Stephen J. Davis

Shenoute and a Recently Discovered Tomb Chapel at the White Monastery

In 2002, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) discovered and investigated a triconch funerary chapel at the White Monastery. Since 2006, this structure has been the focus of further excavation, conservation, and analysis by an international team currently sponsored by the Yale Monastic Archaeology Project (YMAP), in collaboration with the SCA. The funerary chapel features a subterranean tomb and evidence for an extensive program of figural and nonfigural wall paintings. During the December 2009 campaign, conservation of the paintings in the tomb revealed new details that connect this space with Shenoute, the famous head of the monastery during the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. In this brief article, the authors report on these recent discoveries.

Fashioning a Divine Body: Coptic Christology and Ritualized Dress

In the ancient church, human bodies were contested commodities. Early Christian writers frequently wrangled over the ethical implications of dress and bodily adornment, and sought to regiment various forms of physical interaction and movement within their communities, from sexual contact to pilgrimage travel. Bodies—and how they were used—functioned as privileged markers of Christian identity, as valuable capital in the complex economies of Christian discourse and practice. Nowhere was this more the case than in discussions about Christs body and its relation to his divinity. While such christological discussions took place throughout the Mediterranean world, in this article I have a keen interest in the ways in which the body of Christ was represented in Alexandria and Egypt from the fourth through the eighth century. Specifically, I want to explore late antique Coptic Christian understandings of the incarnation, and I propose to do so from a new theoretical perspective.

From Women's Piety to Male Devotion: Gender Studies, the Acts of Paul and Thecla , and the Evidence of an Arabic Manuscript

When we read early Christian narratives such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla , what is the relationship between the characters portrayed in the story and the “real-life” persons and groups who composed and transmitted the work? In the second-century Greek account, Thecla abandons her fiance and family to follow Paul and his ascetic message. She endures a trial by fire in Iconium, resists sexual assault on the road to Antioch, and survives attacks by beasts in the Antiochene arena, all the while supported by a wealthy widow as her patron, a friendly lioness as her protector, and a chorus of women in the stadium who extol her perseverance and cry out to the governor for mercy. In the end, after baptizing herself, Thecla is released, dresses herself like a man, and begins preaching the gospel as an itinerant apostle.

A "Pauline" Defense of Women's Right to Baptize? Intertextuality and Apostolic Authority in the Acts of Paul

In early Christian studies, the Acts of Paul has gained attention as an expression of Pauline tradition in the second century. Indeed, in a study now over a decadeand-a-half old, Dennis R. MacDonald argued that the Acts of Paul and the Pastoral Epistles each borrowed from a common stock of oral legends about the apostle Paul, but applied them to very different purposes.1 The Acts of Paul seems to have been written in the context of ongoing eschatological expectations and a corresponding disruption of social conventions (e.g., rejection of marriage, ministry of women). By contrast, the Pastorals oppose such a vision of Paul’s ministry, and instead seek to endorse conservative social values and the development of an organized ecclesiastical leadership. The first known external reference to the Acts of Paul appears in Tertullian’s On Baptism (ca. 200 c.e.).2 In that treatise, Tertullian confirms that the author of the Acts of Paul wrote the work as an attempt to enhance Paul’s legacy, and that he brought together already existing material about the apostle in creating the work: