"In the late fourth century, tales began to circulate of 'anthropomorphites' dwelling in the Egyptian desert -- uneducated monks who crudely believed God to have a body. This characterization was accepted until the nineteenth-century discovery of "The Life of Apa Aphou of Pemdje…
"Liturgical papyri are prime witnesses to the history of liturgy and the religious and theological currents in late antique Egypt. These items from the third to ninth century preserve hundreds of Greek and Coptic hymns, prayers, and acclamations, most otherwise unknown but some …
Far from the Christian metropolis of Alexandria, removed from the well-known and much-visited monastic settlements of the Thebaid, and infintely remote from Rome, lay the garrison towns of Aswan and Philae. There Christians and pagans coexisted. Integral to the christian communi…