ABSTRACT
For the early history of Christianity in Africa, the case of Egypt and its main urban centre, the city of Alexandria, remains of paradigmatic significance. Alexandria was not only the first main centre of Christianity in Africa, but also, Alexandrian Christianity (as well as, later, Egyptian Christianity) represented the most diverse varieties of early Christianities even as it played – as one of the most significant Christian centers in the first four to five Christian centuries after the city of Rome – a direction-setting role in the definition of the emerging Christian discourses and literature.2 In addition, perhaps by sheer happenstance due to its unique climatic conditions that favoured the large scale preservation of the earliest flowering of Christian literary production in the ephemeral medium of papyrus, Alexandrian and Egyptian Christianities constitute the earliest, most
diverse, most extensive library of literary production of early Christianities for any single geographic locality into the fourth century – from (what later became canonical) apostolic/New Testament writings, through Apostolic Fathers, apocryphal Christian writings of a wide variety, heterodox writings that included the broad category now labelled as Gnostic, as well as “mainstream” Christian writers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria; Egypt being not only the place of writing but also the locale of preservation of many writings originating elsewhere but finding a home in Egypt. Christian theological schools in Alexandria (and Egypt) not only produced a
copious amount of religious writing, but also exported teachers and teachings to other parts of the later Roman Empire. Egypt was a laboratory for the production of episcopal authority in the formation of orthodox Christianity, even as it was also an important site of resistance to episcopal authority. Rooted simultaneously deeply in Alexandrian Jewish social formations, with their attendant religiocultural discourses, and in non-Jewish Graeco-Roman intellectual, cultural, and religious discourses, even as it inculturated into indigenous Egyptian and African cultures, Alexandrian and Egyptian Christianities exhibited all the hybrid forms – and splits, contestations, and tensions – characteristic of Christian formations elsewhere in mixed ethnic communities. Egypt was the context for the development of a variety of early alternative spiritualities – Gnosticism, on the one hand, and the monastic movement with its own distinctive desert spirituality, on the other. It was, finally, also the context of the first massive translation of Christianity into an indigenous – African – culture (Coptic) with its own language, traditions, spirituality, and divergent history. In short, Alexandria and Egypt are a microcosm of early Christianity in its variety and its formation into a recognizable orthodox mainstream.
