Journal of Early Christian Studies

Amulets and magical formularies from Christian antiquity are often assumed to reflect the world of laity or popular religion and the demi-chrétiens scribes and clerics who aided it. But given church fathers’ acrimonious disputes over practices (magic? idolatry?), community boundaries (Jewish? Christian?), and theology through late antiquity, wouldn’t this anxiety over boundaries have concerned local and popular domains as well? Joseph Sanzo argues in this book that the kinds of internecine disputes over orthopraxy and orthodoxy that we associate with church fathers and their class were also taking place in the world of laity, and that amulets and formularies are witness to them.

Sanzo unfolds his thesis in two sections, on the “Discursive Boundaries of Rituals and Groups” and “of Texts and Traditions,” each with two chapters. Chapter One, “Ritual Boundaries in Late Antique Lived Religion,” looks at evidence that some Christian scribes of the fifth and later centuries brought an ideological opposition to outsider ritual specialists to their own ritual compositions, cursing or reviling magoi or magia in the course of writing apotropaic charms. Chapter Two, “Religious Boundaries in Late Antique Lived Religion,” discusses the exportation of anti-Jewish invective and conceptions of purity from ecclesiastical ideology to the language of charms and to a larger sense of exclusive “Christianness” in the composition of charms. “Jewish” ritual formulas like Iao Sabaoth do not, by the fifth and sixth centuries, indicate an historical fluidity between Christian and Jewish communities but the appropriation of [End Page 188] those formulas into a “Christian magic.” When Jews come up in incantations (as in sermons), they amount to a fictive Other, hardly polemical or indicative of social proximity, but still reminding clients and patients of their insiderness as Christians. Sanzo’s argument is that this sense of insiderness, of privilege within boundaries, was not restricted to elite ecclesiastical rhetoric but actually engaged the ritual imaginations of late antique Christianizing local cultures, mediated by ritual experts and amulet-makers.

The second part of the book consists of two distinct essays that illustrate the contentions of Part One. “Words, Images, Materials, and Gestures” reviews the multiple media through which some key Christian magical idioms were marketed in cultures. A gospel story—the hemorrhaging woman from Mark—could gain tactility and iconicity on a hematite gem. The pan-apotropaic words of Psalm 91 could be worn as a silver armband but also—Sanzo here expands his discussion to late antique Judaism—as Aramaic incantation bowls and silver rings, in which “iconic” text replaces the iconic scenes of Christian amulets: boundaries again asserted through the artisanal traditions of ritual media in the two religions.

The last third of Chapter Three and all of Chapter Four address the various uses and meanings of the cross as both a distinctive symbol and a multimedia vehicle of power. Crosses seal amulets, direct invocations, and orchestrate gestures by ritual experts and laity both. But, as Chapter Four suggests, even the mythical implications of the cross could shift between a display of suffering (that might capture a client/patient’s suffering) and triumph, in which Jesus’s power over death produces great thaumaturgical power.

Sanzo illustrates these divergent mythical images of the crucifixion with a number of Egyptian Christian texts for healing, exorcism, and protection. The key artifact for crucifixion as display of suffering is a well-published jasper gem of the crucified Jesus from the British Museum (appearing also on the book’s cover). The gem is commonly dated to the third century c.e. on the basis of its depiction of a naked Jesus in a quasi-seated posture. Sanzo develops a suggestion by Philippe Derchain that this depiction of a crucified man makes him equivalent to a biaiothanatos—a powerfully ambiguous spirit of an executed criminal that could be invoked for material purposes. The theory is creative, but the evidence (even from Christian magical texts) is neither abundant nor in any way explicit. Still, Sanzo’s point that the myth of Jesus’s crucifixion could be appropriated in multiple ways for multiple purposes bears consideration.

Ritual Boundaries can wander haphazardly among topics and textual discussions and can be hard going in places. The foray into Jewish amulets in Chapter Three is confusing in a book focused on Christian cultures. However, the book is full of interesting and important observations. The idea that spells and amulets express or presume boundaries of religious self-identification, or purity or authenticity, is an important one that certainly transcends Christian materials. The avoidance of images (apart from demons’) in Jewish amulets of the period and even the inclusion of rabbinic references in the wording of incantation bowls suggest the same “boundary-setting” trend in developing Jewish “magical” traditions. Sanzo astutely observes the diverse appropriations of cross and crucifixion, which show a lively creativity with central institutional myths across lay, artisanal, [End Page 189] and scribal milieux. And of course it is always worth underlining the different ways that scripture itself was imagined, deployed, and interpreted in late antique Christianizing cultures, a point on which Sanzo contributed an important 2014 monograph (Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from Late Antique Egypt, Tübingen). [End Page 190]