Coptica 15, 2016

From Elijah to Elisha: Athanasius’s Fighting Spirit Doubled in Shenoute Carolyn Schneider

Recent conservation work in the church of the Monastery of Anba Bishay, part of Shenoute’s monastic federation in Upper Egypt, has uncovered a sixth-seventh century layer of paintings that includes portraits of the Alexandrian bishops Athanasius, Theophilus, Cyril, and Dioscorus. 1 These bishops were all well-known for engaging in religious combat: Athanasius against the Arians, Theophilus against the pagans, Cyril against Nestorius, and Dioscorus against the Council of Chalcedon. This paper will focus on the way that Shenoute’s disciples conflated Athanasius’s battle against the Arians with Theophilus’s battle against the pagans and both with Shenoute’s battles on all fronts. A story from the Arabic version of Shenoute’s life claims that just as Elijah bequeathed his spirit to Elisha two-fold (2 Kings 2:9-15), so Athanasius’s efforts lived on with redoubled strength and scope in Shenoute. 2 Although the Life of Shenoute expresses the common spirit between Athanasius and Shenoute in the highly symbolic style of hagiography, it reflects quite closely the links that Shenoute himself forged with Athanasius’s pugnacious side in his own literary discourses. Shenoute was on good terms with the bishops of Alexandria, and his long life (c. 348-c. 466) overlapped with the lives of seven of them: 1 Elizabeth S. Bolman, “The Red Monastery Conservation Project, 2006 and 2007 Campaigns: Contributing to the Corpus of Late Antique Art,” in Christianity and Monasticism in Upper Egypt , vol. 1, Akhmim and Sohag , ed. Gawdat Gabra and Hany N. Takla (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 309-310. Elizabeth Bolman narrates a short video of the conservation work done at the Monastery of Anba Bishay in “Red Monastery, Sohag, Egypt,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Metmedia, 2012, , accessed 10 February 2016. 2 This material does not appear in the surviving Bohairic, Syriac, or Ethiopic texts. It is very likely, however, that it was in one Sahidic codex, labeled MONB.WV, that contains several episodes that otherwise appear only in the Arabic version of the Life of Shenoute . The beginning of MONB.WV is missing, although an extant fragment (BN copte 129 12 , fol. 75r) contains material corresponding to the end of Besa’s introduction (of which our story is an earlier part) in the Arabic version. Because the number of lines per page in the Arabic version and in codex MONB.WV is roughly the same, Nina Lubomierski suggests that the material at the beginning of the Arabic version would have fit nicely into the space before the first paginated folio of codex MONB.WV (BL Or. 3851B, fol. 70r). See Nina Lubomierski, Die Vita Sinuthii , Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 45 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2007), 83-88. Since Lubomierski’s study was published, additional fragments of MONB.WV have been identified, but they do not contain our story. See Alin Suciu, “More Sahidic Fragments from the Life of Shenoute Attributed to Besa,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 17.3 (2013): 424-427.

Coptica 15 (2016), 71 – 79.