Marking Boundaries: The Use of Gendered Language in Syriac Apocalyptic Literature

During the sixth and seventh centuries, as internal and external conflict confronted the Roman Empire through both political and religious strife as well as foreign invasion, a surge of apocalyptic expectations arose within Roman Christian communities. Christians living on the eastern edge of the Empire utilized apocalyptic literature as a method of expressing their anxieties around not only the coming end-time, eschaton in Greek, but also around the political, social, and religious changes they were experiencing. Syria authors of apocalyptic literature during the sixth and seventh centuries used gendered language to create meaningful differences between themselves and the characters villainized within this literature. The dichotomies manufactured within these texts between the heroic, masculine figures and the feminized non-Christians and heretical Christians builds upon literary tropes of the idealized man and uncontrolled barbarians, using both historical and scriptural references to emphasize the “correctness” of their own performance of masculinity and the “incorrectness” of the masculinity displayed by opposing groups. By adding gender theory to the study of late antique Syriac apocalyptic literature, I will show that these sixth- and seventh-century Syriac authors used masculinity as a tool to build boundaries between themselves and others in an effort to emphasize their own correct masculine practice, which was defined by control of themselves and others, and which in turn suggested their right to represent the contested title of Christian orthodoxy.