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The Teachers Behind Early Christianity

Introduction

When we think about early Christian monks and nuns, we often imagine illiterate men and women whose lives are devoted to prayer, solitude, and spiritual discipline. But how did these communities learn? Who taught them to read, interpret scripture, and pass on their traditions?

In this Bible and Beyond Discussion, Dr. Lillian Larsen will draw on archaeological discoveries and ancient Christian writings to explore the educational world of the earliest monastic communities. Together we will examine how teaching and learning shaped Christian practice long before the great monastic centers of later centuries became famous for scholarship and literacy.

The discussion will also consider intriguing evidence for the roles women played as students, teachers, and devoted seekers of knowledge. These often-overlooked stories invite us to rethink some of our assumptions about education, gender, and the formation of Christian traditions in the ancient world.

Join us as we explore a fascinating and surprisingly human side of early Christian history: how people learned, taught, and shared wisdom in communities devoted to the pursuit of spiritual life.

Dr. Lillian I. Larsen serves as Crawford Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands in Southern California. Her research has long explored the material, textual, and interpretive record of education in Christian and monastic practice (2018). Her most recent publication examines the use of the ‘Bible as a School Text’ (2026). A forthcoming essay traces the role that gender has played in shaping the emergent record of Christian and monastic learning. The 2018 book she edited with Samuel Rubenson, Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical Paideia, may be of particular interest for those who enjoy this discussion.

Transcript

(scroll to the bottom for a thorough bibliography)

Shirley Paulson

Welcome, everybody, to the July 2026 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m so pleased to welcome back Dr. Lillian Larsen. One of our Bible and Beyond Patreon members suggested our topic, and Lillian is just the right person to talk about it! The question is, “How did early Christians learn? They didn’t have churches or Bibles as we have them. So what was it like?” You might remember that Lillian was with us last October talking about Eusebius, but let me introduce Dr. Larsen again, in case you missed her the first time.

She’s a Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands in California, where she holds the Crawford Professorship of Christianity. She’s devoted her career to exploring the roots of early Christianity, especially the role of monastic education and classroom practices in shaping the faith. Her 2018 book is titled Monastic Education in Late Antiquity, and I think we’re going to get that in the chat for you to look at again. And she’s contributed numerous articles and book chapters on early Christian traditions. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Lillian from Westar where she’s served as Co-chair of the Christianity II Seminar. So I’m just tickled to have you back with us again, Lillian. Thanks so much for being with us.

Lillian Larsen

I’m delighted to be back, and thank you for the invitation to get to talk about the thing that I love to talk about the most. I will try to be very brief.

Shirley

Well, I know there’s so much to talk about. We’re going to try to give everybody enough information so that they can be asking questions, but I know you’ve got a lot to talk about. So we’ll start with this: I just imagine that there was no such thing as a Christian Sunday school in antiquity, but it seems like Christians just sort of knew Christian things without really learning them. So it’s really kind of an interesting question to think about how people were taught in those early centuries. Maybe you could give us a feel for just what an education might’ve looked like. Did Christian kids go to a school where a teacher guides them? Was there such a thing as adult ed? Let’s sort of start there.

Lillian

Well, so I think I’ll start by saying that there probably weren’t “Christian” anything until the third or fourth centuries and that in the earliest periods, many Christians would’ve thought of themselves as Jewish. And so if they were getting an education, they probably would have been getting an education in a Jewish context. That said, the scholarship suggests that there was probably a 5% literacy rate within the ancient world. And what would’ve determined an individual’s literacy was probably that they were male and that they were up at the higher echelons of society. And so the structure for learning would have been largely an elite structure. The resources to have the supplies and the felt need for an education all were big pieces of why someone would be educated. And my premise, and one of the things I’ve been arguing for most of my academic career, is the first time that really changes is when we get to monasticism within a Christian context.

Within Judaism, there’s a large debate about how educated individuals were. And historically the tradition has been that Jewish individuals were more educated than the 5% in the normal population. And that is highly debated, and there’s really no consensus. But it seems to me that what becomes a Christian emphasis on education with monasticism in my mind may well grow out of Judaism and the need simply to be conversant with texts, which would’ve been a change from Greco-Roman religions, which were largely iconic and more practice-oriented.

Shirley

Well, then that leads to my next question really. I think it’s well known, at least in America, that our early education system was completely mixed with religious teaching and that children learned to read the Bible and the moral lessons with the Bible as part of their education. So is that kind of thing compared with the ancient way of learning, even for people who weren’t Jewish?

Lillian

So great question. For people who were Jewish, they would’ve learned to read and write using the Hebrew scriptures. And probably the reason that education became so mixed in America with biblical texts and Greco-Roman texts was a function of those two communities kind of melding in Christianity. And so up until the earliest Christian formal curriculums, which are probably fourth century, most of education would’ve been Homer. And I thought it was quite fun that we’re having this class right now as the Odyssey is making headlines. Who would’ve ever thought that this would be the front page news every day? And basically children would’ve learned Homer. They would’ve learned the sayings of wise men. They would’ve learned maxims from ancient philosophers. And what I argue, and I think there’s great evidence for, is that with Christianity, those same models were continued. And the only thing that changed was the canon.

And so similar to a Jewish context, we started to get Hebrew scripture and Christian scripture as they emerged as the grist for education, but the model of education stays the same, and stays the same up until the period you’re talking about, where children were learning Greco-Roman and Christian texts in a conventional classroom because those two strains of training kind of melded and came together.

Shirley

Wow. So let’s get a little perspective in terms of the chronology. When did monasteries start appearing?

Lillian  

So another big debate, but generally it’s thought that the earliest formal monastic communities would’ve been the fourth century. But there are some scholars who argue that this would’ve been starting already in New Testament times and that the field of widows, the Order of Widows in Christian scriptures that we read about may have been some of the earliest seeds of monasticism of women choosing to remain unmarried or widowed in order to pursue other possibilities. And so technically, I think the first formal education that we have a record of would be the third, fourth centuries. But whether it has roots prior to that is a big question that is still being debated.

Shirley

Okay. Well then, so if we could walk into a monastery setting, I feel like from my perspective now that they have a reputation for being places of learning. Was the system of learning in a monastery, anything like the public learning going on? I guess I’m asking them with so few people who were literate, did Christians come to a monastery illiterate and then expect to learn there?

Lillian

That’s a great question. So the myth of monasticism is that particularly in Egypt, that the monks had no interest in education. And if you’ve ever heard of St. Antony who didn’t want to learn letters, one of the most famous quotes. If you know anything about monasticism, that’s probably what you know. And so that has become kind of the stereotype of monasticism. But in fact, I think, as you said, monasticism is the place where people would go to get educated and that even Antony was a caricature by someone who was by Athanacius, a bishop who was a little bit troubled that all these people were getting an education and perhaps threatening the established order or the church hierarchy.

And so one of our earliest rules, which is a rule of Pachomius from the desert of Egypt, says there shall be no one in the monastery who does not learn to read and does not memorize something of the scripture. And so I think what changes with monasticism is the canon that no longer…slowly we move away from Homer and the Psalms replace the poetry of Homer. The Proverbs replace the sayings of wise men and commanders. And as a result, because of this image of the monasteries, because of Antony, this idea that Antony wasn’t learned, those texts haven’t been recognized as school texts. But in fact, as we start looking at things, it’s clear that the only thing that’s changing in the monastic setting is that the Bible has become a school text. And initially Homer is still there, but we can see it slowly get replaced by the Psalms and by the Proverbs because of course this is what people are reading.

And then after the Renaissance, the classics came back into the curriculum. What we get in American schools is a mix of the classics, Homer, ala today, and the Bible for much of even into the 20th century.

Shirley  

Gosh, it’s making me think about a lot of things here. Okay. So then would you have any idea of what kind of curriculum they would’ve had besides learning these specific texts or how do they actually go about learning reading and writing?

Lillian

So not so different from today. And one of the fun things, if we have time, I’ll show you some images that kind of document this. You would start with the alphabet and then move to syllables, which is something we don’t do so much anymore. But we have in the ancient context, we have something called syllabaries, which we know that children would recite out loud. And we have complaints in the monastic text that they don’t want to live by the children reciting their syllables because it goes on forever and ever.

Syllabary would’ve been comprised of each letter of the alphabet and each of the seven vowels. So ba, be, bo, you can imagine. And they go on for pages and pages in the documentation. So you would start with letters, you would then go to the alphabet, you would then go to syllables, and then you would start sounding out words. And we have artifacts where we can see that the words were hyphenated even as they would be today so that students could learn how to sound out the various syllables. And then from words, you would go to small maxims, something like, “make haste slowly” or “the early bird gets the worm”, these kinds of things that were kind of quippy and easy to play with. The maxims would turn into sentences. And from sentences, we get something like the sayings of Jesus. So if you think of something like the Sermon on the Mount where we have a line where Jesus says, “you have heard”, or there’s a line, “You have heard it said,” and we get a line from Hebrew scripture. But I say we have a classic school text. And I’m not saying that Jesus was writing a school text or the authors of the gospels were writing the school text, but in fact, they were using models that they had learned in the classroom. One of those models is to attribute a quote to an important teacher and then to expand on that quote using a variety of different mechanisms.

Shirley   

Well, in what language are you talking about? Coptic or Greek or what?

Lillian

It happens in both Coptic and Greek. So this is another place where monastic education has fallen off the radar because there’s a long history of anything in Coptic can’t be–ala Antony—can’t be done by literate individuals. And so we actually have examples of texts when they’re named Greek are called school texts. And if they’re identified as Coptic, they’re identified as miscellaneous texts, even though they’re very obviously a school text. So there’s so many layers of colonial history that also get mixed into this that make it really complicated and that much more fun perhaps.

Shirley

Well, you mentioned Antony several times, and I don’t know that everybody knows Antony. Can you tell us a little bit about him and why he matters here?

Lillian  

Sure. So Antony is supposedly the first Egyptian monk, and traditionally he’s been named the first formal monk in general. And there’s a story called “The Life of Antony” that was written in Greek by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, where he introduces Antony, who’s been named the father of monasticism, as not interested in learning letters but wanting solely to get his information straight from God.

And he memorizes all of the scriptures simply by listening in church and absorbing these texts. It sounds a little magical, and it sounds like the kinds of things that were said about the New Testament and the authors of the New Testament for many generations–that those authors didn’t know how to read and write, but rather they got this straight from God. And what gets transcribed as Christian scripture is direct revelation from God. We know now that that’s not the case and I think the same thing is true of monasticism. That this image of Antony getting his information straight from God probably is a caricature or very much of a caricature that authorizes monasticism, but then over time masks what’s actually really happening in the monasteries where most of the texts that we have from ancient Christianity come from. The monasteries are the places where those texts were produced and copied and perhaps composed. And so the story gets really complicated. These interpretive caricatures that have been read onto the texts.

Shirley  

Okay. So you mentioned that Antony might’ve learned in church, but were there churches yet or is this still a synagogue or where is he learning these things supposedly?

Lillian

That’s a great question. We know that some of the earliest churches are monastic and are built by the founders of monasticism. So Pachomius, who says that everyone needs to learn how to read and write to enter the monastery, also builds one of the earliest churches in Egypt for the people in the community. And the fact that we have an ecclesial structure by the fourth century suggests that there are churches or communities on the scene. It’s interesting though, even fifth century monastic texts talk about the community meetings as synagogues. And I think quite literally the term is a community meeting, but interesting that the terminology is shared with Judaism even as late as the fifth century.

So the first formal churches that we know of are the churches, the Theodosius, one of the Christian emperors had a huge building project, and those are still many of the churches that we visit today. And there were churches that were starting to be built. Once the empire becomes Christian, churches are beginning to be built. And the fact that Athanacius is a bishop suggests that there’s already a religious hierarchy in place where services are being held and a ritual is taking place. And certainly one of the ways one would’ve learned if one wasn’t in a monastery would’ve been to be listening to the service. But if we think about the rate of literacy at 5% outside the monastery, then people would have been listening more than studying at that point.

Shirley

So who would’ve been reading these texts then? We are so textually oriented and then we’re all excited about finding a text. Who’s reading them if nobody can read?

Lillian

It’s another great question. And you would’ve had to be trained quite carefully to read. And part of the reason for learning the syllables is that there’s no spaces between words in the ancient manuscripts. And so you need to be able to recognize a syllable to be able to tell where the words begin and end and also to tell how to pronounce a word. And so it’s not so different from how one would learn to read even today, except that it’s more challenging. And so many folks would have listened more readily than they would have read. And if you were a reader, you would’ve been trained to read. And so here again, we can see why imagining education happening in the monasteries really addresses that felt  need we talked about at the beginning, because in order for the religious services in a monastic context to happen, the readings are very much a part of that.

And so within a monastic setting, individuals would’ve been trained to read. In a regular setting, individuals would’ve been trained to read. And one of the questions then is, are the officials in the church getting their training in a monastic setting and then bringing that out into the community as readers and as deacons and teachers within the community–which is very much how the Coptic Church, the Egyptian Church operates today. And probably any church operates–where folks are being trained, maybe not to read per se, but to work with texts and then bring that to a broader audience. And what has shifted is we have a higher rate of literacy across the board.

Shirley  

Yeah. So in our Substack, Bible and Beyond Substack, I’ve posted a review on Candida Moss’s book on the ancient children who were reading and they were enslaved children. And she points out that enslaved Christians’ children needed to be educated to read and write and perform Christian literature primarily because older, wealthy enslavers couldn’t maintain their eyesight and needed to rely on children to read and write for them. Do you see that kind of education for enslaved children in monasteries or was this going on privately in wealthy homes?

Lillian  

I think both/and. Because of the literacy rate in the ancient world and because literacy was thought of a technical skill, it wasn’t that if you were the owner of an enslaved person–not so different from American slavery–one of the ways you increased the value of your enslaved person was to train them to read and write. And those enslaved persons might have been the teachers for your own children if you were in a wealthy family, or they might’ve accompanied your children to go to another teacher and make sure that learning happened in those settings.

And one of the things that I think is quite interesting and Candida Moss doesn’t talk about, is that by the fourth century there was legal language that says if an enslaved person is accepted into a monastery, they are granted their freedom for as long as they remain in the monastic setting. If they leave the monastic setting, they become enslaved again. And so I have wondered increasingly whether the growth of monasticism may have been less spiritually oriented than it was educationally oriented. And if enslaved individuals, particularly highly trained enslaved individuals, had some opportunity for upward mobility or social mobility within a monastic setting, if one could get oneself to a monastery and be received by that community, I could imagine that being quite attractive. And I can see that also being attractive for women, that if a woman enters a monastery and is no longer bound by marriage, the same opportunities kind of avail themselves. And so it’s interesting, this doesn’t come up in Candida Moss’s book.

And there’s very little that’s been done on slavery in the monasteries because it kind of goes against everything we think about as monastic of this kind of higher spirituality. And yet we know very clearly that there were enslaved individuals in monastic settings. And someone like Basil, Basil of Cesarea, who’s a very elite landowner who started some of the earliest monasteries, and we have one of his earliest monastic rules, he has in his rule that if an enslaved person comes to the monastery and asks to be admitted– this is an early fourth century–they should be sent back to their slave master, which is really shocking. And in contrast, we have Shanuta in Egypt who says if an enslaved person makes it to the monastery, they should be granted freedom. So clearly there’s a difference of structure. And Basil says, if you know that you’re sending someone back to a very violent context, then you should bring that person into the community, but it’s clearly less than normative in this. So I think what we have in some monastic settings is in fact wealthy households being repurposed as monasteries. And then education would’ve been part of that.

Shirley  

Yeah. So if sacred texts were used in the general education, do you think that that might have contributed to the spread of Christianity? Or, is that stretching this whole idea too much?

Lillian  

That’s a great question. And I actually kind of chuckled when I read it on your list. I think what contributed to the spread of Christianity was Constantine turning the empire Christian. And I think the education system followed suit. And so I think in many ways the education becomes a reflection and a reinforcement of the empire being Christianized. And at that point, it’s important that Homer goes out of vogue and the new body of authoritative texts becomes the canon of the school context.

And it’s clear that there is tension around that. So when Julian comes to power a number of periods after Constantine, he reverts the empire to paganism or to Greco-Roman religion and fires all the Christian teachers. But that’s very short-lived. And so it’s a really big question of how the elite… Many would argue that the elite really don’t necessarily embrace Christianity and want to stay with their original canon of Homeric texts. But then there’s a new Christian elite that can shore up their authority by virtue of this new canon, which they then begin to teach in schools as well.

Shirley  

Now I want to leave time for us to see your slides. So I’m going to ask these questions quickly, but I just really want to know, do you see any evidence that gender played a role in early Christian or monastic learning?

Lillian

Yes. And I mentioned this a little bit earlier, so I’ll go quickly here. But in fact, I have wondered whether the earliest Christian monasteries were started by women. And we know for a fact that there were a number of really wealthy women who founded Christian monasteries. We know that they were quite learned because the men who write about them talk about it. And they talk about the fact that the best thing about these women is they don’t ever claim their learnedness for themselves. They always credit it to their male counterparts.

And so we can’t know for sure how learned these women were, but the fact that they had the wherewithal to start monasteries and to train other women, and we have writings of a group of women– again, written by men–of a group of women called Lovers of Learning who are being led by another woman called the Deacon Severa. And it’s interesting, they’re being supplied by a male monk with literature to support their learning habits. And the earliest Christian curriculum that we have is written for a little girl. So Jerome in the fifth century wrote a wonderful curriculum, our most detailed curriculum, where he basically quotes Quintilian who writes this curriculum for young men. But Jerome turns it into a curriculum for a young girl and uses all the models from the Greco-Roman context or Hellenistic context, and then puts scripture…replaces all of the Homeric texts and those other texts with scripture and biblical texts.

I think, in fact, something like the Nag Hammadi codices may well have been written by women who were living in monasteries. The only question so far that’s been asked is whether women were reading the Nag Hammadi codices. But given the content of the Naga Hammadi codices, I find myself wondering were women also writing the Naga Hammadi codices? And if they were, they’re using all of the same models that come out of the Greco-Roman classroom, but their core texts are Hebrew scriptures. So think of all the Genesis accounts and the development of Genesis stories. And then they’re applying the classic strategies of a Greco-Roman classroom to this emergent canon of biblical text. And the fact that so many of those texts are Hebrew scripture also speaks to the fact that we don’t really have Christian scripture at this point. It’s literally forming at this time. So it’s not surprising if people are taking and redeveloping biblical texts, they would be working from Hebrew scripture and then turning it into what will become the extracanon for Christianity.

And that some of those were women given the topics…I mean, I’m thinking of Celine Lilly’s work where she argues that some of the texts are addressing violence against women. It’s absolutely fascinating to think about is it female monastics who are in fact creating these texts in classrooms where they start as school exercises and then eventually become part of the Nag Hammadi codices? And that may sound farfetched, but it’s fun to think about.

Shirley  

It’s really fun to think about this. If anybody came to this conversation not knowing this was going to be an interesting topic, now you found out it is. Wow. So Lillian, why don’t you show us a couple of your slides? Actually, let me just get people ready here. We are going to turn the mic over to you in just a little bit, but I’m going to also just pause, let you think while I also mention to you that I have just a couple of announcements.

I want you to know that our next Bible and Beyond course is “Introducing Nag Hammadi and Related Texts”. And this course begins on Tuesday, September 8th through October, I think 13th or something. And you can get more information online at bibleandbeyond.courses/nag-hammadi. So you can find out all about it there. Also, if you haven’t seen the new Bible and Beyond Substack publication, I hope you’ll check that out. You go to bibleandbeyond.substack.com where I’m trying to keep people posted on all kinds of new things going on in this particular academic field. So do join us there. And Lillian, go ahead and show us your slides and then we’ll open it up for questions.

Lillian

And there are already some great questions in the chat. I’ve been scrolling through. So those of you that put questions in the chat, if you would ask those out loud once we run through slides, that would be great. So I have a really quick PowerPoint presentation, and I’m going to move quickly because I want to have time for your questions. We were trying to figure out how to orchestrate this. But I think in so many ways, pictures are worth a thousand words. And so if I go too quickly, feel free to ask about slides as we come back around in the discussion part of this. And with that, I will simply jump in.

So I’m going to do this quickly if I can. So we talked about Antony. Antony is often figured in this kind of emaciated state and severely ascetic. His most famous line is that he did not want to learn letters.

And then we have a couple of desert monks who kind of echo that. Their names are Arsenius and Evagrius, and they too question the merits of learning. I wish I had a dollar for every time these texts are trotted out and proclaimed as authoritative; but in fact, they are just a tiny, tiny slice of the textual tradition that derives from the Egyptian desert. And one of the things that got me connected with this material at all was reading these texts and saying, how do we have so many texts if nobody can read and write?

And that in fact is what started me working on this many, many years ago as a mathematics teacher. The logic of it just didn’t make sense. And it has been kind of amazing to see how much evidence there is for ancient education and what it looks like in a Christian context, and how little knowledge we have because all of the evidence gets dismissed because of these three quotes that are kind of trotted out again and again and again.

So quickly, the earliest monastic rules are figures here. Someone asked about the name of a rule and the rule I mentioned was Pachomius of Egypt. There shall be no one in the monastery who does not learn to read and does not memorize something of the scriptures.

But Jerome, who wrote the curriculum for a little girl, gives us our earliest Christian curriculum. And basically it is the ancient Greco-Roman curriculum now being rewritten to incorporate scripture. And it’s almost identical except that it is for a little girl and it is written again for Christian audiences.

Here again, this is an image from Egypt of Pachomius giving his rule, which is quite lovely. And again, the text, and I’m going to scroll over this, but this is the citation. If you want to find this, it’s quite easy. The precepts of Pachomius, they’re translated into English and it’s 139 and 140 where you can find this passage of the mandate for reading and writing.

So the curriculum, the alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and this is from a monastic setting in Egypt. And we know that because at the bottom it says monks beloved of God in a scribal hand. This is probably a more polished hand than we would get from a classroom, but we have to know that they had to learn to read and write. And so even if this is polished, it suggests that there’s learning happening in the monasteries.

Alphabets were written in forward reverse and mixed order, and this is one of the ways we can tell it’s a school text. You can see this first alphabet starts with alpha. The second one starts with omega. And we think of the line alpha and omega that we get in Christian scripture. It probably comes right from the classroom. And then the very fun habit or protocol in a classroom was to mix the alphabet and take the first letter and the last letter. And if you really knew your alphabet, you would be able to put those together and recite it back and forth.

From there, we have the same thing in Coptic. So the legacy that there’s no education happening in a Coptic context, the models look exactly the same.

This is a fun exercise which we don’t know whether it’s Greek or Coptic because they share the same alphabet. But when this alphabetic exercise, which is just four betas, an alpha and four betas, and they’re going down the alphabet. So imagine having to do this for 24 or 28 letters, you would know your alphabet by the end. But when this is identified as a Greek text, it’s considered a school text. And when it has been published as a Coptic text, it is a miscellaneous text. And I think that really speaks to the fact that… how much this imprint of Antony has shaped the conversation of education in the monasteries and in Egypt in particular. And I think the ramifications of that for the Nag Hammadi codices are similar, that if there’s no education happening in monasteries or in Egypt, then we can’t possibly have folks making these kinds of sophisticated texts. So it has lots of really interesting ramifications.

This is a wall inscription in the back tombs of Egypt. It took us an entire day to get there.

But again, we see mixed alphabets, and here we start to see syllabaries. And as I said earlier, syllabaries are pronunciation exercises created out of the letters of the alphabets combined with different vowels. It’s hard to see this on the wall, but it’s written in between Egyptian hieroglyphics. And we can cry about the graffiti, but it’s quite interesting to see it.

And here again, we have another syllabary that’s written on wood, this one in Coptic.

Word lists, as we talked about, we can see here that the word list is beginning to bring in words from Hebrew scripture. So Daniel, Jonah, Joel. And this is a Greek word list, but we see the same thing in Coptic.

And these are from the Book of Acts. So we get word lists coming from biblical texts.

Word lists on walls, this is the same area where the syllabary and the alphabets are retained in the back on the wall where there’s hieroglyphics.

And then one of my favorite texts, and we can maybe stop here, one of my favorite texts is a codex that includes a syllabary. So we know it was a school text, but it also includes a copying exercise from the writings of Paul, Romans 1:1.

And next to that, what I think we’re seeing is a syllabic exercise on Paul’s name. And we get a little bit of the dialect here. And so Shirley, you were asking about how to learn to read. We can imagine if someone is having to read this text out loud, this exercise is going to help them say all those different versions of Paul’s name that may show up in this letter. And so we have a syllabic exercise that’s kind of associated with the copying exercise underneath the syllabary.

And from there we go into sentences. These are drawn a mix of biblical and Greco-Roman. So some of the sentences of Menander, which are a classic school text, and then biblical texts mixed in. Sentences in both Greek and Coptic.

And again, we can see classic pedagogical texts, “an old man’s prudence, get thou in thy youth”. Those kinds of moral sayings. And we can see that they’re functioning in both languages.

We can also see compositions where a sentence is being turned into a saying. And so we have a maxim drawn from Proverbs, and then we see that same maxim down here being attributed to Basil as a saying attributed to Basil. We don’t have any record of Basil ever saying this in Basil’s own writings. And so I would guess this is a school text where students were asked to take a proverb and find an appropriate subject. And Basil was rich, and this proverb is about using your wealth appropriately. So those two things make a good match.

We find the same thing in a longer document with, again, attribution to Basil based on poverty and riches. Again, Basil was a wealthy man. And so it’s interesting that all of these compositions, which are independent, continue to go back to him around riches and wealth.

And then we get a classical text that’s also used in a copying exercise from Basil where this is one of the sayings of the Seven Sages, “Give heed to yourself, know yourself”. We all know the saying. And here we have this saying not attributed to Homer or the Seven Sages, but to Basil. And then a long, very rhetorical composition that may have been created by Basil or may have been created as a school text in the name of Basil to show off one’s capability or practice one’s capability in learning letters.

I think I’ll stop there so we have time for questions.

Shirley

Very good. Oh my gosh, there’s so much there to see, to think about. Thank you, Lillian. So I’m hoping that all of you know how to raise your electronic hand because that’ll be the easiest way to find out who’s going to say what. It’s easier if you put your hand up and say them so that we can answer them one at a time. So we have Helen first. Go ahead, Helen.

Helen  

Yeah, there we go. This is fascinating. I just can’t do enough of it. But the question that I had is that because the fourth century was a time when women were being excluded from the public church, would that perhaps have been a motivation for the more enclosed idea of women starting the monasteries? And was the fact that women were educating the youth in these monasteries, if that is the question, is that a threat to the more Orthodox community? And the third question is about wealth, because you mentioned it a couple of times that people often couldn’t join these communities if they didn’t bring cash with them, if they didn’t bring some kind of asset or money with them. That’s what I’ve read. So would that affect what gets copied, what gets saved, what stories are told? So those are my three questions.

Lillian

Okay. And I should have written them down. So the first question of whether women were joining the monastery because they were being excluded from the hierarchy. Was that the first one?

Helen  

Well, they were not public anymore by the fourth century as the church became more a church, a basilica instead of a home community.

Lillian  

That’s a great question. And so we know that women were leaders of communities in their home, and it was easier because they could live within the structures of the society and still hold leadership positions. I have wondered whether it is part of the monastic development, which in fact grew out of households. So think of Basil and Macrina, if you’re familiar with that literature of the Cappadoccians. They had a wealthy household and they built their monastery within that household. And so I have wondered whether this was a way for women to retain their authority. So that’s a really great question. I don’t know that I have a firm answer, but I think it’s a really important thing to think about. Were women’s roles as leaders in monastic communities built into the household structure?

Helen

And educators.

Lillian

And what we know from ancient education that I didn’t talk about, but you now bring up–which is great–is that women were responsible for educating their younger children if women were educated themselves. So an elite family, if we think of that upper 5%, women may have been the teachers of younger children and young women probably would’ve been educated at home by their mothers. So we kind of see this lineage of education. And this is another thing I’ve wondered about monasticism is whether the model is such that women could remain teachers because they were already teachers in the household. And as long as monasticism claimed that household model, women in teaching roles were less of a threat.

That takes us to your third question of was it a threat in the public sphere? And I would say yes. And the fact that someone like Jerome is very complimentary of Paula, who appears to be very learned, speaks four languages, reads Hebrew and Greek and Latin, that she doesn’t show off her learning, suggests that the roles are still in place of who is supposed to be learned and who is not. Even as it’s clear, I think, that women are learning on the side independent of the men, that doesn’t mean that that learning is being recognized. And one of the papers that I sent to Shirley in preparation for this is this wonderful article of those women in Palestine who want to go to Egypt to visit one of the monks. And the monk is very complimentary of their learning, but he really doesn’t want them to come visit him. And he makes it very, very clear. And I think we see the same gender tensions as elsewhere.

Now the question of economics, I’m not sure that in this very early period that people had to bring material wealth with them, although that would’ve been true at a later point. But I do think that the monastic settings themselves were probably started by wealthy families like Macrina and Basil. And I think this question of enslaved individuals or just, I’ve wondered, if the fact that Christianity doesn’t allow child exposure, if some of the growth of monasteries is people donating children, which we have clear records of, in order to keep them alive and to not have one more mouth to feed. And then that becomes the engine for the monastic growth and for education within the monastery.

Helen

Interesting. Thank you.

Shirley  

Thank you. And thank you. Yeah, Diana, go ahead, please.

Diana

Hi, I just got off of, before I came onto this, another talk by Dairmaid MacCulloch. He’s a professor at Oxford. He writes about Christianity. And he was saying that the earliest concept of the monastery system came from India, from Buddhism, because they had monasteries going way back, like 600 BC, something like that from the earliest days of Buddhism. And it was probably women starting them. He was saying there was early Christianity had a lot of very powerful women, is what he was saying. So I thought I would just add that into the frey of this knowledge. Thank you.

Lillian  

Yes, I saw that in the chat and I’m glad you brought that up because I think many, again, although we have this kind of mythic period of origins of Christian monasticism, it would not be at all surprising that they’re borrowing models from elsewhere. And in fact, some of the sayings of the Desert Fathers, we have the same sayings attributed to the Buddha, the same stories. And if I had another career, one thing I thought when I was at an earlier point in my career was it would be really fun to trace how those sayings and stories got passed along the Silk Road or passed between communities. And I haven’t done that, but I think those are really important questions and hopefully questions that will start to be asked more frequently. And I’m really delighted to hear that Dairmaid MacCulloch is asking them because the whole field of monasticism has been incredibly entrenched in these images of Antony as getting things straight from God.

And of course that has to do with borrowing from other monastic movements as well. If Antony got this straight from God, then clearly this is a brand new thing. And it’s not. It’s more clear that the Christian monks are using models from other monastic movements in Hinduism, in Buddhism. And as you say, Buddhism has been on the scene for 600 years at this point with a highly developed monastic structure. And so why recreate the wheel? And the same models show in Buddhism of family organizations donating property and building communities out of those settings. So I think that the origins are perhaps somewhat similar. So a really great point.

Shirley

Thanks for bringing that up, Diana. Leigh Ann, go ahead. Oh, by the way, I should mention that Leigh Ann is the one who raised this question for you, Lillian. Go ahead.

Leigh Ann

Thank you. It’s been totally fascinating. So I feel like this could probably go on for hours.

Lillian

It could. So don’t get me started.

Leigh Ann

But I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the composition aspect and maybe what happened with those compositions and things, and especially in the very early years of Christianity. The reason being is that we think about…and you kind of indicated that they were attributing some of the exercises of “write this” and “put this in somebody’s name” and that kind of thing. So do we have any indications or how much do we know that of those things that were attributed–that came out of pure scholastic exercises–became complete scripture or at least scripture-like?

Lillian

That’s a great question. And this is what I think personally–and I don’t have this in print–so if you quote me, please don’t. This is truly what I think happened with the Nag Hammadi codices. And I’m not a Nag Hammadi person, so I can’t say that. I have very good friends that are Nag Hammadi, one of whom is here. So I am very shy to say that in public. But honestly, every time I read the Nag Hammadi codices, I think, oh my goodness, these sound like school texts. So if you think of stories of Cain and Abel, you’re taking a small kernel of a text, and this is Greco-Roman literature and Jewish literature as well. You take a small kernel of a text and you use the mechanisms of the classroom to paraphrase that text, to change the grammar, to refute, to authorize, to incorporate quotes from other texts. And voila, suddenly you have a new text.

And I mean, The Odyssey is really someone who did this 3,000 years ago with the Iliad. They took this one character and built a whole other story. The Aeniad is similar, taking one character and building that out into another story. And so these are classic classroom exercises. And if you just Google my name, you’ll find at least five or six articles about this in the monastic context, because this is where I started, was looking at the sayings of the Desert Fathers and realizing… I read them while I was teaching mathematics. And someone gave me the book as a gift. I was not a scholar. I was a mathematician. And I read them and I thought these aren’t spiritual texts, these are school texts. Mainly because they, to me, seem to be teaching the things that I was trying to teach my students, my urban students in an inner city school classroom: Be kind, mind your own business, don’t worry about everybody else, worry about yourself. And what was crazy was when I started my doctoral work and started working backwards from the text, I used a lot of biblical scholarship on the sayings of Jesus and found out that in fact, these may well have been school texts and were using the mechanisms of school texts. So, the question of what we have in the canon or the extra canon, whether that is coming out of a classroom, I think the only answer has to be yes, because where else would you learn it? And that that’s coming out of a monastic classroom or a classroom where people really know the Bible, to me, suggests monastic. You’re reciting the Bible all day long, you’re praying it in a cycle of prayer four or five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times a day. Who would be so steeped in biblical texts that they could reproduce and extrapolate? It would have to be a community that’s doing this all day, every day. So does that help to answer your question?

Leigh Ann

Yes, it does. And it also just creates a lot more questions in some ways. But not to take up a lot of time, but let me just ask you this real quick. In relation to that then, these class exercises, how would that relate to the Jewish concept of midrash where they’re doing a lot of that extrapolation and that kind of thing? Was that brought into the classroom? Is that something that would’ve been happening separately and then could influence it or vice versa or whatever? I’m just wondering how that works together.

Lillian

Great question. And I think it’s exactly that. So I think it’s a mix of Jewish midrash and classroom exercises. And of course, the folks who were writing Jewish midrash in the fourth and fifth centuries would’ve also been using those same classroom exercises. And so there’s a wonderful volume that George Kennedy published. It’s just called the Progymnasmata, which is a collection of the classroom exercises that were used in the ancient world. And what I find fascinating is almost all of those, they were little handbooks that basically give you the DNA of what would’ve happened in a classroom setting. And almost all of those come from late antiquity, all that are extant, which makes me again wonder how much almost all of the texts that we know from late antiquity are shaped by these very dominant classroom models that are so well attested that we have eight extant handbooks, which is a lot. So I would really recommend that text. I think it’s like reading candy. And you’ll never read a text the same again after getting a sense of how those classroom exercises work. The other great text is Hock and O’Neill’s The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric, which was written in the ’80s and is still absolutely a phenomenal glimpse of what a classroom context of composition might’ve looked like.

Helen

Can we put those in the…write them down so that we can actually see the titles and the authors in the notes?

Shirley

Let’s do it afterwards.

Lillian

We’ll do that. And I can actually give Shirley a bibliography or you probably have some just from the articles. And…

Shirley

It’ll be in the transcript too, so we’ll get it to you. We’re just moving along here. And I want to hear from Pat and Peggy before we go.

Pat Nester

Yes. I have read commentaries where it was emphasized that the early Christian fathers, both before and after Nicea, were interested in maintaining control and authority. And as a consequence, wouldn’t be particularly interested in their congregants learning how to read and make their own judgments and interpretations of things. So this was kind of pushing against literacy. I just wondered how big an influence was that? It seems like it continued on well into the middle ages and beyond until Protestantism came on board.

Lillian

The Protestants do it too. But great question. And it takes us back to Antony. One of the most compelling critiques that I have heard is of the Antony story, the classic reading of the Antony story, is David Brakke who suggests that Athanasius was threatened by the sophistication of the monks. And so he created this ideal of an Antony who was not interested in education whatsoever. And this reminds me of stories that my mother used to tell of what a good girl she was in Norway. And when I grew up, I learned that she was nothing close to that. So David Brakke argued probably 30 years ago now that Athanasius in fact had a political motive of framing Antony as an illiterate rustic, as an ideal that the monks should emulate rather than what they were in fact doing, which was pursuing educational off-limit topics and being very involved intellectually and in sophisticated kind of argumentation, which threatened his authority as an ecclesial figure. And I find that very, very compelling. And so part of the reason that I’ve…and I stand on David’s shoulders really in arguing against this idea of an illiterate Antony…but what I’ve been most shocked by as I’ve continued in this work is how dominant that motif has remained. And so the most recent monastic history was published in 2024 by Yale University Press. It is meticulously researched, and it starts with this picture of Antony as an illiterate monk who couldn’t bear to learn letters and got it all by heart. And I think the parallels with biblical scholarship for so long that those early disciples couldn’t possibly have known what they were doing. There’s so many layers to this that it’s hard to dislodge it, but I think that’s exactly what’s going on. Good. That’s fascinating.

Shirley

Great question. Everybody has such great questions. And so Peggy, you get the last word here.

Peggy

Yes, and I have quite a lot to say, but I’m going to make it short. First of all, congratulations to everybody tonight for using the chat the way it’s supposed to be used. Shirley, I want to suggest that you print it out or save it to a file because some of those questions still need to be answered somewhere. There are links in there, folks, for the substack, and maybe that’s where they’ll find some of the answers. Maybe you’ll find it at Bible and Beyond, but they’ll get answered. And then Lillian, you didn’t get a chance to mention your book, but I will say the link is on there, and we just found out that it’s also available in paperback in Kindle. And other people were also posting, but if you mentioned something, we tried to put a link for it. So there’s a link about Antony, there’s a link about this, there’s a link about that. Go check out the chat before you sign off today. Thank you.

Shirley

Oh, Peggy, thank you. Thank you so much.

Peggy

Oh, and Patreon information is there too.

Shirley

Wow, there’s a lot going on, everybody. Lillian, thank you. Really, I think you have opened up big wide eyes for us to a world that we have not known. So grateful to know about all this. And we have to say goodbye, but as Peggy has said, this is not over yet. We’ll have the transcript up for you. We’ll have the recording of this, which will stay permanently available on our website and on YouTube. And you can even share it with people so that it’s going to be out there. And also more questions. And whatever questions have not been asked, I’m going to ask Lillian to answer them for us and we’ll make them available to you. The best way to find that will be on the website because I don’t know everybody’s email addresses, so you’ll have to come to the website to find out what’s going on.

Okay.

Lillian

And thank you for all your great questions. This was really fun.

Shirley

Lillian, do you have a last word you want to say to us about your summary about what’s been going on or what we should know or what we should do about all this?

Lillian

Be skeptical. And I think so much of Protestantism is also working against monasticism. I mean, the heart of Protestantism as a critique of monasticism is another reason why so much of this history has been lost. And that’s not a criticism, it’s just a fact. But one of the things that I think we need to remember is that Luther himself was an Augustinian monk. And so he too was trained in the same strategies that were being used in a fourth century monastic classroom. And as he distanced himself from that, I think we also fall prey to this idea that monasteries are places where there isn’t any intellectual life because the Protestants have laid claim to that with the reformation. But in fact, I think what we have is a longer continuous trajectory that’s really fascinating to put together with biblical scholarship. And so much of the best work that’s been done is work that’s been done on the Jesus tradition, on sayings and the gospels. And I always say applying that to monastic sources is just like picking apples because of course texts are texts and they’re being constructed in the same way. So go explore. I will give Shirley some resources that you can spend some time with, and I would be happy to come and talk further at some point. But thanks for letting me join you tonight.

Shirley

Oh, thank you so much, Lillian. And just so you know that we’ll put them on the Bible and Beyond discussion page, on Lillian’s page there. So when you find it in the Bible and Beyond discussions, you’ll find all that information that Lillian’s talking about, we’ll post it there. Okay everybody, I have to say thank you so much for your participation. This was the July 2026 Bible and Beyond discussion titled The Teachers Beyond: Behind Early Christianity with our guest scholar, Dr. Lillian Larson. Thank you for being with us for our monthly Bible and Beyond discussion tonight. These discussions are led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of some early Christian texts or issues. In the second half hour, we generally try to have participants give a chance to ask their own questions. We usually meet on a fourth Monday of the month from 8:00 to 9:00 Eastern Time.

And so now let me tell you what’s happening next month. We will meet on the fourth Monday, August 24th. Rikki Liu, who is a PhD candidate from the University of Texas at Austin, will share some of her research on Cupid and Psyche and how their characters are used in Nag Hammadi writings to answer the big question, what does the soul long for? Sounds like another intriguing conversation.

So anyway, now please join me in thanking Lillian for giving us such a vivid picture of these early Christian centuries. So fascinating. Thank you so much. I’m going to turn this up. I’m going to leave the chat on for everybody, if you would like to just stay on and chat for a little bit. Karen is not with us tonight, so we’re going to just say goodbye here, but you can stay on and chat if you’d like to. Thanks so much everybody. Bye-bye.

Bibliography

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