Book Reviews - Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, written by David Frankfurter

Abstract

David Frankfurter, (2017) Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. xix + 314 pp. ISBN 9780691176970 (hbk.)

Twenty years after the publication of his Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (1998), David Frankfurter returns to the local religious worlds of Roman Egypt. Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity treats religious continuity and change in 4th- to 7th-century Egypt. This study redefines Christianization as a process of “negotiation,” in which Egypt affected what it meant to be “Christian” and vice versa (6).