Those for Whom the Lamp Shines: The Making of Egyptian Ethnic Identity in Late Antiquity

In Those for Whom the Lamp Shines, Vince L. Bantu uses the rich body of anti-Chalcedonianliterature to explore how the peoples of Egypt, both inside and outside the Coptic Church, came tounderstand their identity as Egyptians. Working across a comparative spectrum of traditionsand communities in late antiquity, at the intersection of religious and other social forms ofidentity, Bantu shows that it was the dissenting doctrines of the Coptic Church that played thecrucial role in conceptualizing Egypt and being Egyptian. Based on the study of neglected Coptic andSyriac texts, Those for Whom the Lamp Shines offers the only sustained treatment of ethnic andreligious self-understanding in Africa's oldest Christian church.