Available From UC Press

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

Vince L. Bantu is Assistant Professor of Church History and Black Church Studies at the Fuller Theological Seminary and is the Ohene of the Meachum School of Haymanot. He is author of A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity's Global Identity and editor of Gospel Haymanot: A Constructive Theology and Critical Reflection on African and Diasporic Christianity.

"Those for Whom the Lamp Shines is an outstanding and important contribution. It is the first sustained account of ethnic rhetoric as it rises in prevalence in late antique Egypt. With admirable sensitivity to the complexities of group conflict, Bantu lucidly charts the significant changes in ethnic reasoning about 'Egyptianness' in late antiquity."—Mary K. Farag, author of What Makes a Church Sacred? Legal and Ritual Perspectives from Late Antiquity