Late Ancient Christian Anxiety over Islamic Geographies of Containment: Two Examples

Abstract

In the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Christians across the Mediterranean were experiencing the consequences of the rise of Islam and its expansion. With this challenge to Christian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Christian writers began to ask about the effect of Islamic expansion on their own lives, practices, and worlds to come. In this article, I aim to contextualize two examples of how late ancient Christians questioned their ability to remain Christian in the face of both Islamic captivity and assimilation: 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John) and Anastasius of Sinai’s (d. ca. 700) Questions and Answers (Questions). I divide this article into three sections. First, I place Christian anxiety over Islamic rule in conversation with Stephanie Camp’s concept of the “geography of containment” to explore how some late ancient Christians understood themselves to be geographically and spatially limited by imprisonment or enslavement. I also provide an overview of recent scholarship on Christian responses to early Islamic expansion and anxiety over enslavement, imprisonment, captivity, and assimilation to Islam. Finally, I turn to 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius’s Questions to analyze how late ancient Christians turned to monks and patriarchs to find answers regarding the uncertainty of Christian identity under Islamic rule.

In the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Christians across the Mediterranean were experiencing the consequences of the rise of Islam and its expansion. With this challenge to Christian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Christian writers began to ask about the effect of Islamic expansion on their own lives, practices, and worlds to come. In this article, I aim to contextualize two examples of how late ancient Christians questioned their ability to remain Christian in the face of both Islamic captivity and assimilation: 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John) and Anastasius of Sinai’s (d. ca. 700) Questions and Answers (Questions). Both of these texts, written within the genre of erotapokriseis (question-and-answer dialogue), address a specific anxiety in the seventh and eighth centuries: Will a Christian living among others be resurrected? Can one remain a Christian while captive? Can a Christian find salvation if enslaved or unable to participate in ecclesiastical or liturgical practices? Without use of the term, these late ancient Christian texts express concern over how one’s status as dhimmi impacts Christian identity and practice.

I divide this article into three sections. First, I will place Christian anxiety over Islamic rule in conversation with Stephanie Camp’s concept of the “geography of containment” in order to explore how some late ancient Christians understood themselves to be geographically and spatially limited by imprisonment or enslavement. I will also provide an overview of recent scholarship on Christian responses to early Islamic expansion and anxiety over enslavement, imprisonment, captivity, and assimilation to Islam. Finally, I will turn to 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius’s Questions to analyze how late ancient Christians turned to monks and patriarchs to find answers regarding the uncertainty of Christian identity under Islamic rule.

1. Ethnicity and Geography

Late ancient Christian writers in the eastern Mediterranean reveal through their texts their anxiety over Islamic hegemony.1 Part of this late ancient Christian anxiety revolved around the collapse of Christian hegemony and imperially-defined group identities, beyond other concerns such as differing theological propositions or ritual practices. As Christians in the eastern Mediterranean experienced an influx of Islamic figures who took on elite roles in urban spaces, they experienced a shift in both social and religious status that raised a question not even asked in the pre-Constantinian era: Can Christians be Christian if living among or under non-Christians? Centuries of Christian hegemony had heavily intertwined Christian identity and a sense of belonging with Byzantine imperial governance, such that when that governance was questioned it also shook the foundations of religio-ethnic Christian group formation for some inhabitants of the Byzantine empire.

While “ethnicity” is a topic that, as Anthony Kaldellis has rightly noted, is slow-going in Byzantine studies (Kaldellis 2019, pp. 42–52; Betancourt 2020, pp. 161–203; Mitchell and Greatrex 2000),2 scholars of early and late antique Christianity have more robustly recognized that ethnicity in the Mediterranean world not only is socially constructed and salient in particular instances, but also is entangled with religious practices and identities. Perhaps most influential in early Christian studies is Denise Kimber Buell’s Why This New Race?, in which she coined the term ethnic reasoning to explain how early Christians conceptualized ethnicity as something “to be produced and indicated by religious practices” (Buell 2005, pp. 2–5; cf. Berzon 2018), as well as something that could be fluid or fixed depending on individual and communal needs. Within classics, Rebecca Futo Kennedy has likewise provided a helpful definition of ethnicity as “a contingent group identity shaped according to changing needs and context but most frequently reflects self-identification within a group based on cultural characteristics” (Kennedy and Murray 2020, n.p.). Late ancient Christians might be understood through such a definition as a contingent grouping whose salient markers shift, and as those who perceive themselves as sharing beliefs, rituals, and spaces. Such religio-ethnic concepts are valuable for understanding the Byzantine period. As Kaldellis notes, “the Roman state was keen to convert its domestic population to Orthodoxy […] Orthodoxy, moreover, embedded these people within ecclesiastical, imperial, and other structures of governance and also promoted the spread of the Greek language” (Kaldellis 2019, pp. 124–25). Christianness and Christian religious and political hegemony is imagined to be embedded in Roman imperial identity. This means, however, that a perceived threat to Roman imperial hegemony can disrupt the intertwined belief in Christian hegemony and identity. Likewise, the inability to live among others in the same religious group and participate in a set of shared rituals becomes a problem of ethnicity, kinship, and belonging among late ancient Christians. As I will explore below, texts like 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius’s Questions showcase this anxiety in the fungibility of Christianness as a religious and ethnic marker of belonging if the sociopolitical support net of the Byzantine Empire is challenged.

These two early Byzantine Greek texts provide a glimpse of a Christian anxiety over restriction of movement—whether by captivity, enslavement, or other forms of control—under Islamic hegemony. To help understand this concern over bodily and spatial autonomy, I make use of Stephanie Camp’s term geographies of containment (Camp 2004, esp. 12–34; cf. McKittrick 2006). Camp coined this phrase in her examination of enslaved Black women in the Antebellum South in order to highlight how “at the heart of the process of enslavement was a spatial impulse: to locate bondspeople in plantation space and to control, indeed to determine, their movements and activities” (2004, p. 12). In the field of Classics, Sandra Joshel (2013) expanded upon Camp’s work by exploring how Columella and Cato the Elder’s agronomic literature details attempts to organize space and time in order to micromanage every aspect of a Roman enslaved person’s life. While it is certainly not the case that all eastern Mediterranean Christians were enslaved under Islamic hegemony, we see that the fear of enslavement, captivity, and restricted movement commonly plays out in Christian literature and makes possible such an anxiety over geographies of containment. My goal here is not to claim that enslavement and incarceration in the US, Atlantic World, and late ancient eastern Mediterranean are necessarily the same; rather, my aim is to borrow concepts about “containment” from other humanistic fields of study to formulate new questions about how late ancient Christians coped with spatial restrictions and displacement imposed upon them under a new cultural and religious regime. Some late ancient writers express concern that their Christian identity and their very salvation are threatened by living among non-Christians, or by having restricted movement or access to Christian spaces or rituals. Loss of Christian political and spatial power in parts of the eastern Mediterranean shaped the theological questions that Christians asked and the answers that both monks and apocryphal narratives provided them.

2. Late Ancient Christian Fears of Enslavement and Incarceration

Especially over the last fifty years, scholars have become increasingly interested in Christian and Jewish responses to Islamic expansion in late antiquity. Perhaps most famously and controversially, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism (Crone and Cook 1977) showcased how using non-Islamic sources to uncover the history and development of early Islam could help fill out our historical and textual portrayal of the late ancient eastern Mediterranean landscape. Texts like Jacob the Newly Baptized and BL Add. 14.461, a flyleaf in a sixth-century Syriac manuscript of Matthew and Mark that mentioned Muhammad (ܡܘܚܡܕ), have been of particular interest, as too have late ancient accounts of Christian martyrdom under Islamic hegemony.3 My hope is to place 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius’s related questions within this broader conversation of Christian reactions to Islam that may otherwise be overlooked or be considered less obviously about Islamic hegemony at first glance.

Both 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and some of Anastasius’s questions are concerned with a fear of limited movement or inability to be among other Christians on a regular basis, which fits well into late ancient Christian anxieties over potential captivity or enslavement during Islamic expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. Contemporaneous texts expressed both fear of displacement and enslavement, and highlight some instances of spatial and geographical control over Christian bodies. For example, the Syriac Fragment on the Invasion of Syria (637 CE) mentioned the murder and captivity of Galileans and their forced migration elsewhere in the Syro-Palestinian region (Shoemaker 2021, pp. 55–56). Homilies and apocalypses attributed to Ephrem (Homily on the End Times and Apocalypse of Ps.-Ephrem 62–63) feared the enslavement of children throughout the eastern Roman Empire and a perceived lack of tolerance for Christians, mentioning the enslavement of some Christians and displacement to non-Christian-majority lands (Shoemaker 2021, pp. 85–87; Penn 2015, pp. 42–44). While some late ancient Christian texts justified the enslavement of Christians by Muslims because of the former’s sins (e.g., Jacob of Edessa, Scholia 27), others fantasized of a future in which a messianic king would re-establish Christian hegemony and enslave those who have enslaved Christians (e.g., Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius 38–39).4 One of the writers I examine below, Anastasius of Sinai, describes Muslims as “those who hold us in slavery” in his Edifying Tales (2.11 [C7]; Shoemaker 2021, p. 110). Of course, these examples represent a range from historical instances of enslaving Christians under Islamic hegemony to rhetorical appeals to the oppression of Christian dhimmi as a result of their loss of hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. Various writers expressed anxiety over Christian enslavement, real or imagined, as evidence that Christian hegemony was challenged or was about to make a resurgence.

We find similar concerns over both real and imagined imprisonment, which was deployed in late antiquity particularly for unpaid debts and as precursors to capital punishment (Schneider 1995). One key example comes from Anastasius of Sinai’s account of George the Black (Edifying Tales 2.22 [C13]), an “enslaved person of a Saracen in Damascus” who was incarcerated as a child, renounced his faith at eight years old, and later reclaimed his Christian identity and was killed. Stephen Shoemaker (2021, pp. 112, 123) notes that this scene, which he labels the first martyrdom narrative of a Christian by Muslim hands, is exemplary of a broader network of Christians who were incarcerated and coerced to convert. Similarly, the early eighth-century Passions of Peter of Capitolias highlighted an instance of a late ancient Christian refusing to recant his Christian identity and eventually being incarcerated and killed. While not the norm (with the exception of instances of blasphemy or apostasy), incarceration and execution under Islamic officials led to a revival of Christian production of martyrological literature (Sahner 2018, pp. 166–68).5 While some Christians were incarcerated, it is unlikely that there was a mass expectation to convert or to recant one’s religious identity and, as Christian Sahner noted (Sahner 2018, pp. 38–45, 246), that Christian writers under the Abbasid dynasty associated its harsher stance against non-Muslims with Umayyad predecessors in their textual and rhetorical portrayals of Christian incarceration and martyrdom (cf. Crone and Cook 1977, pp. 50–51; Friedmann 2003, pp. 115–20; Wasserstein 2010, p. 186; Papaconstantinou 2008).

While not the focus of this short article, it is worth noting that there is a parallel to Christian concerns over Islamic methods of containment present in legal texts regarding the experiences of Muslims living in non-Islamic lands. Often divided into dār al-Islām (the abode of Islam) and dār al-ḥarb (the abode of war), various Islamic jurists weighed in throughout the medieval period regarding whether Muslims ought to live in Muslim-minority lands and what obligations they were expected to maintain in such spaces (Verskin 2013, pp. 6–16; Albrecht 2018, pp. 39–86). As Khaled Abou El Fadl (1994, 2003) points out, our knowledge of these juridical positions becomes clearer from the twelfth century onward, making it difficult to speak about direct parallels to Christian anxieties about minoritization in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Like with late ancient Christian enslavement, incarceration and martyrdom became a potent tool for imagining what Dominique Moran labels carceral geography, an approach that views “carceral spaces broadly as a type of institution whose distributional geographies, and geographies of internal and external social and spatial relations, should be explored” (Moran 2015, pp. 1–2; cf. Moran et al. 2018). Recent historical and sociological work has taken an increased interest in the “punitive turn” or “carceral turn” regarding how states and institutions manage strategies to control and coerce particular populations—especially through manipulation of space and time in order to direct and limit mobility. Of particular interest is how the “carceral” extends beyond prison buildings and is used in other aspects of life in order to surveil and delimit the types of people, spaces, objects, and actions that one can interact with. Moran’s carceral geography is conceptually similar to Camp’s geographies of containment, but they are not often applied to (late) antiquity—although recent work on early Christian concepts of condemnation and Mediterranean carceral practices is set to shift the conversation (Henning 2021; Letteney and Larsen, forthcoming; Larsen, forthcoming). Late ancient Christians, who experienced a disruption in Roman Christian hegemony, expressed in various ways their anxiety over the possibility (and actuality) that their bodies would be vulnerable, their sociopolitical status would be questioned, and their ability to enact their Christianness in spatial or ritual modes would be stymied.

3. Christian Anxiety in Question-and-Answer Literature: Two Examples

One literary genre in which we find clear discussion of the concerns of late ancient Christians is question-and-answer literature. Erotapokriseis, or question-and-answer, literature is an especially wide-ranging genre of literature in the late ancient and Byzantine world that has only in recent decades been given sustained attention. Built upon Hellenistic aporiai and problemata literature, erotapokriseis literature became a common tool for pedagogy, producing literary dialogues, and for popular figures to collect a variety of questions sent their way (Volgers and Zamagni 2004; Papadogiannakis 2006). Such collections of questions and answers also became fruitful tools for organizing knowledge and tackling difficult issues, as Yannis Papadogiannakis points out through Ps.-Caesarius’s Erotapokriseis on sixth-century Christological and anthropological controversies (Papadogiannakis 2013). Some collections, such as Jacob of Edessa’s Responsa, fit within this larger genre of erotapokriseis as he answered questions about the social and liturgical treatment of Christian–Muslim intermarriage (Tannous 2020; Simonsohn 2015, pp. 201–2). Likewise, the Greek pseudo-Athanasian Questions for the Leader Antiochus (Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem) and its later Arabic translation highlight just how central erotapokresies literature was to Byzantine debates and discussions regarding Jewish–Christian–Muslim relations (Roggema 2020, pp. 15–52). Question-and-answer literature allowed for prominent figures of the patristic past to respond to the concerns of later generations of Christians regarding ritual practices, theodicy, and theological and Christological specificities—including how to respond to Jewish and Islamic presence in or near Christian communities and spaces.

Both 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius’s Questions and Answers can be numbered among these late ancient texts that organize and respond to pressing questions from their own time and cultural contexts. The title of Anastasius’s Questions itself claims that the various questions brought to the monk at St. Catherine’s Monastery were “posed by various people” (γενόμεναι ἐκ διαφόρων προσώπων) and that he composed the text through the collective wisdom and experiences of others—likely other monks (Munitiz 2011, p. 49; Richard and Munitiz 2006, p. 4). 3 Apocr. Apoc. John, on the other hand, is presented as an apocryphal Christian text in which a revelatory figure answers the same types of questions asked in other erotapokritic literature written by monks and other ecclesiastical figures (e.g., Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius). While some scholars argue that revelation dialogues are a distinct genre from erotapokriseis, overlap between the two genres suggests that late ancient writers felt comfortable borrowing questions and answers between these literary scaffoldings in order to frame their texts (Tóth 2017).6 In this case, two erotapokriseis texts attest to a set of related pressing questions among late ancient Christians regarding how Islamic hegemony and the shift in their kinship ties and ritual practices impacted their ability to remain Christian or to find salvation.

3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John) is an apocryphal revelation dialogue whose scene is set on the Mount of Olives just after Jesus’s resurrection. Dating 3 Apocr. Apoc. John is a difficult task, since the text does not make any clear references to contemporary events. Rather, the text’s use of liturgical practices, monastic terminology, and dependence upon 1 Apocr. Apoc. John likely places it between the seventh and ninth centuries (Bonar et al. 2020, pp. 432–33; Whealey 2002). Unlike most other revelation dialogues, which portray Jesus answering the disciples’ questions directly, the Jesus of 3 Apocr. Apoc. John hurriedly leaves the scene and tells the patriarch Abraham to answer John’s questions.7 John’s interrogation of Abraham covers a wide range of topics: God’s judgment against the Jews, the ability to recognize one another in paradise, the honor given to monks and priests, whether marriage persists in the resurrection, what one eats in paradise, and more. While some of these questions are applicable more generally across Christian history, some are more temporally and culturally specific, such as whether souls will “find mercy through the panikhida” (3 Apocr. Apoc. John 9.6), a nighttime memorial service.8

One question that may not immediately stand out as temporally specific was likely circulated in response to Islamic expansion in the eastern Mediterranean.

“John said: ‘If ever a Christian is a captive among an (unbelieving) nation, and grows old and dies among them, is he raised up with the Christians?’”

Ἰωάννης εἶπεν · ἐὰν χριστιανός ἐστιν αἰχμάλωτος εἰς ἔθνος καὶ γηράσῃ εἰς αὐτοὺς καὶ ἀποθάνῃ, ἀναστήσεται μετὰ τῶν Χριστιανῶν; (3. Apocr. Apoc. John 10.10)9

Abraham responds to John’s question by quoting David, a common strategy in 3 Apocr. Apoc. John meant to demonstrate to John that scripture already contains answers to every question he asks. He quotes Psalm 146.2 (LXX) and states: “Child, they are going to be gathered with the Christians and their race (μετὰ τῶν Χριστιανῶν καὶ τῆς γενεᾶς αὐτῶν)” (3. Apocr. Apoc. John 10.11).

Even while living, being captive to, and dying among non-Christian people, Abraham suggests that Christians are a unified racialized entity that will experience the resurrection together. 3 Apocr. Apoc. John uses terms associated with ethnic grouping and differentiation (ἔθνος; γενεά), suggesting that some late ancient Christians were concerned about the consequences of living under an ἔθνος beyond their own and how their religious, ethnic, and kinship ties were at stake.10 John’s dialogue with Abraham also highlights how geographies of containment and spatial restriction are imagined to be overcome in the eschaton. Although some late ancient Christians express fear that dying in a spatially or geographically different place than other Christians will impact their belonging to a heavenly Christian community, Abraham’s response underscores that geographic difference under Islamic hegemony is temporary. Put another way: 3 Apocr. Apoc. John agrees that logics of spatial confinement impact one’s social, ethnic, religious, and kinship ties—and yet offers a future solution to this problem through scriptural prooftexts.

A similar question can be found in Anastasius of Sinai’s Questions and Answers. This text likely dates to the 690s CE and is among a large corpus of texts attributed to Anastasius, who lived through most of the seventh century and spent much of his life as a monk in Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula (Munitiz 2005; 2011, pp. 10–11; Shoemaker 2018). Anastasius’s Questions seem to have emerged out of a variety of questions that the writer collected and edited so as to present them coherently as though Anastasius had received requests to personally answer each of them. Questions and Answers has a complex transmission history, particularly since it has a literary relationship to Pseudo-Athanasius of Alexandria’s Questions to Antiochus that is difficult to trace (Munitiz 2011, pp. 22–23). Some have even suggested the 1 Apocr. Apoc. John (a predecessor and textual source for 3 Apocr. Apoc. John) interacts with both Anastasius’s and Ps.-Athanasius’s Questions in the production of its own biblical citations and question-and-answer format (Vianès 2012, pp. 153–58; Haldon 1992, pp. 122–24). While his Pseudo-Athanasian counterpart does not mention Muslims or Arabs, Anastasius more directly wrestles with how Islamic presence and hegemony impacts the lives of Christians in at least eleven of his answers.11

Like 3 Apocr. Apoc. John’s racialization of Christians in the resurrection, Anastasius racializes Christians (alongside Arabs) in order to explain various differences between them. Throughout his responses, Anastasius often pairs Arabs with Jews, Hellenes, and other nations in order to highlight distinctions between Christians and non-Christians. For example, he refutes the belief that the devil fell because of not bowing to Adam—a common trope in late ancient Christian literature12—by claiming that “such myths belong to the Hellenes and Arabs” (Ἐλλήνων κὰι Ἀράβων εἰσὶν οἱ τοιοῦτοι μῦθοι) (Munitiz 2011, p. 195, modified).13 Likewise, Question 26 asks: “Why is it that among us Christians (Χριστιανοῖς), rather than among some other unbelieving nations (ἔθνη ἄπιστα),” there are more sick people (Munitiz 2011, p. 106; Richard and Munitiz 2006, p. 52). Anastasius responds by explaining how “the race of the Jews” (τὸ γένος τῶν Ἰουδαίων) have a poor diet that impacts their health, whereas “Arabs […] moreover a race from the desert and a dry climate” (οἱ δὲ Ἄραβες […] λοιπὸν δὲ καὶ γένος ἐξ ἀέρων καὶ ἐρημικῶν καὶ ξηρῶν τυγχάνοντες) and “the remaining nations who are idolaters” (καὶ ἕτερα δὲ πλεῖστα ἔθνη εἰσὶν εἰδώλοις λατρεύοντα) come from drier climates and thus do not experience as many illnesses.14 Proving that Christians are physiognomically, geographically, and theologically distinct bolsters Anastasius’s related argument: that God has not abandoned Christians even when Islamic hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean seemed inevitable.

Anastasius takes a particular interest in responding to anxiety over the loss of Christian hegemony. Question 99, for example, asks why some turn away from God and the church “with this race” (μετὰ τοῦ ἔθνους τούτου) and instead claim that God has purposefully chosen to overthrow Christian hegemony (Munitiz 2011, p. 225; Richard and Munitiz 2006, p. 156). Anastasius’s response clarifies that the group being referred to are Arabs, since he knows that “the demons are more religious than the Arabs, confessing him to be the Son of God” and that God would be evil if God indiscriminately saved or destroyed people without accounting for their merit (Munitiz 2011, p. 225).15 Likewise, Question 101 asks whether “all the evil things done by the Arabs against the lands and people of the Christians” (πάντα τὰ κακὰ ὅσα ἐποίσαν ταῖς χώραις καὶ τοῖς λαοῖς τῶν Χριστιανῶν οἱ Ἄραβες) have been done with God’s approval, to which Anastasius replies in the negative (Munitiz 2011, pp. 230–31; Richard and Munitiz 2006, p. 161). These types of questions that Anastasius and others were responding to and collating in texts like the Questions reveal a concern regarding whether Islamic expansion in the eastern Mediterranean was brought about by means of divine providence, as well as whether the racialized group known as Christians was near its end.

Like his apocryphal counterpart, Anastasius also responds to anxiety over how captivity, persecution, and enslavement impact Christian life and practice. The five questions and answers that deal with persecution, imprisonment, trial before a judge, and enslavement do not explicitly mention Arabs as the perpetrators. However, it seems likely that Anastasius is responding to these instances of judgment and violence as the “evil things” occurring against Christians mentioned in Question 101. Some of these questions deal with how to respond to instances of oppression or with those who succumb to their newfound situation. Anastasius urges Christians not to flee from “a time of persecution” (ἐν καιρῷ διωγμοῦ; Question 75), nor to fall into sin while “being enslaved in captivity” (ἐν αἰχμαλωσίᾳ ὑπαρχούσας δούλας; Question 76), nor to be ashamed when having to eat camel or donkey “while in captivity” (εἰς αἰχμαλωσίαν ὑπάρχων; Question 102) (Munitiz 2011, pp. 190–91, 232–33; Richard and Munitiz 2006, pp. 126–27, 163). Seventh-century Christians to whom Anastasius purportedly writes are concerned over practical matters regarding how to endure in their current circumstances, and particularly the restrictions imposed upon their cultural and spiritual habits.

One question to which Anastasius responds, however, closely parallels 3 Apocr. Apoc. John 10.10 and its concern over the relationship between captivity and salvation. He is asked the following:

If I am subjected to enslavement or captivity, and I am not able—as I want or when I want—to go spend time in church, or fast or keep night-vigils, how can I be saved and find forgiveness for sins?

ἐὰν ὑπόκειμαι εἰς δουλείαν, ἢ εἰς αἰχμαλωσίαν, καὶ οὐ δύναμαι ὡς θέλω ἢ ὅτε θέλω σχολάσαι τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, ἢ νηστεῦσαι ἢ ἀγρυπνῆσαι, πῶς δύναμαι σωθῆναι καὶ ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν εὐρεῖν;16

The question reveals a seventh-century Christian anxiety over geographies of containment and carceral geography. Some Christians feared that their inability to participate in ecclesiastical and liturgical activities would impact their ability to be forgiven for their sins or to acquire salvation, since a lack of control over the movement of one’s body might alter their ability to participate in Christian activities, inhabit Christian spaces, and thus be a Christian. This anxiety is shared with the question in 3. Apocr. Apoc. John regarding whether a captive who (implicitly) lives away from Christian communities and ritual spaces and eventually dies among a non-Christian race will remain a Christian in the resurrection. Spatial separation between Christians and their community due to imprisonment and enslavement led to a crisis of Christian identity: How can one be a Christian if not participating in communal Christian life? Can one still be a Christian if enslaved or imprisoned?

Anastasius responds to this question affirmatively, and suggests that all forms of enslavement and imprisonment assist with the forgiveness of sins. He calls on his readers to recognize that “if someone loves God, one is able in any circumstances, wherever one may be (ὅπου δ᾽ ἂν καὶ ἔστι), to remember God in one’s heart” (Munitiz 2011, p. 212; Richard and Munitiz 2006, p. 140). In response to Islamic geographies of containment that delimit where some Christians can go, he proposes an internal spatial plane within which one can encounter God. While 3 Apocr. Apoc. John offers a space that is both temporally and spatially distinct from the captivity that some Christians experienced (e.g., the resurrection) as the location at which the race of the Christians are reunited, Anastasius offers consolation and remembrance of God in the here and now.

4. Conclusions

In this brief article, we focused on two examples of how eastern Mediterranean Christians responded to Islamic presence and influence over their lives in late antiquity. Recent scholarship on enslavement in the Black Atlantic and mass incarceration in the United States help us ask new types of spatial and racial questions about how some Christians responded to perceived and actual instances of enslavement, imprisonment, forced migration, and demographic changes. As an ethnic group with perceived shared characteristics and identity markers, these late ancient Christians feared that spatial disruption from their daily habits and from Christian kinship relations threatened their own Christianness. These two examples might point to a sociocultural understanding of late ancient Christian identity—one based on community rather than the individual.

Thinking about late ancient Christian reactions to Islamic hegemony through the lens of “geographies of containment” and “carceral geographies,” as well as the continued maintenance of Christians as a religio-ethnic group, might also help us better understand the interplay between ethnicity, religious practice, and political power in the early Byzantine period. While contemporaneous writings like John of Damascus’s chapter on the Heresy of the Ishmaelites focus on purportedly heretical doctrines and practices or falsified books (Khoury 1969, pp. 47–65), texts like 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius’s Questions provide a supplemental resource through which to view the spatial, ethnic, and ritual concerns of late ancient Christians—both in this life and in the next.