Things Unbefitting Christians": Violence and Christianization inFifth-Century Panopolis

Near the end of the fifth century C.E., the new abbot of Shenoute's monastery in Atripe, Besa, was called upon to pacify local villagers who had been "fighting for nothing over a piece of wood." Using Besa's sermon as a starting point, this paper explores the possibility that the village strife addressed here revolved around Egyptian religious images and their dwindling community of devotees. Papyri, inscriptions, and Coptic sources show Egyptian religion's striking resilience in the region of Atripe through Shenoute's own time; and comparative sources on local Christianization describe cases of local violence in the last stages of Christianization, meant to cleanse "pagans" regarded as dangerous to local fortune. This paper explores an additional dimension of such modern antipagan purge movements, their inevitable leadership by youths and their aim at the elderly, and looks at ways in which late antique Christianization also involved intergenerational tensions.