The delay of Egyptian Christendom

Peter Rodgers more-recently posed that the Alexandrian text be Ephesian. This constrains Bart Ehrman's proposal that the Alexandrian type has an earlier and a later stage: for Rodgers, only the later stage is truly Alexandrine.

Much of this is argument-from-silence. But the silence has been getting louder, over the last century of digging at, especially, Oxyrhynchus. Sure: Oxyrhynchus is not Alexandria; this one is approaching Memphis. But the two Greek-speaking towns were close-enough that some Alexandrines should have boated their way up there. Christian texts like Oxyrhynchus #840 and the spectacular #1 (Thomas!) only show up in the Severan Age. Christians as people aren't mentioned in the saecular corpus until then, either.

[INTERJECT 5/3: Vridar recalls that a massive pogrom scoured lower Egypt under Trajan. Greek pagans would have united with the natives, to regard gentile Christians as race-traitors.]

We might also ask after any mention of Alexandrine Christians in contemporary Christian literature like, oh, Justin and Polycarp. We hear much from Ephesus, Rome, even Sinope; not from Egypt so much...

...unless we count Basilides. Irenaeus from Lyons will have much to say on him. Oddly Tertullian - African-Punic, from Carthage - didn't comment, far as I can find; but a "Pseudo-Tertullian" will, as will Clement "of Alexandria" (possibly an Athenaean himself) and the Roman Hippolytus. Basilides is considered to have founded his church under the Antonines in the AD 120s-30s. Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes were also considered Alexandrine of this time, to Clement's chagrin.

My suspicion pace Rodgers is that that Gnosticism was the face of Christianity in Egypt. I garner from Lucian and Celsus that Gnosticism had a bad odour among philosophers, who disliked Christianity generally, and picked on the Gnostics as the worst of the bunch. This might be because Christian Gnostics appealed, exactly, to Middle-Platonists like Numerius; pure Platonists would consider them rivals, and antiPlatonists like Lucian would naturally despise the lot. Such a Christian in Egypt might have to keep quiet about it, and not move too far afield; for fear of a lynching.

The more-sober lower-case gnosticism of a Clement would make Egypt more amenable to Christianity generally, and that is when Christians started making inroads among first the Copts and then all the upper-Nile dialects. These Christians were still gnostic however.

All this tl;dr means that I think Rodgers has run ahead of his waterskis again. He needed to create a focused study upon to what degree, and to what Christianity, Christians spread in Alexandria; and beyond. Only then can he pose a theory on what Bible(s) they had.

(And, seriously: papyrus-to-Egypt just reads like a coal-to-Newcastle argument, generally.)