APOCRYPHA: Storyworlds in Transition" and director of operations in its associated Proof of Concept project "Tool for the Analysis of Information Transfer in Manuscript Cultures (TInTraMaC)", both hosted by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. During this time, he has worked on the corpus of Coptic manuscripts deriving from the Monastery of Saint Macarius in northern Egypt. He is currently producing a monograph on their production, distribution, and use, with a particular focus on the monastic use of apocryphal literature.

SBL 2021 Review Panel: Bishops in Flight

AJR is pleased to publish remarks delivered as part of a book review panel at the annual meeting of the 2021 Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio. The panel was organized by members of the Social History of Formative Christianity and Judaism, Exile (Forced Migrations) in Biblical Literature steering committees. The book is Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2019) by Jennifer Barry and the panelists were: M Adryael Tong (ITC), Mark K. George (Iliff School of Theology), Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen), and Tina Shepardson (University of Tennessee Knoxville). The series begins with a book review of Bishops in Flight by Madeline St. Marie.

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Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity

by Madeleine St. Marie in Review

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Interpreting Exile in Late Antiquity

by Tina Shepardson

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Exploring Space: A Response to Bishops in Flight

by Mark K. George

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The Desert and the Prison

by Matthew Larsen

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The Bishop and the Exile

by M Adryael Tong

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AJR Forum on Bishops in Flight | A Response

by Jennifer Barry

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The Desert and the Prison

Jennifer Barry’s Bishops in Flight is a stellar achievement that will serve as the new touchstone for the foreseeable future on the topic of late antique Christian discourse on exile and displacement. She adroitly analyzes discourses on how and when a bishop ought to flee, how a bishop ought to return from flight, how one might condemn a bishop for flight, and how one might rehabilitate a bishop returning from flight. In what follows, I will first offer an interpretive restatement of her main ideas. Then I want to raise two questions, through the lens of a particular documentary papyrus. Lastly, I want to offer an exploratory reflection on the potential stakes of the project.

Barry’s Bishops in Flight gives a clear sense that, for an ambitious bishop in the fourth and fifth centuries, the road to status, to prestige, to political influence — quite often — led straight through the experience of exile or displacement. For late antique bishops, if you play the game of thrones, you win or die— except that sometimes you win by exile, and other times you die by exile, and in exile. And yet, apparently to be exiled or to flee during a time of hardship was a sign that a bishop was someone of importance.

And yet, while fleeing could be construed as an act of holiness, likened to the flight of Christ from his opponents since his hour had not yet come, it could also be construed as fleeing the scene of a crime — the very proof of one’s guilt. Whether the crime was murder or heresy, if you ran away, it could be conceived as a form of admitting guilt, at least for some. In this way, one had to follow a careful rule book on how to flee. If you fled, you might be Christ or you might be the devil, and the difference between the two was most certainly in the details — the detailed script, that is, of how to go (usually voluntarily) into exile.

Barry provides much more than just simply an analysis of the topic. She provides a fresh lens for viewing the institutionalization of Christianity and the political maelstroms of the fourth and fifth centuries. This story is often told through the lens of the various Christological controversies and their ties to various locations and changing political landscapes. Barry tells this story but through a refreshing alternative perspective. Who flees and how, who returns and how; it was all about — please excuse my paraphrase Hamilton — who lives, who dies, and, most importantly, who tells your story.

Barry shows how any bishop worth his salt (and it was a his) was exiled (as another reviewer put it, it was almost a part of the bishop’s job description), as well as how the story of developing late antique Christianity was also about how to develop central casting for being properly and orthodoxly exiled. In reading Bishops in Flight I got the sense of a story of a story of crime and punishment, but more subtly backstage view into the audition for who gets assigned what roles in an already scripted play and why.

To wit, crime, and punishment …

Jennifer Barry insightfully evokes Tertullian as an opening frame for her book. The opening words of the prologue for Bishops in Flight come from Tertullian’s On Flight in Persecution. She uses the quotation to foreground the idea that fleeing from persecution in the late second and third centuries was a sign of cowardice, conceit, and frankly apostasy. A brilliant juxtaposition for what Barry will cover later in the book.

But I must admit (and here I acknowledge my own position as someone working on issues related to the carceral state), as I read Bishops in Flight, I found my mind returning to another snippet from Tertullian. In around 197 CE, Tertullian, the razor-tongued rhetor from Carthage, wrote a letter to a group of incarcerated Christians to encourage them to keep the faith. The letter is known to us as the treatise, To the Martyrs. In it, he wrote, “The prison is for the Christian what the desert was for the prophet.” Tertullian notes a substitution: while the desert was generative for the prophet — the place where a prophet was made or broken — the prison served the same function for second and third century Christians.

But this changed in the fourth century after the Edict of Milan in 313. As Michelle Salzman illustrated, by the end of the fourth century, not only was it not illegal to be a Christian, but a majority of Western senate high office holders identified as Christian. I wonder how Barry might comment on the idea that her book is about how the snippet from Tertullian gets reversed in the fourth and fifth century: The desert became for the late antique bishop, what the prison had been for the second and third-century Christian confessor.

Simultaneously, a place of death and a place of life, a place of disgrace and a place of glory, a place where both heroes and villains were born. The key difference, of course, between the prison of the second and third century and the desert of the fourth and fifth, is going to prison was often always an involuntary judicial matter, while the desert could be voluntary and non-judicial.

And yet, it wasn’t the case that by the time of Athanasius, for instance, that Christians were no longer put into prisons: it is more the case that only certain types of Christians — specifically of lower social status or less politically important people— went to prison.

And here I’d like to stage my first question. The question is: what about social status? This book is not just about bishops in flight, or even men in flight, but about highly educated, socially elite, politically influential men in flight.

I want to package the question in the form of a little-discussed papyri from May 23, 335 CE from Alexandria to Phathor, Egypt, which is now called P. Lond. 6. 1914. It documents several local Christians who had been mistreated by drunken soldiers. What makes this documentary papyrus so interesting is that about halfway through the letter, we find that this violence action against these local Christians was specifically at the direction of Athanasius. It is in such a connection that Peter van Minnen has rather dramatically called this little papyrus, “one of the most important documents ever published.”

While some were exiled, many others were kept in the region but were incarcerated in various locations — in the meat market, in the camp prison, in the “big prison.” One of the mistreated Christians named Callistos wrote a letter on this papyrus to report what had happened and to say they needed bread. Interestingly, then, this papyrus may corroborate or at least tell the other side of the story to some of the charges Athanasius faced on his trial in Tyre: of treating local competing Christians violently and potentially messing with the bread dole (the latter of the two, in fact, being the charge Athanasius was found guilty of and ultimately exiled). Here we catch a glimpse that Athanasius not only knew how to take a political and judicial punch; he almost knew had to dish it out, too.

Many of these clergy were incarcerated, and not exiled, not because they had committed a different kind of action, but because they belonged to a different social status. The Roman legal code distinguished punishments for people of different social status. If you were one of the honestiores at the rank of decurion or above, you would be exiled. If you were one of the humiliores below the rank of decurion (i.e. probably about 98% of the population of the Roman world), you would have been incarcerated in the mines — even though you had committed the same crime.

We see this exact scenario played out in a letter correspondence between Cyprian and several of his fellow Christian clergy. In 257 CE, he wrote as an “exile” from his garden estate in the North African coastal town of Curubis to a group of Christians incarcerated in the mines in Numidia. Cyprian worked hard to correlate his experience of relegatio in his extravagant beach house with their incomprehensibly awful living conditions incarcerated inside the mines. They had not committed different “crimes;” they were simply different people — or more precisely people of radically different social status. By looking at these two other scenarios — those of the Christians incarcerated at Athanasius’s direction and the letters of Cyprian and his colleagues — I think we can interrogate some of the key questions raised by Bishops in Flight and push the discussion in a direction that I suspect Barry herself would welcome. How does social positionality inflect the discourse of bishops in flight, when it is socially elite, politically influential males in flight, and we know other people would have suffered other penalties for perceived deviance, not only because they lacked the social clout but also the economic ability to flee.

Which brings me to my second question that I kept returning to as I read Bishops in Flight: in what sense is this a story about media? I mean media in two senses, both of which are illustrated by the two examples of Callistos’s letter about Athanasius and the letter correspondence between Cyprian and Numidian clergy in the mines.

First, I think we can talk about media and expectations of generic materiality. P. Lond. 6.1914 is a letter, a piece of documentation, never intended to achieve wide and public circulation. Put differently, the letter existed in the medium of papyrus, but it was not media in the sense that it did not exist in ancient media streams. Likewise, with Cyprian’s Ep. 77–79 constitute the responses Cyprian’s fellow clergy(?) that he received back from the mines. Each of the three letters have an increasing non-literary and more “normal letter” feel to them, and one get the distinct sense that they would have been utterly lost in time, had they not been preserved in Cyprianic letter collection. Cyprian’s letter, however, has a distinctly literary flare to it and has an eye on a wider public, and the writings about Athanasius’s (both his own and those after him) and Chrysostom’s (both his own and those after him) are clearly geared toward a wider and public readership.

Which raises the second sense of media: in what sense is Bishops in Flight also a story about media in the sense of mass communication in an effort to “control the narrative” in ancient media streams? As Bishops in Flight illustrates well, “when you play the game of late antique bishop, you win or die,” but of course winning didn’t mean “not get exiled” — just the opposite, perhaps. What “winning” meant was having a Christlike rather than a diabolic kind of flight, and the difference between the two, it seems to me, is a question directly related to practices of ancient mass media. So, in what sense is it useful to add the lens of media to the discourse of exile and displacement so insightfully traced in Bishops in Flight?

Finally, let me conclude with this reflection on the stakes of Barry’s Bishops in Flight. Barry places this late antique discourse within broader and more modern discourse on displacement, and helpfully suggests how such a placement is a productive one for us as historians. Let me ever so briefly raise one other issue. The book gave me a clearer sense that at least one way of telling the story of developing late ancient Christianity is the story of cultivating and preserving a persecution complex, almost against all odds. The process of victimization seems legible for a movement that started with its leader being executed as a public enemy of the state, as someone perceived as a failed revolutionary insurrectionist. It is legible for a community of people regarded as a dangerous disease and superstition undermining the Roman state. Holding onto a persecution complex Christians in the mid-fourth to fifth century required cultivation and innovation.

Tools were forged for maintaining a persecution complex in the late antique Christian world of the fourth and fifth centuries that have had a long and often troubling history. When one is “treated badly,” was it because they were in fact in error and deserved sanction, or were they a victim in need of “controlling the narrative” of persecution? As we see this strategy alive in the world still, in what sense does Barry’s narrative of fleeing, on the one hand, and displacement, on the other, offer us a useful analytical tool?

So, in conclusion, in my personal pantheon of books on the intersecting topics of carcerality, sanctions, and human mobility, Barry’s Bishops in Flight takes its places alongside such books as Julia Hillner’s Prison, Penance, and Punishment, Pilar Pavón Torrejón’s La Cárcel Y El Encarcelamiento En El Mundo Romano, Daniel Washburn’s Banishment in the Later Roman Empire, and Theodor Mommsen’s Römisches Strafrecht. Or, to say it differently, if you haven’t read it yet, please do so, and since it is open access, you have no excuse not to.

Matthew Larsen is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially the cultural and material histories of ancient Christian communities from the first to fifth centuries. Currently, he is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, where he is the PI of a multi-year research project studying the materiality of incarceration in Mediterranean antiquity (Carlsberg Foundation).