Reading the Sahidic Testament of Isaac in an Egyptian Monastic Context
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 1-1-2013 "Our Father Isaac": Reading the Sahidic Testament of Isaac in an Egyptian Monastic Context John William Fadden University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Biblical Studies Commons Recommended Citation Fadden, John William, ""Our Father Isaac": Reading the Sahidic Testament of Isaac in an Egyptian Monastic Context" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 971. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/971 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. “Our Father Isaac”: Reading the Sahidic Testament of Isaac in an Egyptian Monastic Context _________ A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology Joint PhD Program ________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ________ by John W. Fadden June 2013 Advisor: Pamela M. Eisenbaum © Copyright by John W. Fadden 2013 All Rights Reserved Author: John W. Fadden Title: ‘Our Father Isaac’: Reading the Sahidic Testament of Isaac in an Egyptian Monastic Context Advisor: Pamela M. Eisenbaum Degree Date: June 2013 Abstract This dissertation argues that the textual community of fourth or fifth century monastic Egypt read Testament of Isaac as an ascetical regimen in order to transform themselves into children of Isaac. T. Isaac highlights three particular dimensions of Isaac’s character from the remembered tradition of Isaac that would have resonated in the Egyptian monastic context of the textual community – Isaac as priestly authority, Isaac as sacrifice, and Isaac as blind ascetic – to create a model for the new self that the textual community aimed to achieve. Two important ascetic practices in T. Isaac that the textual community was to perform were copying and reading T. Isaac . These two practices functioned as technologies of the self that helped the members of the textual community to transform their present subjectivity into a new self modeled on Isaac in T. Isaac . ii Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………....1 0.1 Purpose of the Dissertation ………………….………….………………1 0.2 Introducing Testament of Isaac …………..…..………………………….8 0.3 Date and Provenance of Testament of Isaac ………………………..…..21 0.4 A Brief Description of the Egyptian Christian Context………………...38 0.5 Plan of the Dissertation ………………………………………………...43 Chapter 1: Isaac as Priestly Authority ..……………………………………………45 1.1 The Egyptian Context……………………………..……………………46 1.2 The Tradition of Isaac as Priest ………………………………………..54 1.3 Isaac as Priestly Authority in Testament of Isaac ………………………67 1.4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………85 Chapter 2: Isaac as Sacrifice ………………………………………………………..88 2.1 The Egyptian Context and the Sacrifice of Isaac………………………..90 2.2 The Tradition of Isaac as Sacrifice……...………………………………92 2.3 Isaac as Sacrifice in Testament of Isaac ……….......................................120 2.4 Conclusion………………………………………………………………132 Chapter 3: Isaac as Blind Ascetic…………… ……………………………………..134 3.1 Key Concepts in Disability Studies……………………………………..135 3.2 The Egyptian Monastic Context and Disability and Illness…………….139 3.3 The Tradition of Isaac’s Blindness...........................................................143 3.4 Isaac as Blind Ascetic in Testament of Isaac ………….………………..162 3.5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………172 Chapter 4: “Our Father Isaac:” Ascetic Practice and Communal Identity in the Testament of Isaac ……….…………………………………………………175 4.1 Testament of Isaac ’s Textual Community………………………….......176 4.2 Reading Testament of Isaac as an Ascetical Regimen………………….188 4.3 The Textual Community as Children of Isaac…………………………..208 4.4 The New Subjectivity for the Children of Isaac………………………...214 4.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….221 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..224 iii Introduction An ancient pseudepigraphical text, Testament of Isaac (T. Isaac ) recounts the death of Isaac the biblical patriarch. It is a relatively ignored text from antiquity. The general silence about T. Isaac in scholarship might suggest to someone that reading a dissertation on this text may be unfruitful. Yet, this silence should not be taken to mean that T. Isaac is uninteresting. As I first read T. Isaac , I was struck by how different the story of Isaac’s death was from the paltry space given to Isaac’s death in Genesis. Why, I wondered, does Isaac get portrayed in this manner? Eventually, to make sense of how Isaac is portrayed, I began to consider: How might T. Isaac have functioned for the textual community that read, copied, and apparently cherished it? These questions drove the project that has resulted in this dissertation. Such questions helped me to consider T. Isaac as evidence for an important period in early Christianity, Egyptian monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. 0.1 Purpose of the Dissertation In this dissertation, I am attempting to understand T. Isaac within an Egyptian monastic context. I argue that the textual community read T. Isaac as an ascetical regimen for realizing the true self. In doing so, the textual community drew on remembered traditions of Isaac that supported the idealizations of priestly /monastic holiness, of human obedience to God’s commands, and of ascetic practice. Isaac became 1 a remembered example of the true self that one could hope to attain through ascetical practice. I borrow the term “textual community” from Brian Stock. He defines it as a group that arises somewhere in the interstices between the imposition of the written word and the articulation of a certain type of social organization. It is an interpretive community, but it is also a social identity. 1 I use the phrase textual community to identify a community that preserves, uses, and reproduces a particular text. Such a community is an abstraction, an idealization, of real communities whose members may have applied the ideas of the text in their life. In the process of preserving, using, and reproducing the text, members of a textual community also interprets the text, and thus a textual community is an interpretive community as well. Not all textual communities read and interpret the same text in similar manners. It is not difficult to imagine, for example, that a textual community comprised of twenty first century, academically trained biblical scholars would engage a text in a different manner than members of a church bible study. Perhaps the former would concern themselves with historical criticism, while the latter would be primarily concerned with devotional purposes or gaining life-lessons out of the text. For the dissertation, when I refer to “the textual community” I have in mind one of T. Isaac ’s textual communities, one that is made up of Egyptian Christian monastics in the fourth or fifth century C.E. By “ascetical regimen,” I mean intentional and repetitive performances, which rely upon a remembered tradition, that help to bring about a change in one’s subjectivity. The subjectivity toward which one is moving is an alternative to (but not necessarily 1 B. Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 150. 2 opposed to) the dominant subjectivity of one’s culture. 2 In the monastic context, monks are moving from a worldly subjectivity to a subjectivity based on Isaac’s model. I sometimes refer to it as a ‘holy one’ subjectivity. In ancient Christianity, the holy one is a figure who was viewed to have gained access to the divine. The holy one embodied the potential for being fully human, as God intended. 3 Isaac exemplifies the image of a holy one. I will discuss the particular subjectivity that became manifest in this textual community in more detail later in the dissertation (Chapter Four). The remembrance of a tradition is an important aspect of ascetical practice. According to Gavin Flood, “asceticism can be seen as an internalisation of tradition, the shaping of the narrative of a life in accordance with the narrative tradition that might be seen as the performance of the memory of tradition.” 4 Central to tradition is a shared collective memory passed through generations. Memory is to be understood as the capacity to conserve information deemed important by a community. 5 Tradition is “actively reconstructed in a shared imagination and reconstituted in the present as memory.” 6 One of the ways that the performance of memory is accomplished is through the repetitive performance of religious reading: “Religious reading, the internalisation of 2 Cf. R. Valantasis, The Making of the Self: Ancient and Modern Asceticism (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2008). 3 P. Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," JRS 61, (1971): 80-101; P. Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," Representations 2, (1983): 1-25. 4 G.D. Flood, The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory, and Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ix. 5 Flood, The Ascetic Self , 8. 6 Flood, The Ascetic Self , 8. 3 scripture, is crucial for the performance of the memory of tradition.” 7 In the late example of Peter Damian (c.1007-1072), Flood abstracts, “The reading of scripture, the lives of the saints, homilies and so on becomes, along with prayer and liturgy, another way in which the body is entextualised.” 8 As Flood theorizes the ascetic self across cultures, he places importance on ritual and texts. Texts become an icon of tradition that ritual articulates and performs. 9 “The text makes demands upon the subject to conform to it.” 10 For the textual community of T. Isaac , T. Isaac became an icon of the remembered tradition of Isaac. The textual community recalled the remembered tradition of Isaac as preserved in T. Isaac to imagine a new self. I consider it “remembered tradition” precisely because the Isaac portrayed in T.