A light lunch will be provide - please let Sheilagh know if you are attending.

Joseph E. Sanzo, Ph.D. is a WIRL Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick.

Much literary and archaeological scholarship over the past several decades on topics, such as early Jewish–Christian relations and early Christian heresiology, has tended to associate the interest in drawing clear-cut religious boundaries between Christians and non-Christians with a handful of Christian elites (e.g., Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, John Chrysostom, and Augustine). This same line of scholarship often contrasts this elite concern for religious differentiation with the vast majority of Christians, who are said to have interacted with their non-Christian neighbors in more amicable ways. While the recent work by scholars, such as Geoffrey Smith and Heidi Wendt, reveals that the early Christian interest in religious differentiation extended beyond traditional orthodox circles, the question of religious difference among the “ordinary” Christians has not been sufficiently addressed.

In this paper, I address the question of religious differentiation among the rank-and-file Christians by attending to Christian amulets and patristic texts condemning amulets – a cluster of Christian sources often seen as reflecting blurred boundaries or a lack of concern for religious difference. In particular, I examine a series of healing amulets from late antique Egypt that drew clear-cut religious boundaries between Christians and Jews, yet configured those boundaries differently than traditional taxonomies. I then examine a few literary texts condemning the clients who used amulets. These literary testimonies suggest that Christian clients were likewise sensitive to religious difference – and could frame religious difference in highly inflammatory ways – even as they crossed the social and religious boundaries that ecclesiastical leaders promoted. I conclude that the diverse, yet clearly demarcated configurations of religious difference evident in these material and literary sources require us to reexamine the evidence often used to imply a lack of interest in religious differentiation among the Christian masses and suggests that the impulse to differentiate and malign was probably much more widespread in late antique Christianity than scholars now generally acknowledge.