Epiphanius of Cyprus’ work has often been pilloried as tedious, pernicious, vicious, or a combination of all three.1 Such classifications were partly judgements on heresiological genre, perceived as an uncivil, low-brow form of Christian self- fashioning.2 They were partly on Epiphanius’ own merits – or perceived lack of them. His work most often received academic attention in a small sub-genre of one-off articles examining how he uses aggressive, often herpetological, rhetoric and polemical naming to formulate theological boundaries.3
Recently, however, scholars of Early Christianity have reexamined his work in the broader context of rethinking “heresy” and “heresiology,” resulting in fresh angles
1 As summarized by his English translator: “It would be easy to assemble, fr om the writings of
patrologists and historians of religion, a bill of particulars against him. He is a heresy hunter, a name caller, and “nasty.” His judgements are uncritical. His theology is shallow and his manner of holding it intransigent,” in The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, vol. 1, Book 1 (Sects 1-46), trans. Frank Williams, 2nd rev. ed. (NHMS 63; Leiden: Brill, 2009), xxxi. Williams also translated the remainder of
the Panarion and De Fide, in The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III. De Fide, vol.2, 2nd rev. ed. (NHMS 79; Leiden: Brill, 2013). Williams worked from the Greek edition by Holl, now
emended and reissued in Epiphanius I: Ancoratus and Panarion haer. 1-33 (GCS n.F. 10.1; edited by Karl Holl, Marc Bergermann, and Christian-Friedrich Collatz; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Epiphanius II: Panarion haer. 34-64 (GCS 31; edited by Karl Holl and Jürgen Dummer; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1980); Epiphanius III: Panarion haer. 65-80; De Fide (GCS 37; edited by Karl Holl and Jürgen Dummer; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985).
2 Karen King, “Social and Theological Effects of Heresiological Discourse,” in Heresy and
Identity in Late Antiquity, ed. Eduard Iricinschi and Holger M. Zellentin (T übingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 28-49. With respect to Irenaeus as an example, though a statement easily transferable to Epiphanius, King writes: “as scholars have assessed the adequacy of Irenaeus’ portraits of his opponents, his partiality and tendentiousness have become clearer. Moreover, his tone of derogati on and ridicule are judged antithetical to modern canons of impartiality and even appear unseemly, intolerant, and uncivil. Not only his accuracy but his moral character have come into question” (29).
3 Thomas J. Whitley, “Poison in the Panarion: Beasts, Heretics, and Sexual Deviants,” VC 70.3
(2016): 237-258. Recent scholarship has lingered on this: see Ingvild S. Gilhus, “The Construction of Heresy and the Creation of Identity: Epiphanius of Salamis and his Medicine -Chest against Heretics,” Numen 62.2-3 (2015): 152-68; Young Richard Kim, “The Transformation of Heresy in the Panarion of Epiphanius of Cyprus,” in Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, ed. Geoffrey Greatrex and Hugh Elton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 53-65; Paul Robertson, “The Polemic of Individualized Appellation in Late Antiquity: Creating Marcionism, Valentinianism, and Heresy,” SLA 2:2 (2018): 180-214.
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on the structure and significance of his writings.4 “Epiphanius,” in Young Kim’s vivid
phrase, “was late antiquity,” emblematic of late antique learning as well as elite prejudices.5 Todd Berzon suggests his work is the epitome of heresiological genre, but also indicates how that genre structures difference analogously to the “fixation of ethnologists and early anthropologists on mentalities and dispositions.”6 He sums up
the imperial Christianity of his age, Andrew Jacobs argues—a muscular Christianity distasteful to our contemporary taste in the ways it exerted power and control from an imperialized centre.7
One of the important insights from this recent scholarship is that by scrutinizing Epiphanius’ heresiological persona, we understand better his ways of accumulating, managing, and asserting knowledge of religious difference. Heresiology is often anxious, fearful of its own unmaking, or of contamination.8 This anxiety, however, does not exhaust the knowledge ordering function of heresiological behavi our. Epiphanius’ methods of collection and representation of information reflect what
4 A rethinking made possible by two works in particular: Walter Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und
Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1934), esp. in the translation edited by Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), and Alain Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la literature grecque IIe-IIIe siècles (2 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1985). See especially Eduard Iricinschi and Holger Zellentin, “Making Selves and Marking Others: Identity and Late Antique Heresiologies,” in Heresy and Identity, 1-27. On the etymology of “heresy” and the evolution of the meaning of the Greek hairesis, see Heinrich von Staden, “Hairesis and Heresy: The Case of the haireseis iatrikai,” in Jewish and Christian Self Definition, vol.3: Self-Definition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 76-100; Le Boulluec, La notion, 47; John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), 168-75.
5 Young Richard Kim, Epiphanius of Cyprus: Imagining an Orthodox World (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2015), 1.
6 Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of
Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 85-86.
7 Andrew S. Jacobs, Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2016), 271-7.
8 See Kendra Eshlemann, “Becoming Heretical: Affection and Ideology in Recruitment to Early
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Maldonado Rivera calls “a paradoxical articulation (and reformation) of Christian curiosity,” a “Christian erudition,” with a “Christian cultural project.”9
Simultaneously, Christian literature elites continued a trend towards universalism in erudition, as Jeremy Schott has noted.10 Since his heresiology, then, attempts such a complicated set of tasks, it becomes less a genre of control and more an array of knowledge-ordering techniques, some of which even introduce tension into its own textualized taxonomies.
That Epiphanius’ epistemological management of the pious (or impious) past, and its relation to a Christian present, is not neat will come as no surprise. Scholars of early Christianity have learned to live with the messiness of Christianization, the process according to which Christianness became a fundamental piece in a composite high-prestige ancient identity. As David Frankfurter writes:
“The process of Christianization in late antiquity can no longer be said to have involved the encounter or conflict between two mighty worldviews, Christian and heathen, or one mighty worldview and the inconsequential detritus of Greco-Roman religions. There was always, in some form, religious mixture and contestation—at the local as well as the trans-local, “discursive” level…We have begun to turn to more
performative, expressive, social contexts for understanding
Christianization.”11
Similarly, we have grown used to talking in terms of contested social and theological networks of early Christian affiliations. As Richard Flower recently noted, Epiphanius composed the work for which he is most often remembered, the
9 David Maldonado Rivera, “Encyclopedic Trends and the Making of Heresy in Late Ancient
Christianity 360-460C.E.,” PhD Dissertation (Indiana, 2017), 84.
10 Jeremy Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 17-19.
11 David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity
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pugnacious Panarion, “in the uncertain theological climate of the reign of the emperor Valens, when Epiphanius’ own Nicene orthodoxy was officially heretical.”12
In addition, scholars have more and more reckoned with the way heresiological functions shaping behaviour through discourse and rhetoric, rather than merely (or perhaps ever) to directly contest and refute opponents. Scholars have moved away from source criticism of the succession of heresiologists from Irenaeus to Epiphanius, towards thinking about each in their cultural and social context. As Jacobs writes: “Even—or especially—at the moment in which unitary truth is forged, the edifice of orthodoxy cracks, the discourse of singular truth slips, and the shadow of the “other” creeps in.”13
Nevertheless, this “shadow” of the other, when it is not clearly “Jew,” “pagan,” or “heretic,” has often been left to scholars dealing with late antique texts such as the Protoevangelium of James or the Testimony of Truth, or late antique groups like “Jewish-Christians,” often categorized as in some way “marginal.”14 Rebillard writes
that, “while historians no longer view groups as sharply differentiated, they do,
12 Richard Flower, “Medicalizing Heresy: Doctors and Patients in Epiphanius of Salamis,” JLA
11:2 (2018): 251-273, at 269.
13 Andrew S. Jacobs, Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 117.
14 As in the case of “Jewish-Christians,” see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “‘Jewish-Christian’
Apocrypha and the History of Jewish/Christian Relations,” in Rediscovering the Apocryphal
Continent: New Perspectives on Early Christian and Late Antique Apocryphal Texts and Traditions, ed. Pierluigi Piovanelli and Tony Burke (WUNT 349; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 87-116. For other examples of “marginal” texts in which a continuum of identities has been permitted, see e.g. Lily C. Vuong, Gender and Purity in the Protoevangelium of James (WUNT 358; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2013); Timothy J. Horner, “Jewish Aspects of the Protoevangelium of James,” JECS 12 (2004): 313-35, at 314; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Inscribed in the Book of the Living: Gospel of Truth and Jewish Christology,” JSJ 38 (2007): 234-71; Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Parting Ways over Blood and Water? Beyond ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ in the Roman Near East,” in La croisée des chemins revisitée: Quand l’Église et la Synagogue se sont-elles distinguées?, ed. Simon Claude Mimouni and Bernard Pouderon (Paris: Cerf, 2012), 227-59.
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nevertheless, still tend to treat them as internally homogeneous.”15 When not dealing
with “marginal” texts, scholars of late antiquity do often limit religious variety or intermittent Christian identities to “ordinary” Christians.16 Those within the groups
counted as most emblematic of that group’s core identity, like the Christian bishop, often end up with a remarkable uniform, coherent set of Christianized motivations. According to this account, the complex practice of everyday knowing often reduces to binaries: orthodox/heretic, Christian/pagan, Christian/Jewish. Moreover, the reduction of this knowledge organization to binaries is taken as a fundamental core mechanism of the late antique processes producing Christianized erudite culture according to what Schott calls “a system of knowledge that structured contact between Christians and the ethne.”17 “Christian” remains a prototypic term. It is assumed that an author like Epiphanius retains an uncomplicated relationship to their own Christian identity; that all his knowledge must be, in some important sense, motivated by a serious concern or desire for Christianness.
Epiphanius’ treatment of Samaritans enables a crucial intervention. Epiphanius, in line with his ethnographic-heresiological style, weaponizes bookish knowledge of the Samaritans within the history of Israel. When he does so, however, the informational dynamics of his imperialized Christian centre have a remarkable effect. The articulation of a universal and maximal knowledge often squeezes management
15 Éric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke, “Introduction,” in Group Identity and Religious Individuality,
ed. Rebillard and Rüpke (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 5.
16 See e.g. Éric Rebillard, Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa,
200-450CE (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 75; Michael S. Williams, The Politics of Heresy in Ambrose of Milan: Community and Consensus in Late Antique Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 21-22; Lisa K. Bailey, The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 103.
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of Christian difference into a subordinate and secondary role. Instead, Epiphanius is unselfconsciously distractible and divertible. He picks a fight with Samaritan exegetes. He retells Israelite history in a curiously Samaritan-focused way. Even in the Panarion, he sometimes thinks in a Samaritan register, with a sympathetic approach to Samaritan tradition (paradosis.)
In handling knowledge such that his intellectual attention can be absorbed and exhausted by distinctive features of Samaritans, Epiphanius decentres “Christianness” from his management of difference. The universalized scope of imperial knowledge encourages and even facilitates his operation outside of the Christianized centre with respect to which he appears so deeply typical. In other words, Epiphanius, at the heart of imperial Christianity, provincializes himself for the sake of universalizing knowledge.
I take the term “provincialize” from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s postcolonial historiography, particularly useful as a lexical counterweight to the accurate characterization of elite Roman erudition like that of Pliny, Galen, or Aulus Gellius as “colonizing.”18 In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty writes that his work focuses
not on Europe as a geo-political entity, but on “the imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichés and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought.”19 Chakrabarty aims, therefore, to demystify the material processes by which
18 A particularly influential frame both for work on Roman knowledge and empire, and late
antique Christian empire. On the former, see e.g Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History”: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); on the latter, Jacobs, Epiphanius, 132-75.
19 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
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that figure, “Europe,” became intrinsic; to make Europe, in other words, not a prototypic term against which everywhere else is measured by default, but one in a constellation of others. During his erudite performance, Epiphanius demystifies himself. He does not act as a prototypic Christian authority, with his intellectual activities reducible to combatting heretics and buttressing the orthodox. Rather than simply using the Samaritans as a foil to reinforce a specific form of Christian identity, Epiphanius often claims knowledge of Samaritans in their own right.
This chapter has four parts. First, I discuss the recircumcision of Symmachus in On Weights and Measures. Here, an aspiration to total knowledge leads to Epiphanius presenting a Samaritan where there was none before. Moreover, in a context where we would expect a Jewish/Christian battle over the proper form of scripture we find an exhibition of Jewish/Samaritan difference. Second, I turn to one of Epiphanius’ most characteristic – and unusual – engagements with Samaritans: a narrative of their origins in the time of Ezra found nowhere else in late antique texts except Samaritan internal traditions. Epiphanius’ interest in Christianness is again displaced by an intense focus on how post-exilic Samaritans and Jews contested the “holy seed” of Abraham. Third, I re- read Epiphanius’ heresiological account of Samaritans with a view to seeing how it fits this pattern: what does a Christian heresiology look like when decoupled from a primary interest in engineering heretical others? I argue scrutinizing how Epiphanius pays
Samaritans attention in their own terms extends our conversation about the management of difference. Finally, I return to the matter of Epiphanius’ provincialization and its relation to his behavior of epistemological excess. What does it meant for Epiphanius, a Christian bishop whose career in many ways epitomizes the ascent of Christianness to a
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prestige identity, to operate without reference to Christianity as a term of prototypic difference?