Anthony Sciubba: Spiritual and Social Mediation in the Apa John Archive

During the last quarter of the 4th Century C.E., an anchorite named John maintained a robust epistolary correspondence with the monks, clergy, and laity of the Lower Thebaid. What survives is a collection of twenty-seven Coptic and Greek papyri, eighteen of which subsequent scholars have connected to Apa John with a high degree of certainty. Although monastic papyri can preserve a variety of documents including receipts, sales, and loans, the Apa John Archive consists almost entirely of letters, especially petitions for spiritual intercession and social mediation. As such, this archive contains invaluable evidence for the interaction between law and religion in late antique Egypt. Rapp, Vivian, and Kotsifou have analyzed and translated selections from the Apa John Archive in their groundbreaking studies of monastic mediation, while Van Minnen, Zuckerman, Clackson, Gardner, Gonis, Wispzycka, and Choat have all made invaluable papyrological contributions to reconstructing the historical transmission and content of the archive. Nevertheless, no prior study has performed a systematic analysis of monastic mediation in the Apa John Archive, nor has any analysis approached the internal evidence of the archive as a whole in order to draw particular conclusions about monastic mediation in late fourth-century Lycopolis. This is precisely what I propose to do in this paper. I will argue that the diverse petitions in this archive imply a shared local expectation that Apa John would act as a biblical prophet in his social and spiritual intercessions between God and man.