Shared religious symbols do not necessarily mean weak or blurred religious boundaries. Christian ritual texts that combine anti-Jewish rhetoric with names for God often labeled “Jewish” show that cultural sharing and sharp religious differentiation could coexist. This calls for more care in how scholars interpret religious identity, boundaries, and “mixing” in late antique lived religion.
See also Ritual Boundaries: Magic and Differentiation in Late Antique Christianity (University of California Press, 2024; open access).
By Joseph E. Sanzo
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Center for the Study of Lived Religion
July 2026
Scholarship on religion is often inspired by a serendipitous situation in the scholar’s life. Our chance encounters and experiences can have a lasting impact on how we interpret religious phenomena, even as it pertains to the ancient world. To be sure, the kinds of impactful events can vary. It might be a special religious service one attends. It might be a frightful experience, say, with a Ouija board.
In my case, the events surrounding a specific date almost thirty years ago (October 26, 1996) helped shape the way I have understood late antique lived religion (i.e., religion as it was practiced by people in their daily lives). What happened on this date? I attended the OzzFest. For the reader who is unfamiliar with the OzzFest, it was a concert put on by Ozzy Osbourne (1948–2025) that included a range of other hard rock and heavy metal acts, including Slayer and Biohazard. The concert I attended took place in San Bernardino, California at what was then known as the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion. And, yes, for those of you Americans who are old enough to remember, the Blockbuster in the name refers to Blockbuster Video, that place where we used to engage in the most antiquated of activities: going to a store to rent a movie. As might be expected, the concert was fantastic. In fact, although I was only sixteen at the time, it is still one of the best concerts I have ever attended. My friends and I rocked out to such Ozzy Osbourne classics as “Crazy Train,” not to mention those of the other bands present.
Brimming with excitement from the amazing spectacle I had seen, I was completely unprepared for the experience I would have over the ensuing days. And it is this experience that is key for the present discussion. Upon returning home, I was met by a series of condemnations and accusations from family members and, especially, from my pastor and from fellow church members for having participated in a satanic event. After all, claimed such people (at least those in the know), doesn’t Ozzy refer to himself as the Prince of Darkness, sing songs about occultists such as Aleister Crowley, and don images of monsters and satanic paraphernalia on his records? The general logic was that Christians should not allow such satanic elements to mix with—or pollute—their Christian faith (such metaphors proliferated in these conversations). At the time, I was a relatively devout, self-identifying Christian and was aghast by such claims. Isn’t music a gift from God, I thought? And, although Ozzy uses such imagery, he clearly uses it for fun.
This more personal anecdote reveals two points that are directly relevant to our concerns. First, the story hints at two different ways of conceptualizing Christianity: what was mixing to one party (namely, select family and church members) was not mixing to another (namely, me). Everything I did was completely compatible with Christianity as I understood it at the time (and certainly not “satanic” from my perspective). I would have even attributed Ozzy Osbourne’s talent to the work of the Christian god. Second, and more importantly, the story makes a relevant point about what we cannot infer about religious boundaries: precisely because I did not interpret my participation in the concert as a mixture of the satanic and the Christian, one could not have inferred that at the time there was an unwillingness or inability on my part to draw firm boundaries between Satanism and Christianity (again, as I understood those terms at the time). I absolutely would have made a clear distinction between Christianity and Satanism. In fact, I would have not only separated myself from Satanism, but I would have openly condemned Satanism in every way, shape, and form as evil and abhorrent. I was not a historian of religion when I was sixteen! At least in this instance, metaphors such as mixing—and we might add “fluidity” and “blurring” (to update the nomenclature [see below])—did not in fact characterize my perspective but were part of the rhetoric of censure and condemnation. The argument posed to me by my detractors, when translated to the concerns of this essay, was basically as follows: “if you don’t have our boundaries, you must not have any boundaries at all.” But, again, I did have clear ideas about religious boundaries at the time, despite the fact that the way I thought of the boundaries was different than those in my family and home congregation.
As I began to study late antique religion in my twenties, I was surprised to discover that my personal experience in 1996 stood at odds with how many contemporary scholars understood the relationship between religious symbols and religious boundaries, especially as it relates to late antique lived religion. Often citing instances in which elements from various religious origins are found alongside one another, many contemporary scholars have claimed—and continue to claim—that the boundaries between religions in everyday practice in late antiquity were “blurred,” “fluid,” or “messy” (though various metaphors might be used). This metaphoric scheme has led many of these same scholars to contend that religious boundaries and differences were unimportant to the “ordinary” Christians and Jews of late antiquity. Interest in religious division, so argues this line of scholarship, was solely or primarily characteristic of literary “elites” such as Saint Augustine or John Chrysostom. This tension between my personal experience and prevailing scholarly opinion prompted me to grapple with a set of questions: what can we in fact infer from objects that juxtapose symbols originating from different religious and ethnic traditions as it relates to religious boundaries in late antiquity? Was my experience in 1996 unique to me or reflective of a similar dynamic operative in late antiquity?
Over the course of my research, I discovered that the so-called Christian magical evidence could shed light on this challenging issue. First, a bit of background is in order. Like most Christians in late antiquity, Christian “magicians”—or, better, “ritual specialists” or “ritual practitioners”—were immersed in a world in which the “Jews” were portrayed as the murderers of Jesus and the persecutors of Christians. This motif of the persecuting-Jew was embedded into a range of contexts, including the Passion narratives of the canonical Gospels (and other non-canonical Gospels such as the Gospel of Peter), letters, dialogues, homilies, and hymns. The apocryphal correspondence between Abgar, king of Edessa, and Jesus, which was well known in antiquity (and attested in different versions, including a Greek version and the Syriac Doctrina Addai), also pays homage to this motif. In the first letter (which is of interest to us), Abgar requests healing from Jesus. The Savior then responds to the Edessan king in a separate, second letter, stating that he is unable to come, but will send an emissary (in some versions identified as Thaddeus or Addai). In the version of Abgar’s letter to Jesus as told by Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–339 CE), the relevant portion of this letter reads: “I heard that the Jews are mocking you and wish to ill-treat you” (Ecclesiastical History 1.13.8–9).
This correspondence (and its anti-Jewish rhetoric) made a considerable impact on many Christians, including several Christian ritual specialists. To mention briefly a few texts that I have analyzed in more depth in my book, Ritual Boundaries (pp. 51–55), consider, first, a late fifth-century CE Greek healing amulet from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt (P.Oxy. 65.4469), which intensifies the anti-Jewish invective found in Eusebius’s version: “for I have heard that the Jews murmur against you and persecute you, desiring to kill you.” The latter phrase, “desiring to kill you,” places a murderous intention on the “Jews” (understood as an entire category of people). Although the version of this ritual specialist is rather slanderous against the Jews (again, understood as a collective group), the version of the Abgar-Jesus correspondence found in a sixth-to-eighth-century CE Coptic magical handbook, P. Leiden, Ms. AMS 9, strengthens the anti-Jewish sentiment to an even greater degree. The ritual specialist behind this handbook not only underscores the intentions of the Jews to persecute Jesus, but he also calls the Jews “the dead dog,” simultaneously noting that they are not worthy of God’s “holy gift.” As if this were not bad enough, this latter ritual specialist also proclaims in an original composition God’s just punishment of the Jews for their role in the death of Jesus: “Rejoice, all you creatures, for the lord rose from the dead on the third day and he freed the entire race of Adam, and he despoiled the Jews, who were ashamed of what they had done” (10r, ll. 4–12). We might imagine that this ritual specialist from late antique Egypt had in mind here events such as the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple or the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem and Egypt.
But the anti-Jewish rhetoric is not the end of the story. Despite their interests in distinguishing Christians from Jews, these ritual practitioners, who do not easily fit into our categories “elite” and “nonelite,” utilized names for God (e.g., Iaō, Adōnai, Elōei, Elemas, and Sabaōth) that most scholars have labeled “Jewish.” Yet, at least the practitioner behind Leiden, Ms. AMS 9 clearly thought that these names were purely Christian, writing: “I entreat you, O Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, god of gods, king of all kings, the imperishable, unpolluted, uncreated, untouchable, morning star, the hand that rules, Adōnai Elōei Elemas Sabaōth” (Leiden, Ms. AMS 9, 1v, ll. 1–10). What does all this mean? We are not witnessing an absence of religious boundaries (or something analogous to fluid, blurred, or fuzzy boundaries), but a different configuration of clearly marked religious boundaries than is presented in many literary sources (and generally assumed by scholars). How did this work? Since these originally Jewish or Hebrew names had been thoroughly assimilated into a Christian ritual culture, they were considered to be fully Christian and thus completely compatible with an anti-Jewish perspective.
On a broader methodological level, these magical objects are not merely contrasting evidence to some larger body of material attesting to “fluid boundaries” (or similar metaphor). To the contrary, once we appreciate that cultural sharing and similar concepts were completely compatible with harsh religious differentiation, then much of the evidence usually taken as automatically reflecting “fluid boundaries” or a lack of interest in religious differentiation (e.g., the appearance of elements from diverse cultural origins on an object or the presence of multiple religious groups in the same space) in fact turns out to be ambiguous and only raises additional questions. How did these elements or groups operate within the given context? What approach to religious identity or differentiation do they imply (if at all)? How long were these elements or spaces part of a larger symbolic complex and how did that timespan impact their meaning and significance? In other words, further information is required to make any assessment in this regard, which, in most cases, is unfortunately missing. Consequently, these selected magical sources, which clearly demonstrate that cultural sharing and differentiation were compatible social dynamics, require us to change the way we look at the late antique evidence more generally as it relates to religious and cultural boundaries in lived contexts.
For instance, this magical evidence provides a conceptual framework that allows us to home in on certain passages from the “church fathers” and to assess their social implications from a different perspective. As it turns out, these literary writers occasionally acknowledged that those who could be accused of crossing religious boundaries held to exclusionary visions of Christianity; the anti-Jewish writer John Chrysostom notes that the so-called “Judaizers” who went to synagogues to get amulets and other forms of “magical” healing would also distinguish themselves from Jews (Against the Judaizing Christians 8.5.4). This acknowledgment forms part of a hypothetical conversation between a “faithful” Christian (from the perspective of Chrysostom) and a “Judaizer.” Chrysostom writes, “even if he be a Judaizer times without number, he will never bring himself to say: ‘I do approve’ [of the Jews for crucifying Jesus and blaspheming against him].” The person engaging with this Judaizer is then instructed to respond, “How is it that you attend their services, how is it you participate in the festival, how is it you join them in observing the fast?” The text makes it clear that, for such “Judaizers” (if there really was such a group in late antique social reality), going to the synagogue, participating in their festivals, and receiving healing from their practitioners were not considered “Jewish” practices (at least not in the same way as it was for Chrysostom). Since these cultural practices and symbols were not understood to be “Jewish” in this regard by the participants, they were completely compatible with those participants’ anti-Jewish sentiments. To state the matter a bit differently: Chrysostom and his “Judaizers” operated according to different understandings of local religious practice despite their common desire to separate Jews from Christians in harsh and slanderous ways.
To summarize: we cannot necessarily infer the absence of clear-cut religious boundaries among late antique people whose Christianity might have been seen as reflecting mixed, crossed, or fluid boundaries with the non-Christian from another’s perspective (whether ancient or scholarly). As historians of the late antique world, our approach to religious and ritual boundaries in lived religion must account for the different ways people articulated religious self-identification and, consequently, how they marked differentiation from Others. We cannot assume that, simply because a late antique Mediterranean person did not draw the lines between insiders and outsiders in the same way that someone like Saint Augustine did, they didn’t think there were important differences between Christians, Jews, and what we might call “Pagans.”
In the end, social dynamics such as religious differentiation—albeit diversely configured and on different levels—seem to have always been an important aspect of lived religion. We can even see this playing out in our own world: religious differentiation seems to apply not only to contemporary lay Christians (who might distinguish themselves from Christians of other denominations, not to mention Mormons and those of other religions), but even to Satanists: one might think of the harsh rhetorical differentiation between LaVeyan Satanists and those from the Black Metal movement and, of course, between Satanism and Christianity. At the very least, I can say with confidence that, despite the caricatures of certain churchgoers, religious differentiation played a role in the views of one late-twentieth century then-evangelical Christian who went to an Ozzy Osbourne concert.